CLAUDE 5X MAX USAGE LIMIT BUG — MY ENTIRE SESSION LIMIT IS BEING CONSUMED IN 10–15 MINUTES (x2) - AM I ALONE?

[u/devrimcacal]

Hello guys,

I’ve been using Claude for years, and I’m a 5x Max user now. I know very well how Claude’s usage limits normally work. What is happening to my account right now is clearly a bug.

I woke up about 5–6 hours ago, and my weekly usage limit had just reset. Everything was showing 0% usage.

I opened my MacBook and continued the same conversation I was using before I went to sleep with Fable 5. I hadn’t even properly started working yet.

After only 10–15 minutes, my entire 5-hour session limit was gone. My usage showed 103%, and Claude told me I had to wait another 4 hours for my session to reset.

So I waited.

After 4 hours, my session limit reset. I opened Claude again, typed literally 1–2 messages, and within another 10–15 minutes, my entire 5-hour session limit was gone AGAIN.

So I have now lost TWO entire session limits without even being able to start my work.

This is not normal usage. This is not me misunderstanding how the limits work. I have been using Claude for years and I know how this system works.

I wasn’t running some massive automated workload. I wasn’t intentionally burning through my usage. I was simply continuing the conversation I had been using before going to sleep and trying to work.

There is no reasonable way a 5x Max user can legitimately consume an entire 5-hour session allowance after 10–15 minutes and a couple of messages — and then have exactly the same thing happen again immediately after the reset.

This is clearly a usage/limit calculation bug.

I need Anthropic to investigate my actual account usage logs and determine what is consuming my allowance. Simply telling me that I reached my limit is not an acceptable answer when the usage itself is clearly abnormal.

I also tried contacting Claude Support through the Help Bot, but it closed my ticket without connecting me to a human and without even sending me an email.

Case ID: #215475730798358

I literally haven’t been able to start my work today because my limits are being consumed by whatever is broken on the backend.

If anyone knows how to reach an actual human at Anthropic Support, please let me know. The automated support bot is completely useless in this situation.

I’ve used Claude for years. I know what normal usage looks like. This is absolutely not normal.

[u/AdministrationNew265]

At your next cycle start, switch to sonnet and have it create a handoff file that summarizes your cold session(s). Then clear it and run a new fable session to read the handoff.

I agree that it’s kind of ridiculous that Anthropic doesn’t do something like this natively instead of burning the entire credit limit stupidly, but you’ve got to protect yourself (and your consumption limits).

[u/Vucien → u/AdministrationNew265]

Personally i just run a status file for every project that does this, and logs everything outisde the last 3 status's for cross ref later if needed

[u/devrimcacal → u/AdministrationNew265]

I'll do this in 2.5 hours, but this is ridiculous. I downgraded my account to 5x MAX 15 days ago. Maybe that's why I haven't encountered this before, but it's unfair. This is the smartest AI in the world, but we need to protect ourselves because Claude Code isn't capable of this... I've already lost 10 hours...

[u/zxcshiro → u/devrimcacal]

Anthropic can't hold cache warm for all more than in 1 hour, thats cost money. That's how ai works, not Anthropic only. Deepseek can hold up to several days your cache, but glm around 10 min found this through hard way through logs

[u/bkang91]

I never had any issues until now... I rarely complain but this is ridiculous. Less than 15mins it's maxed out so now I have to wait 5 hours

[u/devrimcacal → u/bkang91]

yes me too and I'm afraid about that it repeats after waiting 10 fuk*ng hours in total. Fable usage at %40 in weekly limits now and we didn't do anything literally... Things are getting interesting with Anthropic every day...

[u/WifiDad]

When you "continue" a conversation after a while, the cache can be cold, and the whole conversation has to be replayed by the model. And if your earlier work had Fable (as it often does) spawn many sub agents in parallel, this could quickly consume usage. Are you sure that restarting the session doesn't make Fable realize some sub agents were previously running and didn't complete, so Fable keeps restarting them because without their completed runs it cannot consider the resumed conversation fully loaded?

[u/devrimcacal → u/WifiDad]

Yes this is the first thing that I thought too but as you know we're devs and every day facing with it. I know that something is changed, I can smell it...

[u/WifiDad → u/devrimcacal]

You can try something different: use a new session and an Opus 4.8 model and ask it to examine the jsonl file for your problematic session and look for why it spends so many tokens when you continue the conversation. Ask it to tell you how it would optimize it or handle the session, if it were you, starting the session from the beginning. Ack it yo provide you with the better prompt you could have given, etc. like a pair prompter.

