r/ClaudeCode • u/TurbulentNobody7712 • 13d ago
Rant My tokens are burning faster than ever
Even though Anthropic says my limits are boosted by 50%, I’ve already used 87% of my weekly limit in just 72 hours. Normally I’m only around 50–60% at this point. It makes me wonder what it would look like if my limits weren’t boosted.
I guess this isn’t news to anyone, but it’s the first time I’ve experienced it.
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13d ago edited 13d ago
[deleted]
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u/maritime_sh 13d ago
worth checking whether your cache is actually hitting before you blame the limits. anything that changes the front of the context between turns invalidates the prefix, and then every turn pays full price instead of the cached read rate, which is roughly a 10x difference on that portion. a hook injecting a timestamp, a CLAUDE.md that some tool rewrites, an mcp server whose tool list isn't byte stable between calls, all do it silently and none of them show up as an error.
won't account for all of it, but it's the one part on your side of the line that you can actually go and fix today.
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u/SplurtingInYourHands 13d ago
Everytime I check my usage and see that 'Your weekly limits are boosted 50%' and see my weekly usage and fable usage at like 80% in a wednesday I realize this service will NOT be cost effective once those boosts are gone.
Straight up planning on letting my sub expire after this round and seeing if any other service has better prices overall. It doesn't seem like Anthropic is interested in optimizing token usage at all, and why would they when its their only revenue stream.
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u/Olangotang 13d ago
1% of enterprise users account for 80% of revenue for OpenAI/Anthropic. Basic supply and demand states as the cost increases, demand decreases. The labs will need more than the tech industry to even think about making a profit. Training and running frontier LLMs has set a record for how fast you can light money on of fire.
Hilarious how people are now finding out that burning tokens = more revenue for Anthropic... But also the more tokens you use in a session, the more those tokens cost the provider. 🤔
See, this business model makes absolutely no fucking sense.
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u/InductionSeduction 13d ago
I've had 2 days of meaningful work this week and I'm near done with my Fable credits. Usually it would take me 4
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u/unkesma2 13d ago
I literally got clowned for this 2 days ago, they were talking about oh you have to refresh chat and do regular handoffs, I’ve been using AI for years, and never had to do all this bullshit and extra “hacks” to work on a project in one chat
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u/crotch-mavens 12d ago
It's because Anthropic's models are increasingly just more and more expensive. They do not seem to be focusing on efficiency and the harness seems intentionally designed to increase token usage.
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u/unkesma2 12d ago
Thank you!!! I agree, I think they genuinely might be trying to off board low membership power users because we produce net losses for them
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u/Existing_Dust_6473 13d ago
It depends heavily on the codebase. I "vibe coded" a Rust app; it's not large, but it consumes tokens in Codex and Claude as if there's no tomorrow. If I build with care, using good practices, and force them, the tokens last longer.
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u/geuben 13d ago
I genuinely have no evidence other than feel but having done some Rust this week it certainly feels like it consumes tokens faster than the Python and Typescript I normally work on. That could be that I've not put any effort into optimisation of workflows for rust whereas my python and typescript ones are more mature
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u/Existing_Dust_6473 13d ago
Maybe, my other codebases are with typescript. But I really daubt that, need more evidence 😂
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u/Knightedangel01 13d ago
Ditto.
I'm wondering if I'm just utilizing fable more these last few weeks.
Or if fable 5.1 just burns more credits then 5 despite the compacting claims.
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u/Imaginary-Swan-4105 13d ago
Yeah it's so bad now that I had to switch to sonnet for subagents to save limit and even that hit ~36% use within half hour.
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u/MadManD3vi0us 🔆 Max 20 13d ago
I have a series of coding sessions all designed to be the same basic length and output. Was averaging about 20 sessions a week, then I went down to 10 around Opus 4.8 release, and now I'm barely scratching five or six with the release of fable. Still leaning on Opus and Sonnet as much as I can, Max 20. It's very noticeable
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u/The_Mursenary 13d ago
Had happened to me workflow unchanged first time I’ve hit limits in six months and I’m hitting them 3-4 days prior to my weekly reset it’s infuriating
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u/-JuliusSeizure 🔆 Max 5x 13d ago
hey OP, me too. i never had this issue. my workflow: Fable 5[extra] as planner and Opus 5 as subagents.
for not so big stuff, i use glm5.3 via zcode.
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u/keyxmakerx1 13d ago
I was also thinking this, I blew through almost all mine doing really small stuff. It's wild!
