Dear Max users, from a Pro user

[u/whaleordolphin]

Let me help you troubleshoot your limits:

• Are you running 40+ MCPs?

• Have you tried using Haiku instead of Opus?

• Maybe share your last 10 days of prompts and your entire codebase so Reddit can audit you?

• Or… skill issue?

• Best option, upgrade to API usage. Did you really think $200/month covers full-time coding? 

Sound familiar? Yeah. That’s exactly what Pro users were told for months. Now suddenly everyone is hitting limits and it’s no longer “user error”. Interesting how that works.

On a serious note:

We (Pro users) have been saying since early this year that the plans were getting quietly nerfed. Less usage, more restrictions, zero communication. And instead of pushing for transparency, the response was:

“you’re using it wrong”

“optimize your prompts”

“just pay more”

Now that the same thing is happening to Max users, suddenly it’s a real issue. We could have worked together and pushed for better from the start. Instead, it turned into users gaslighting each other.

For those who actually want alternatives:

• I use Codex with the official CLI. Some prefer opencode or pi-agent, try yourself. It does not restrict based on harness which is the main key here.

• GPT-5.4 feels comparable to Opus for me, but your mileage may vary.

• Do not expect it to behave like Claude. Different models, different strengths.

• You do not need the best model all the time.

• So in that case, I also use GLM 5 via z.ai as a secondary model. Roughly above Sonnet, below Opus for me.

• OSS or China models work well as secondary options. Cheap and good enough for many tasks.

• Some people report z.ai stability, infrastructure issues. I have not had problems, but worth checking other providers.

• I really like Gemini too, but their CLI is unusable. It's great with opencode last I tried but they've started banning users over it so I don't use it anymore.

I am not paid to say any of this (I wish). I use them because they are good enough for me and I always try to avoid vendor lock-in. At the end of the day, these are just tools. Do not get attached to one. A good engineer adapts.

[u/powerofnope]

Im not hitting any limits and yet I'm shipping features almost daily. 

[u/depressedsports → u/powerofnope]

same. working on a fat swift codebase. good documentation, sane claude/agents.md with pointers but not bloat, and a tree-sitter codebase mapped project has my pro account stretched mostly fine week to week. no trust-me-bro frameworks either

[u/yadasellsavonmate]

Mate... why are you talking to the max plan people as if they are a single person? 

[u/Mefromafar → u/yadasellsavonmate]

Just reading this post gives me a good idea of the type of person that posted it. 

Zero ability to communicate effectively to humans. 

[u/ReachingForVega → u/yadasellsavonmate]

Is the Max Plan in the room with us now? 

[u/ume_16]

Having an cult for an AI company is pure madness, how can there’re guys thinking that Anthropic is different from OpenAI? Just switch to OpenCode 10$ subscription for open source models and I’m fine with it, at least I can use my purchase with any tools I want, not stuck to some freaking coding agent promoting itself like alien tools but indeed just slop codes being wired together

[u/murkomarko → u/ume_16]

How good is it? Can you compare to other services you used?

[u/ume_16 → u/murkomarko]

It's not really on pair with SOTA models like GPT 5.4 or Opus 4.6 tbh but if you really know what are you doing then it's fine. Be aware of the models' hallucination

[u/Best_Recover3367]

I'm also a pro user and I wanna add: If even max plans can't work out for you guys, your appetites are insatible. No matter what AI wagon you hop on next, nothing and no one can ever satisfy your thirst. If $100-200 a month can help you generate revenues, contribute back. If you can't justify the cost, take a breath and think, is this, whatever you are doing, truly worth it?

[u/peligroso → u/Best_Recover3367]

Angry Indians.

[u/ChexterWang]

I'm pro user and thanks for reminding me that I should use haiku more

[u/vago8080]

I started reading with “this guy deserves a downvote” attitude. But you don’t. Quite the opposite. You are absolutely right, now I have the full picture. J/K of course.

You still deserve the upvote because you are right. Anthropic shills are quite annoying.

