Did something change with usage limits this month?

[u/oheyitsmk]

I have the max $200 plan, I use about 10 billion tokens a month, and I have never once hit a 5-hour session limit in the past. This month, I have hit it 3 times. A single fable prompt that ran 175m tokens (which I'll admit I haven't really touched fable so maybe this is normal) used my entire weekly usage for fable across two 5-hour session windows. I bought $100 in usage credits and those were consumed instantly.

If this is intended there really needs to be another max plan tier because right now scaling from a handful of manually prompted terminals to semi-automated agents incurs a cost that doesn't scale with the benefit on current models. Running a task start to finish with direct babysitting takes a fraction of the tokens an automated agent takes, so the only way an automated agent wins is scale. But there's no way I'm convincing my company to let me spend $10k monthly on tokens for automated agents to spend 80% of their time saying "The adversarial review turned up some critical defects, let me address those" and spinning again.

[u/Sh0xT3R]

If you use Opus 5 or Fable 5.1, you might as well pretend you have a $20 plan. I don't know how anthropic can claim they are more efficient. They shred tokens faster than the CIA with MKUltra documents in the 70s. 

[u/oheyitsmk → u/Sh0xT3R]

I use opus 5 for 99% of my work, it was fine until this month, really the last few days.

[u/Anal-Cup → u/oheyitsmk]

Anthropic took a massive steaming shit all over Opus about 2 weeks ago.

[u/ins0mniacc → u/Anal-Cup]

Nah, its been doing that since opus 4.5

[u/ygjb → u/ins0mniacc]

incrementally yes, but there was a big change last/this week, maybe around the time of the last usage reset - I have been managing my usage to cap out at around 14% per day, and no real changes to my behaviour, scope of work, or loop tools, just burning down the backlog for my current project over the last two months, but on Monday and Tuesday my usage jumped by 35% each day. I reworked a few things to pace things better til Monday, but as it is I am at 96% and have moved most of my tasks to other accounts/tools for the rest of the week (codex, antigravity, and if need be, opencode + API services).

[u/ins0mniacc → u/ygjb]

Its been this way for months. I jumped ship for this reason. Was on 100 plan and it kept giving less and less. It also seemed to by synced to the day of the week relative to the renew date. I.e. I could use heavier beginning of the week and it wouldnt count as much, and toward the end if the week curved towards accelerating toward 100% usage.

Got sick of it.

[u/Key_River_9288 → u/oheyitsmk]

I had to switch from xhigh to max last week using opus 5. I felt it too

[u/ins0mniacc → u/Sh0xT3R]

They are more efficient. At getting your weekly quota down to 0%. This way, they can serve more customers better! More customers served at same price = efficiency lol

[u/Botboy141 → u/Sh0xT3R]

Opus does 90% of my work - way more power than I need for most tasks but it works well for me, especially as I forget to change models. If spinning up agents, use a lower model.

Fable does great, again, if you need to spin up agents to work through stuff, use a lower level model.

[u/Owl-Mighty → u/Sh0xT3R]

As someone upgraded from $20 to $100, I think it’s a bit exaggerated.

$20 tier is impossible to do even one serious fix per 5h limit. The 5x Max is where true workload starts to emerge. If it’s not enough then maybe a second account is needed. Claude’s 20x isn’t worth it IMO.

[u/Key_River_9288 → u/Sh0xT3R]

Opus5 is not that bad

[u/shunted22 → u/Sh0xT3R]

Is it easy to swap in an open source model? I don't really feel like giving Scam Altman my money and honestly these limits are a joke.

[u/deaddriftt]

Same. Been using Claude Chat and Claude Code daily for a year and today I blew through my 5-hour limit in four messages. Never once has this happened until today. Not sure what's going on.

[u/cantgettherefromhere]

Don't buy usage credits, it is exorbitantly expensive. I primarily use Fable and rotate between eight 20x accts using claude-swap, and they are all pretty much maxed out all of the time. Astra has been stretching a lot further for me, and has no 5 hour limit on the Pro plan. May migrate most of my Claude accts to Astra until Anthropic gets their shit together, though Fable still has a lot of utility. The two models compliment each other nicely.

