Warning: claiming the "free $100 Fable 5 credits" silently turns on paid usage billing (Pro plan)

[u/Malnash-4607]

I'm on Claude Pro. On Tuesday was offered $100 in free promotional credits for Fable 5. I claimed them

What isn't made clear anywhere in that flow: claiming those credits automatically enables usage credits on your account with no limit. And once usage credits are on, they don't just apply to Fable 5. They apply to everything you do past your normal plan limits.

So I carried on using Opus 4.8 like I always do. Hit my 5-hour limit. Instead of the usual "you're rate limited, come back later," it just… kept going. Quietly billing me.

NZ$50.15 later, I noticed. My $100 Fable 5 promo credits are still sitting there untouched — the charge was entirely from normal Opus usage that would previously have just been throttled.

To be clear about what I think the actual problem is:

• Claiming a free promo silently flips on a paid billing feature
• There's no clear warning that non-Fable usage above your plan limit will now be charged
• The rate limit stops being a limit and becomes a meter, with no prompt or confirmation

Attempted to refund via the chatbot but got "We've determined that your purchase doesn't meet our refund eligibility criteria due to falling outside of the timeframe for our policy. "

Please check your settings

Update: Looking at screenshots from the offer (from other posts) - yes, this is on me, and I'm lucky it was a low charge amount - what could have been clearer is that the spend is not limited to just the free credit or Fable 5 usage, and without adding a Monthly spend limit, it's unlimited

[u/distante]

You can setup your monthly spend limit to 0

Edit: this prevents claude to use the credits, BUT if you keep auto-reload off it is safe to set it to the same value of the promotional balance.

[u/OkMove4 → u/distante]

does that block the 85 euro from being used though?

[u/distante → u/OkMove4]

IT DOES, is just use it for the first time. I will update my comment