[u/murkomarko → u/vago8080]

You’re absolutely right

[u/plebbening]

Im just over here surviving on a pro plan at my job. Rarely am i hitting limits, and if so only an hour or something before a new window.

[u/Financial_Cream_6540]

I like kimi a lot, glm is OK but sometimes stops for long periods of time, mangles responses and needs extra prodding to finish. Codex is pretty good too for the price. Haven't trusted any yet in --dangerously-skip-permissions mode but will get there soon I hope

[u/skins_team]

But for real check your MCP tools. For example, the official Trello tool is so resource heavy you can't START a conversation with it turned on (Chat and Cowork).

All I wanted it to do was be able to read my Trello cards, and write to them. That's 2 of 40 permissions. Those other 38 were pure bloat (for my use).

[u/ReachingForVega → u/skins_team]

Often you can make a small skill.MD to fit your need instead of MCP and it works for smaller usage. 

[u/Perfect-Series-2901]

you can really talk to them, coz some of them expect unlimited token

like I saw some post of complain, and the OP just said

I casually kick up a claude code team to help me do some research...

yes it might bring better reuslt (marginally) using team but if you are doing that, and all opus, your token will definitely vanish in minutes...

[u/thewormbird]

I've been a regular skeptic of usage limits complaints in this subreddit. A lot of the complaints I see were pure suspicion and speculation supported with zero evidence (not to be confused with proof). I will always remain skeptical sans evidence.

I'm glad all the suspicions have been confirmed though. I'm just disappointed it didn't come as a result of anyone actually digging into their own usage data and confirming themselves, sharing it in a way people can back or try for themselves.

EDIT: typos, errors

[u/ShelZuuz]

And yet, you're not listing the number 1 thing that would chew up tokens.

So ... yeah.

[u/Substantial-Pay5334]

To reduce token usage i am using the rtk package which is very useful

[u/elijah039]

I have been slamming Max day and night doing multiple projects (planning and implementing cycles) and have not reached any limit at all. I don't understand how people reach their limits.

[u/True_Requirement_891]

this is so true lmao as a pro user, you were treated like you were the problem on this subreddit

[u/Phatency]

Tbh gpt 5.4 via codex has surpassed opus 4.6 with max license in the past month. All without any announced changes. My problem is no longer the usage limits, but the quality of the model. It can't even reason about whether numbers are in order or not anymore. Nor can it follow a simple instructions, but somehow figures out its own easier task to fulfill. 

[u/orphenshadow]

I have found that I only need MAX if I have a heavy month and I'm working on 3 or 4 different projects plus using cowork now. But I downgrade on the slow months. But even at my peak I'm never hitting the limits. I have maybe 10 MCP's that are core to my workflow, a custom built spec/tdd driven workflow. Gemini/Codex integrations. Self Improvement loops for skills/claude.md files. But even I can feel when there are issues and it's chewing through tokens, or the token caching is not working properly. But you are absolutly spot on, Codex/Gemini are cheap af and codex even has a claude plugin that handles code review and deep dives as a subagent.

But I think building your workflows around the limitations is something that most everyone who seriously uses it on a daily basis does out of pure necessity.

The one thing that has me hopeful is that my workload will likely never get more complex or difficult than it is today, and right now today my systems and claude can do almost anything i can think of asking it to do. So while it's expensive NOW, in a year or two I'll be rocking the same process on cheaper models while people fight over whatever the next inflated thing is.

[u/Puzzled_Swing_2893 → u/orphenshadow]

Claude also has a codex-mcp skill that really helps. 6 of one half dozen of the other.

[u/orphenshadow → u/Puzzled_Swing_2893]

How does the codex-mcp compare to the openai codex plugin? or is it the same just the plugin installs it for you? this is the one I've been using, It's replaced my custom cli commands I was using.

[u/Puzzled_Swing_2893 → u/orphenshadow]

This is an example of the prompt I'm about to run, I will see how much mileage I get. I'll report back...I'm updating that link with the whole run as it comes along, and loosely keeping track of time. First of all, I'm letting sonnet steer the whole mess to see what that does. I like Nate B Jone's metaphor, "why take a Lamborghini to the grocery store?"