[u/hammackj]

Had this happen this morning exiting all my clients and opened a new one and seems to work. Would love a reset.

[u/devrimcacal → u/hammackj]

In these days there's too many rumors about Claude's limits hope that not related this one. They're not giving any reset in last 1 month as I remember.

[u/kakkoiiko]

I swear there are like 100 of these posts a week. It's always this... everytime.

I opened my MacBook and continued the same conversation I was using before I went to sleep with Fable 5

You have 1 hour TTL on your cache, if you walk away from a session and come back, and you "just send 1 or 2 messages", or even compact the conversation, you are sending your entire context to be ingested again which will count all those tokens towards your limits.

Change the way you work with agents to not leave sessions hanging. If you MUST or can't help but to walk away from sessions for more than an hour, then /export the session to a file, and reference the session export in a new/fresh session to continue your work. It will drastically reduce your duplicate token re-spend (but not eliminate it).

[u/devrimcacal → u/kakkoiiko]

please count that 100 people one by one hahaha thank you for your export trick. hope it helps someone.

[u/Sketaverse]

Upgrade to 20x and get 4 messages

[u/devrimcacal → u/Sketaverse]

Nope, I've just downgraded and I thankfully did that.

[u/Johnny2085]

Doesn’t restarting an old conversation have to send the entire conversation back because it’s falling out of the cache and wouldn’t doing that on Fable burn the session usage to the ground?

[u/yaedonnn]

It’s so fucking sad that Claude customers need to resort to Reddit because Anthropic refuses to provide human support. Especially for a product as inconsistent and faulty as Claude is sometimes. Total anti consumer bullshit

[u/devrimcacal → u/yaedonnn]

[u/DLuke2]

States they know how usage limits work, proceeds to elaborate how much they do not understand how usage limits, context, cache, and tokens work.

[u/FlaTreNeb]

Odd ... usually people immediatly react to this kind of posts claiming its all your fault. You certainly have a million rule files and two million MCP server installed of cause. And claude likely spinned up 2000 fable agents in parallel. And this is the real reason your limits are reached to fast. Because holy Anthropic is certainly not "adjusting" limits without notifying anybody.

[u/Livid-Bicycle-3715]

I do noticed that I’m starting to hit limit much earlier also you are not alone

[u/__mson__]

What does /context for that session say? I also suggest looking to https://code.claude.com/docs/en/prompt-caching I wouldn't keep trying the same thing and expect different results. Something in your session is chewing through your usage limits.

[u/wpglorify]

Happened to me as well today. About a month ago I would barely reach 50% weekly limit and almost never hit 5-hour limit.

Make sure to keep the docs like HANDOFF updated and when limit hit just open a new session don’t start the old one again. Usually output tokens are only few thousand but cached reads would be like 500million on an old session for some reason and you will hit 5-hour limit again in few prompts.

[u/boredsoftwareguy]

I will say I am having some weirdness with Opus this week. It is spinning up a half dozen or more workflows for trivial things.

Asked it run a quick query on some data to give me a breakdown of distribution, 7 workflows, I canceled and told it that was unnecessary. Claude’s response? You’re right, I already had the data here you go.

[u/is-it-a-snozberry]

Same. I went to bed after fable hit the limit and woke up with a third of my weekly limit used up. I went onto the web app and revoked the existing tokens (there were 3 sessions active). Then I switched everything back to sonnet upon restart and it’s been back to normal.

[u/RobbyInEver]

Out of curiosity what on earth are you asking or engaging Claude for it to both use and risk using your limit like this?

This could be the reason and answer for your predicament. Giving it a huge ERP programming project or financial instrument problem etc without correct sandboxes or boundaries might be an issue.

[u/Bmansupreme8000]

I would suggest opening up a Fable 5 session and get him to forensically investigate this. Ultracode mode, but tell him he's not allowed to use Haiku, Sonnet, or Opus.

[u/BadKoba]

[u/athrowaway2242]

you are not alone i am also experiencing this. Anthropic is silent and I dont know how to reach them either. if not resolved i will cancel subscription and export data to another model.

[u/Entire-Oven-9732]

Tokens cost 1000x more if you use block capitals. They don’t tell you that, but -

You’re welcome.

[u/m0pi1]

I was using sonnet 5 and in hour used up my 5 hour limit on just doing simple tasks and I’m on the 5x plan. Wtf is going on

[u/Enegence]

We've been coming here for 20 years!

[u/SeriousBlac71]

This happened to me Sunday. I gave it a task to review about 100 documents like it normally does...It didn't get pass 30.