Your Claude Max or Team plan now pays for Respira AER

On 7 October Anthropic started adding API credit to Claude Max and Team plans: $100 a month on Max 5x, $200 a month on Max 20x, and on Team $20 per standard seat and $100 per premium seat, pooled up to $500. The credit lands in a console organization you link once, and any API key in that organization spends it. Respira AER, the chat in your Respira dashboard that edits your WordPress sites, runs on exactly such a key. If you are on Max or Team, the work you do in AER this month can cost you nothing beyond the plan you already pay for.

What Anthropic added

A Max or Team plan now links to one Claude Console organization. Each billing cycle, shortly after the plan payment goes through, that organization receives promotional credit. You do not need to add a card to the console. Unused credit expires at the end of the billing cycle and does not roll over.

Plan	API credit each month
Max 5x	$100
Max 20x	$200
Team, standard seat	$20 per seat, pooled
Team, premium seat	$100 per seat, pooled
Team, discounted plans (nonprofit, scientists)	same per-seat amounts
Team pool, all seats together	capped at $500

On a Team plan every seat's credit lands in one shared balance, based on the seats on the plan at the start of the billing month. Anthropic's own example: three standard seats and two premium seats receive $260 a month; one more premium seat makes the next month $360. Free, Pro and Enterprise plans do not get any credit.

The credit covers the Claude API, Claude Managed Agents, the Claude Agent SDK and the console playground. It does not cover Claude Code, and it does not cover extra usage in the Claude apps. New subscribers can claim it after seven days on the plan. The details are on Anthropic's page about API credits for Max and Team plans.

What it means for your WordPress sites

Respira AER is included in every paid Respira plan and in the seven day trial. It runs on your own model key: you paste an Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI or OpenRouter key, AER reads the sites connected to your account and does the work through the Respira plugin, and the provider bills you for the tokens. Respira has never marked those tokens up. The receipt under every run shows what the run cost at the provider's own price.

So the arithmetic is short. A key created in the organization your Max plan is linked to spends the included credit first, before anything you purchased. Everything AER does on that key, from a page edit to a security audit across all your sites, draws from the $100 or $200.

Two things do not change:

• Claude Desktop and claude.ai with Respira as a connector already run on your plan's normal chat usage. No key, no credit, nothing to claim.
• Claude Code with the Respira MCP server is not covered by these credits; Anthropic excludes Claude Code explicitly. It keeps running on your plan's own limits as before.

How to claim it, in four steps

1. Link the organization. On claude.ai in a browser, open Settings, then Billing on a Max plan, or Organization settings, then Billing on a Team plan, where a Primary Owner or Owner does this for the whole team. In the API credits section choose the console organization that should receive the credit, or create one there, and accept the terms. One plan links to one organization, and you cannot move the link yourself afterwards, so pick the organization you intend to build in. If you have no organization yet, create one at platform.claude.com first.
2. Create a key. In the console, open Settings, then API keys, and create a key named something you will recognise, for example "Respira AER". Copy it straight away; the console shows it once.
3. Paste it into Respira. Open your dashboard, AER, choose the Anthropic tile and paste the key. Respira makes one small test call, seals the key and stores it; it is never shown again, and it never leaves your account.
4. Start a chat. AER opens on Claude Opus 5.5, the model that drives a WordPress site best in my testing. Claude Sonnet 5.5 is in the picker when you want to go further on the same credit.

Credits appear in the console under Settings, Billing, in the Promotional credits section, with the amount and the expiry date. If you do not see the API credits section on claude.ai, Anthropic's page says to contact their support.

How far $200 goes

In the thirty days before I wrote this, a run in Respira AER on Claude Opus cost under a dollar on average, with the longest multi-page builds reaching a few dollars. $200 is therefore in the region of two hundred Opus runs a month, and several times that on Sonnet. For a person maintaining a handful of sites that is more than a month of work. For an agency it is a serious share of it.

Every key and workspace in the linked organization draws from the same balance. If you want AER to have its own ceiling, give it its own workspace in the console and set a spend limit on that workspace. When the balance reaches zero, Anthropic answers that the credit balance is too low; AER shows that as an amber line with a link to your billing page, nothing on your site is touched, and the next cycle's credit arrives on its own. Usage is never charged to your Claude plan.

The fine print, as I read it

• Max 5x, Max 20x and Team qualify, including Max plans bought through the iOS and Android apps; claim on claude.ai in a browser. Free, Pro and Enterprise do not.
• The first claim is possible after seven days on the plan.
• Credit refreshes each billing cycle, monthly on annual plans, and expires at the end of each cycle. No rollover.
• Included credit is spent before purchased credit. Auto reload watches only the purchased balance.
• If you cancel or downgrade, new credit stops; what you already have stays usable until it expires. Moving from Max 5x to 20x adds a prorated amount right away. Moving from Max to Team ends the Max link, and a Team owner claims the team's credit after seven days.
• On Team, seats you add count from the next billing month; seats you remove stay until the plan renews, so the credit can drop after that. The pool never goes above $500.
• The credit is for the Claude API in the console. It does not apply to Claude on AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Foundry.

I built AER on your own keys because the alternative, reselling tokens at a margin, puts me between you and the bill for every change to your site. Anthropic has now made that choice pay off in the plainest way: the plan you already have covers the work. If you are on Max or Team, link the organization today; the first $100, $200 or up to $500 is waiting in the console, and it expires at the end of your cycle whether you use it or not.