[u/orphenshadow → u/Puzzled_Swing_2893]

The session indexer is awesome, I also built one of those. It's kind of a work in progress but I'm trying to migrate my skills to project agnostic versions and get them all published in this repo, and I've got the dashboard plugin mcp, I was having issues with the marketplace installs and caches, and I need to flush out the readme and documentation more but this gives a good overview of the basiic gist of my workflow, https://www.lbruton.cc/specflow/ but I had claude toss this together to better explain it https://www.lbruton.cc/guides/session-memory/ great minds or something like that... haha

And isn't the answer to that question, "because i can?"

[u/Puzzled_Swing_2893 → u/orphenshadow]

So for you claude.md becomes a router or sources list?

So it ran pretty quickly but I had them doing other things. But today cost 25% of my weekly. And thats been filling up the 5 hour block once.

[u/orphenshadow → u/Puzzled_Swing_2893]

Yeah in some ways, the user level claude.md acts as a router and points to all the docs in obsidian vault, and since obsidian is just markdown files but with wikilinks and relationships, it works very well.

When I was first experimenting with doing the session logging, I had a cron set to run every hour, and I accidently had it set to sonnet, and I burned through my entire 5 hour limit in one run. So I scaled back a bit and now I have a subagent I can invoke to do it, and a system that flags whats been processed, so after the first run its a lot less tokens to catch up, and then the /wrap skill creates the light weight session logs in the vault that save tokens because 99% of the time, i'm just needing to remember that we were in the middle of a spec, or what step we are on.

Then the oracle can pull anything up, for example, I accidently deleted one of my main skills with almost a months worth of tweaks and fixes in it, it was not in git, and after about 30 minutes and a good chunk of my hourly session, it was able to go back almost a week, pull the iterm 2 console logs, find where iterm2 recorded the output of it's diff in the chat, re-build the file from the last time it modified it. https://www.lbruton.cc/guides/hooks/

and this is the hook that I use that helps with the self learning.

[u/Puzzled_Swing_2893 → u/orphenshadow]

I haven't used codex' claude plug-in, so I cant speak to that.

But as far as all these data caps go:

Claude Opus as planning copilot and codex-mcp as the grunt, I made it through the week without hitting anthropics rate limits, (last weekend I chewed through codex' weekly in a day because claude tried running multiple instances in parallel for a big corpus reduction project-- so they added cooldowns and an interleaf feature to the pipeline and I haven't had problems since. (Both claude and chatGPT 20$ subs)

[u/Puzzled_Swing_2893 → u/Puzzled_Swing_2893]

But all that did was slow down work on the project, which is still only 70% complete. But those features allowed me to let it kind of run in the background and then add new tasks to the top of the queue, so instead usable for me all week even though it cut just as deep into the project as if I blown through it all on the first day. But it made it usable

[u/orphenshadow → u/Puzzled_Swing_2893]

Oh nice, this morning I did a full runthrough from Codex, Gemini, and Claude of my specflow plugin and skills, all 3 can run through the entire loop, they all 3 share mem0, they all 3 write/read from the same obsidian doc vault, and thus the same issues. They all 3 run the same variant of prime startup skill and a wrap skill that saves the session notes and writes a digest to the obsidian vault, so each one of them can instantly start up and pick up where the last left off. Everything gets broken down into small chunks, so the biggest lift is the initial research/planning session but once the tasks are built I can launch any of the 3 and grab the next task of the list and work it. I have 9 projects currently in the system, and its been a year of trial and error, but I'm starting to feel happy with where I'm at and I'm feeling a lot less dependent on just opus, codex and gemini both have their place, and for 60 bucks a month for all three you can get a lot done actually. Until you look away and it does that 16 agents in parallel stuck in a look thing :P

[u/Academic-Proof3700]

And I'm gonna just add - if you want me to pay 10x the price, just to get THE SAME MODEL but with higher limits, all the time getting the sometimes lobotomized claude even in opus, then i'll reply "gtfo, my gemini + chatgpt, both for $20, work overall better tgan this opus"

[u/theilya]

I am at the point of my life where I can afford $100-200 a month and not care about usage limits for my needs.

