Anthropic's March Usage Promotion: How Off-Peak Hours Double Claude Limits

How the Promotion Actually Works
Anthropic's current promotion runs through March 27 at 11:59 PM PT and operates differently than simply increasing your total usage allowance. According to monitoring with the open-source tool onWatch, during off-peak hours, Claude treats your consumed usage as half of what it would normally count.
This means your standard 5-hour limit effectively doubles during promotion hours - not by giving you a separate usage pool, but by halving how your consumption is tracked. The off-peak usage also doesn't count against your 7-day rolling limit.
Off-Peak Schedule Details
- Weekends are entirely off-peak (all day)
- Weekday evenings/nights after 2 PM ET are off-peak
- Peak hours are 8 AM-2 PM ET on weekdays
Practical Impact
Users who regularly hit their limits are seeing significant benefits. Conversations that would normally consume 80-90% of the 5-hour limit during peak hours only use 40-50% during off-peak promotion hours. This effectively doubles your available usage time during the specified periods.
Monitoring Tool
The analysis was conducted using onWatch, an open-source Claude quota monitor available at https://github.com/onllm-dev/onWatch. Version 2.11.21 shows the promo status in both the dashboard and macOS menubar.
📖 Read the full source: r/ClaudeAI
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