In July, Anthropic invited me into the Claude for Open Source Program. The deal is simple: six months of Claude Max 20x, free, for maintainers of open-source projects they want to support. I have been building the Iris web framework for Go since 2016, so I said yes before I finished reading the email. The screenshot of that invitation is pinned on my GitHub profile, and I posted about it on X the same day.
Max 20x is the largest subscription Anthropic sells to individuals. It's a flat monthly fee with the highest rate limits, meant for people who live inside Claude Code all day. I wanted to know what "all day" adds up to, so on September 2nd I ran ccusage over my local Claude Code logs for August and exported the report.
There is one more thing you need to know to read the numbers right. August is not a working month in Greece. It is barely a month. Athens empties out, the bakeries close, and the only people left are tourists and the one Greek who forgot to book a ferry. This year that Greek was me. My coworkers were on the islands. My friends were sending photos of sunsets with captions like "you should be here". I was at my desk in Athens, in front of a terminal, replying "one sec, running tests". Every one of the 29 days below is a day I chose the keyboard over the sea, and I still can't decide whether that is a confession or a brag. My mother has decided. It's a confession.