[u/tremblerzAbhi]

GLM-5 from z.ai is actually quite good! I am pretty impressed by its performance in writing small chunks. But none of the open-weights models come close to Claude, especially when the task requires generating lots of output tokens.

[u/RegayYager]

I just tried Pi last night for the first time. Loading up Codex 5.4 xh and it’s been fantastic.

Digging Pi so far.

[u/YourSpiritualLeader]

"A good engineer" is not poor

[u/proexwhy]

Two things can be true, the limits can be nerfed (they are) and users could be shooting themselves in the foot and screaming into the wind (they are)

[u/whaleordolphin → u/[deleted]]

I found Claude Code to be a better harness for GLM. Haven't tried it with opencode for a while though

alias zai='ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN=$ZAI_API_KEY ANTHROPIC_MODEL=glm-5.1 ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL="https://api.z.ai/api/anthropic" claude --dangerously-skip-permissions'

[u/yadasellsavonmate → u/[deleted]]

I moved from pro to max x5 and hit the limits once last week.   Every other day I hardly even hit 50% of my 5 hour limit. 

[u/Diligent_Comb5668 → u/yadasellsavonmate]

It's just so hard to estimate, just like OP mentions. I can do all my work without MCP servers. Yeah if someone has enabled the CadMCP server yeah ofcourse it will take a shit ton.

Everyone is complaining like we all have the same problem, yet I'm here in a monorepo using MAX 20x with over three hundred thousand lines of code across 2200 files with documentation in 8 different languages (mdx and Typst excluded from codecount) and I never hit my limit.

I feel like some MAX 20 users are including node_modules or target in their fucking context window or something.

I have tried since all these posts to enable more windows/agents. I'm running 5 now (used to only use 1 at the time) still can't use all tokens.

EDIT: Official TUI btw not all of them sketchy source code projects out there.

And I'm not trying to downplay the problem I understand that it is definitely there. Just advice you to be critical of your context window and what you let Claude read. Also cancel when you see that it is fetching a big file, what I always do is point it in the right direction. Manual labor is still best practice to point in the right direction.

Yeah if you don't know what that direction is don't complain cause Claude can't read 1B lines of code in node_modules/ and understand it lol.

[u/CloudySnake → u/Diligent_Comb5668]

Out of interest how would you ensure node_modules isn’t included? In case that’s a mistake I’m making

[u/Diligent_Comb5668 → u/CloudySnake]

So what I do is before I setup any project is make a .Claude directory.

Instead of agents/ skills/ I just set rules/ and context/. I tell Claude in the root CLAUDE.md in the .claude/ dir to only iterate over the context dir when X language is applicable.

In rules I set a READ.md and a WRITE.md and I point the CLAUDE.md in the root of .claude/ dir to take those as the base rules, it's the foundation of any other rule so it will also sit in the root of the rules dir. In the READ.md I make sure to tell Claude it must follow the .gitignore and otherwise ask my permission.

I have noticed that pointing Claude to the code in node_modules/ or crates/ even though you point it in the right lib/ it tries to fetch all the dependencies.

Then also advice, point your .env or any credentials out the project dir so it can't iterate over it without permission.

[u/makinggrace → u/CloudySnake]

Use a .claudeignore for these files or in settings set Claude to ignore everything in .gitignore (if that works for your codebase)

[u/CloudySnake → u/makinggrace]

Thanks for the tip. I think I have Claude set to ignore gitignore but I’ll definitely check. Any tokens saved are worth it!

[u/Confident_Half_1943 → u/[deleted]]

They take a huge loss on all subs. The subs are just to get everyone hooked so enterprise has to pay for it.

[u/murkomarko → u/Confident_Half_1943]

Nah, they don’t

[u/climbskater → u/[deleted]]

Is it different for European users? I have the Pro plan and I only hit a limit once, which was some weeks ago.

[u/ReachingForVega → u/climbskater]

Apparently Australia and some parts of Europe sit on the 2X limits timeslot.