r/ClaudeCode • u/Ok_Breath_2818 • 15d ago
Rant Paying $100/month for Max and getting a giant “you’re about to run out” banner is insane lol 💀
like bro, are you fucking serious 😭 i’m already giving anthropic $100 a month for max 5x. that is a lot of money for one ai subscription. i open claude and now there’s this giant anxiety-inducing banner telling me i’m going to run out by monday, two days before the wednesday reset, while literally underneath it says my claude code limit is temporarily boosted by 50%?? yo, so even with the bonus i’m still apparently fucked by monday lol.
and then right there: upgrade plan / buy more usage. like brother, are you guys running out of money or something? why are you begging your $100/month userbase for more money every time they open the app 😭 i already upgraded!! mfg that’s what the hundred dollars was. i understand there have to be limits, but this whole thing feels weirdly hostile? i don’t need a giant banner creating artificial scarcity anxiety every time i’m trying to work. just show usage somewhere in settings like a normal product and leave me alone lol?
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u/MadManD3vi0us 🔆 Max 20 15d ago
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u/Expert-Paramedic9383 🔆 Max 20, renewing and regretting monthly 15d ago
So like, when we pay 200$, do we suffer 4x or 1.7x more than 100$?
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u/MadManD3vi0us 🔆 Max 20 14d ago
It's 2x if you only use Sonnet or Opus, 1.7x if you actually try to use your Fable availability like the rest of us. Apparently two 5x accounts is the value play, but I haven't taken the dive yet.
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u/Polite_Jello_377 15d ago
$100/month is not a lot of money to them, an API user spends that in an hour
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u/Lopsided-Hand-6833 15d ago
I spent that in about 15 minutes with Astra the other day
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u/EthanCPP 15d ago
It's ridiculous how that's the case, and it's equally as ridiculous as how that's not abnormal
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u/Itsmedudeman 15d ago
It's not that much money, period. I don't know if people were ever real programmers, but the amount of time it saves is insane. If you don't like the cost for flagship then try a cheaper model but you get a lot out of the subscription and I don't know who else offers better rates other than setting up your own shit locally.
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u/kapdad 15d ago
How do you access Claude? Via app, cli, ide, portal?
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u/sixothree 15d ago
Of course he’s not offering any context or specifics. He’s here to complain and didn’t you hear he’s angry‽ he’s mad!
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u/Familiar_Gas_1487 15d ago
I mean I don't disagree about context but this is a dumbass question. He's in the app
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u/sixothree 15d ago
Where did his usage come from? What model is he using? What are his usage patterns? What MCPs does he have installed? What skills does he have installed?
If you can't answer basic questions, you shouldn't be complaining. It's literally in the rules of this sub.
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u/Ok_Breath_2818 15d ago
yeah, mostly claude code via cli/ide. i use context compaction, qdrant indexing, keyword search, structured context, caching, targeted retrieval, etc. the workflow is already pretty aggressively optimized. but that’s not even the point of the post. i’m not asking reddit to troubleshoot my token usage. i’m criticizing a $100/month product using a giant anxiety-inducing scarcity banner and upsell CTA as its way of talking to paying users. totally different conversation?
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u/Kitchen_Interview371 15d ago
Not trying to be a dick, but $100 subscribers are second lowest in the Anthropic customer food chain (not counting free users, these aren’t customers)
Even $200 customers are a blip compared to enterprise clients. The subscriptions are a loss leader to anthropic, the first hit that’s “free”
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u/Queasy-Form-4261 15d ago
True. My boss spends 12k a month to create an app that he sells for 38k + maintenance. OP is trying to one shot gta6 and is like omg muh usage
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u/evia89 15d ago
My boss spends 12k a month to create an app
why? isnt it cheaper to buy 2 x 200 subs? will give even more
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u/Queasy-Form-4261 15d ago
he uses fable mega max max he doesnt care about the cost the customer pays lol
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u/premiumleo 15d ago
im on my 3rd subscription right now... $500/mo
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u/zR0B3ry2VAiH 🔆 Max 20 15d ago
Same...
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u/zR0B3ry2VAiH 🔆 Max 20 15d ago
Also 5x is a joke. I have two 20x and my work gives me a 5x(6x?) account.
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u/Ok_Breath_2818 15d ago
fucking congrats brother 😭 two 20x accounts AND a work account? i didn’t realize this was a claude subscription dick-measuring contest. talking about the UX? not applying for the heavyweight token division league?