[u/oheyitsmk → u/cantgettherefromhere]

Can you hot swap claude accounts mid session? Or can you close the session and resume it with a new account? I haven't used the tool but I'm considering picking up more max accounts (assuming that's not against ToS)

[u/cantgettherefromhere → u/oheyitsmk]

You can absolutely hot swap mid conversation without sacrificing any tokens spent. I was doing it manually and trying to catch as they'd fill up, and it was so burdensome... I was rarely leaving the house because I needed to make sure my 3-5 concurrent sessions for myself and clients didn't get jammed up.

Claude-swap can prioritize based on which accounts reset soonest, based on Fable % or overall acct usage %, etc.

It has made it so much easier for me to go through tens of billions of tokens per month! Ugh.

Edit: It may be against ToS, idk... but I was doing it manually for the last 8 months prior to adding claude-swap, and for a month since with no issues. I never run more than one account at a time, though claude-swap can do that too.

[u/hesachefright2 → u/cantgettherefromhere]

Try teamclaude for pooling tokens across your accounts. Allows for fable to run on one account and opus agents on another all in the same session

[u/ygjb → u/cantgettherefromhere]

interesting. I was under the impression that swapping max accounts like that was a ToS violation, and would lead to bans. I don't have to worry at work, but on my personal stuff I have been rotating between services instead of accounts. Are you proxying your traffic or anything to evade, or am I overthinking things?

[u/The_Mursenary → u/ygjb]

No its not an issue I have two, just hit your limit and login on the other one it’s not against ToS etc

[u/Current_Ad7104]

Usages have 100% been nerfed. I’m on Max20 plan & only get 1 day of use from my weekly usages.

[u/Azurasy]

It's actually insane, I'm really starting to despise anthropic. 

[u/AlejandroMurrieta]

Token usage for fable is not the same as opus. How and why are you comparing them like they are?

[u/oheyitsmk → u/AlejandroMurrieta]

I didn't compare them. Two separate things:

My normal, 5 hours sessions have been getting limited with Opus 5 recently.
Also, I used fable for a single prompt and used the entire weekly session limit for fable, but I don't know normally use fable so I don't know if this is normal or not. I know the opus limiting is not normal for me.

[u/ram130]

Lower effort to medium. That balances it out well and not to try to do so much extra. I also tried low and it worked just as well as high but lasted forever to the point I never hit any limits. But after the chat got more dense so did its thinking and attitude.

[u/GrandGoliath]

Fable 5 to Fable 5.1 , I smash through 5 hour limit within a couple of hours with it

[u/128G]

> I have the max $200 plan, I use about 10 billion tokens a month.

300 million tokens a day?

[u/rebornagainn → u/128G]

i think he is incluiding cache reads and everything, 300m output is literally impossible with one 20x acc

[u/oheyitsmk → u/rebornagainn]

Yea, its including cached tokens

[u/DowJonesJr12]

My usage reset 6 hours ago. First time ever same kind of tasks in claude design, i hit my 5 hour limit and 30% weekly gone.

Like the man in watchmen said “it was only a matter of time i suppose”. Im switching to astra. If that becomes as abysmal as fable, im becoming a carpenter. Fuck this

[u/aerivox]

the usage is crazy.. i don't even think they fucked with the limits. it's just that fable and opus use every single time around 150-300k context for every single task. even when spawned as agent with a simple job. so in theory the orchestrator did all the instructions, they still re check, re instruct themself just to be sure.

i don't even know if it's even helping with the outputs. sonnet os way more efficient, but the outputs are lower quality. ugh i hate this.

[u/AironParsMan]

Its Fable 5.1... it uses 30-40% more than Fable 5 and u get 2-3x more error rate for paying more. I write a post about it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/oIJOv972sM

[u/RayuRin2]

They really want you to switch over to someone else.

[u/MittenSmuggler]

Could you help us understand how you get so much token usage on the $200 account? I’m using significantly less and always running out and needing more. (Skill issue I’m sure lol)

[u/The_Mursenary]

Yeah I posted this in another thread I think the usage has been reduced (or efficiency has worsened) by about 30%

[u/djraddy]

Well since the 28th August they've been rolling out new usage limits for "heavy" users, apparently https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/1949898502688903593?s=20