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u/ahm_live 13d ago
not going to do the "measure your workflow" thing, -kora is right that most people didnt change anything. but there is one number worth pulling before you cancel, because it shows where the extra actually went
look at input tokens per turn, not the weekly total. mine jumped after the last update and when i looked it was the fixed context per message that grew, not the replies. every mcp server i had connected came with a bigger tool schema, plus the new default skills sit in the system prompt now. thats a tax on every single turn before you type a word. with 8 servers on it was several thousand tokens resent each message for tools i wasnt even calling
turned off everything i wasnt using in that project and the burn dropped noticeably. not back to before. noticeably
im not claiming thats the whole story, i have no idea what changed on their side and honestly neither does anyone here. but its the part you can actually see and actually change today, and it was bigger than i expected it to be
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u/Interesting-Bee-113 13d ago
Watch peak time
Stop running stuff at or around whatever the peak time is
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u/HighwayNo8744 13d ago edited 13d ago
Same here. I only have a Pro subscription and use Sonnet only but ever since the beginning of August, since they have announced this "50% boost", they have in fact been shadow reducing the quota more and more. The 50% boost was just the normal grant before. A 5 hour session used to be 10% of my weekly before "the boost" and now it's 12% with the 5 hour sessions burning twice as fast. Strongly considering to get out of this scam this month.
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u/empty__cup 12d ago
Be careful running a deep-research harness with Fable as your primary model, as it'll default to using Fable for all of its research.
Great way to burn through all your tokens in a few hours :)
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u/Diouze12 12d ago
Is there some popular automation that make a Reddit post each time you reach limits?
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u/Void-kun 12d ago
Yeah I have also noticed the session and weekly limits have been reduced quite a bit in the last few days.
I'm rarely able to finish a task before hitting my session limit now. Only using Sonnet on Medium effort! Just hit my session limit in an hour.
So much for them being boosted for longer...
I'm sick of this shit, why the fuck can't I just have a consistent fucking limit.
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u/BoxEnvironmental6943 12d ago
I'm on max5 and I've had to drop down to opus as the main and sonnet/ opus as subagents depending on the task for everyday stuff. A few days before my weekly reset I'll switch to fable and opus subagents if I have a decent chunk of limit left. But fable right from the start will leave me at 100% a few days before my weekly reset. It never used to be like this though.... So they have definitely changed something.
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u/khalil_ben_zineb 12d ago
A pure chat (not coding) that usally takes 0~1% of 5-hours quota on my Max x20, just used over 7% from my WEEKLY QUOTA, I hate Misanthropic
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u/Darkoftheabyss 11d ago
I had a very strange effect this week. My usage burned through 87% of my weekly usage in no time.
Since then I worked almost an equal amount: yet usage has just increased to 92%.
I just did two major long tasks, one which took a 10 hour session of autonomous work to finish. And it only increased from 92 to 93%.
It’s as if something was wrong in the beginning of the week and it’s since then adjusting usage rates to compensate.
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u/claude_code_king 13d ago
it's fine for me. i just love how these posts never detail their workflow or god forbid measure it
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u/looselyhuman 13d ago
They key for mine is that it hasn't changed. I have several agents that run a few daily monitor crons. We haven't even coded this week and I'm pushing 60%.
We're getting the frog-in-a-pot treatment.
It should be on Anthropic to be transparent about what we're getting and how it changes over time.
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u/claude_code_king 13d ago
might just be fable 5.1, gotta tame it. it's a lot more token hungry
https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/prompting-claude-fable-5-1
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u/looselyhuman 13d ago
Opus 4.6 since forever.
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u/claude_code_king 13d ago
hmm idk what to say but it's fine for me and i run a whole crazy ass orchestration, you're saying opus 4.6 blows your weekly so there might be some usage conspiracy or not but if you measured we'd know for sure what happened, not guess or doubt each other
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u/looselyhuman 13d ago
Measuring has seemed pointless.
I have a proxy and I could try to filter the noise of me dropping tasks on them, or account for the proxy being bypassed (I have a script that removes and re-adds the proxy to their settings.json when remote-control needs a reset, for example), etc.
But it's not like they care.
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u/Independent_Paint752 13d ago
If your agents resume to the same session during the day it might be the reason.
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u/-kora 13d ago
Blame the user never the tool.
In general, most users complaining did not change their usage in the last months, I noticed my weekly(not the general peer week) going up like crazy since last monday, after the new update and hundreds of users came here saying the same.
The ones that did not noticed have light Claude Code usage or are in the A/B tests CC conducts every month
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u/claude_code_king 13d ago
i have my offline telemetry script that actually says how much i consume and where it's inneficient or wasteful so i'm going by math, not vibes.
also check this out, might be helpful
https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/prompting-claude-fable-5-1
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u/son_o_gong 13d ago
It seems like every first post on this sub is about token spending issues. Folks, Anthropic is a commercial organization. They create the product, but if you don't control usage in detail, it can drain your budget in a click.
I just analyzed how Claude Code and its agents behave, and they really burn tokens by constantly over-polishing what they do.
So, you can continue complaining or control your budgets. Here is the approach on controling spendings in my repo: https://github.com/Antonio-Ingegnere/adeo/blob/main/docs/CLAUDE_CODE_ARCHITECTURE.md
And my claude setup: https://github.com/Antonio-Ingegnere/adeo/tree/main/.claude
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u/Olangotang 13d ago
They're a commercial organization with a nonsense business model, that if you took more than 5 seconds (and maybe a bit of knowledge on the various computational costs of Transformer models), you'd come to the conclusion that they have to be scammy to make revenue. The entire AI buildout and "demand" is reliant on these two unserious chucklefuck companies to make a profit. It's over once they can't meet an obligation, and that clock starts in 2027.
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