Claude Max and Team plans now come with monthly API credits, which is pocket money for building your own tools
By Brett Gavaghan, Founder of Adaptd ·
Alongside its new Haiku 5.5 model on 7 October, Anthropic added monthly API credits to Claude Max and Team plans. They pay for apps and agents you build on the Claude Platform.
The short version
- Claude Max and Team subscriptions now include a monthly credit for using Anthropic's API on the Claude Platform.
- Max 5x gets US$100 a month, Max 20x US$200 and Team up to US$500 pooled, rolling out from 7 October 2026.
- Link a Claude Console organisation in your billing settings to claim the credit, then try one small internal tool.
Plenty of businesses pay for Claude and have a list of little tools they'd build "one day". Anthropic has just put some money towards one day.
What are the new Claude API credits?
The Claude API credits are a monthly allowance, included in Max and Team plans, for running your own apps and agents on Anthropic's Claude Platform.
Max 5x users get US$100 a month, Max 20x users get US$200, and Team plans get up to US$500 shared across their users. The credits work with any Claude model. Anthropic says they're for experimenting with your own tools and agents that call its API.
Who gets them, and what else changed?
Every Max and Team subscriber gets the credits, which started rolling out on 7 October 2026 and land over a few days.
To claim them, link a Claude Console organisation under Settings > Billing on Max, or Organization settings > Billing on Team. The same day Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5, its cheapest and fastest small model, which it says costs around 75% less to run than Haiku 4.5. It's built for high-volume jobs like summaries, sorting requests and live customer support. Anthropic also halved the price of cache reads on Sonnet 5.5, which it says makes most agent work about 20% cheaper.
Should your business use them?
Businesses already paying for Claude Max or Team should claim the credits, because they cost nothing extra on top of the plan you already pay for.
My advice: pick one dull, repetitive job, like sorting enquiries or summarising support emails, and have whoever does your tech build it on Haiku 5.5. A cheap model on a boring job is where the savings show up first. Just set a spending limit in the Console before anyone gets enthusiastic, because free credits have a way of turning into a bill once the novelty kicks in.
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Wondering what this means for your business?
That's exactly what the discovery call is for.