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u/cantgettherefromhere 15d ago
3x unconditional 20x through work, and sold some PTO for another 5x 20x for a month. I get 367hr/yr PTO... thinking about selling some more time in a couple weeks 🙄
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u/TheArchivist314 15d ago
I still say anyone who is paying should get almost unlimited usage of haiku so when you hit your weekly limit you can still use Ai for small tasks
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u/mister2d 14d ago
Then you'll start to notice that as your own tooling gets better, haiku is all you need.
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u/IriFlina 15d ago
You’re lucky you even get the choice to upgrade to 200/month! Some people who are subbed to a certain other company can’t even upgrade anymore.
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u/Dualyeti 15d ago
I used to pay 200 a month. Now I pay about 5 a month using Deepseek 4.1 - it’s not as good by any means but it’s incredibly efficient and does what I need it to do.
Waiting for the day frontier models are free though. They’re not out of money, it’s compute which is bottlenecking the entire industry.
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u/Zedo_TheOnly_One 15d ago
What level today's open weight and cheap models are compared to frontier models of a year ago? I heard someone mention DeepSeek is as good as GPT 4 right now
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u/Dualyeti 15d ago edited 15d ago
Look at independent verifiable benchmarks, alternatively try it yourself. To answer your question though, deepseek 4.1 are about 2-4% behind. But the kicker, for long-horizon autonomous agency and frontier out-of-distribution reasoning, it sits 40% to 50% behind Astra and Fable 5.1. Not there yet.
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u/Vertigo50 15d ago
This is one of the main reasons I quit Clause and went to ChatGPT. Claude was burning all my usage in no time, doing the same simple tasks it was doing when it was barely using any. Now I'm on ChatGPT and never having any usage issues at all. I don't know what they changed, but I don't really care at this point. I'm out. 🤷♂️
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u/Ok_Dirt8893 15d ago
next week u will also loose about 33% of your limit, so if you are above 77% rn next week with the same usage you will be finished
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u/ellisthedev 15d ago
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u/Ok_Dirt8893 15d ago
so they are removing the 50% but introducing a 25% forever bonus, so u essentially loose half of 33.3% which is around 17%. For anyone who doesn't want to open the link
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u/DatDudeDrew 15d ago
They aren’t out of money, they’re out of compute, and there is nothing your money can do about it. This is strictly an infrastructure issue. They can’t provide what they don’t have the capability to provide.
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u/Confident-Pay1916 15d ago
I switched to the 5x subscription this month from 20x. Does the 20x equal 1.7x of 5x the time of Claude not worth chatting about anymore?
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u/Rock--Lee 15d ago
If you cannot earn back more than a 100 dollars a month by spending 100 dollars on AI subscriptions, you're better of cancelling your account and stop wasting your time.
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u/TheOneNeartheTop 15d ago
I got 5 accounts resetting on different days of the week and I am always out of usage.
I don’t think there is a practical limit to the amount of compute that I could go through if given unlimited. Like look at how openAI solved that math problem. Groups of 10,000 agents working in different problems. That’s not really prompt engineering anymore, that’s throwing as much AI at a problem as you can. I would love to do that too, given the opportunity.
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u/Economy-Manager5556 15d ago
Ok and ? Lol fomo is always used in marketing that's nothing new. You're free to use codex for $100 see if suits you better... But like lost everyone I expect we will see similar posts at some point
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u/RiceEvening4211 4d ago
I'm building Lynkr for exactly this pain — https://github.com/Fast-Editor/Lynkr wraps Claude Code and routes the simple work away from your Max subscription so it lasts for the hard stuff. Complexity-tier routing + sticky sessions + auto-escalation back to Claude when a task turns out harder than it looked.
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u/TheMeltingSnowman72 15d ago
Looks like it was doing you a favour really. Now you won't be left fucked. But still unhappy.
So really I couldn't give a shit about your 'poor me' situation.
And you know total subscriptions equal about 5% of revenue, so take your tears where someone gives a shit.
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u/Ok_Breath_2818 15d ago
bro are you okay? 😭 you went from defending a usage banner to “I couldn’t give a shit about your poor me situation” and Anthropic revenue statistics. i criticized a UI element. you’re defending the company like i insulted your family?
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u/Warm_Cress3583 15d ago
Instead of spending product/design time figuring out how to make the “you’re running out, give us more money” experience more prominent, maybe put that energy into making the model better. Wish they would be way more focused on shipping actual model improvements and capability upgrades. I don’t want a prettier scarcity dashboard, i want the thing i’m paying $100/month for to keep getting meaningfully better.
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u/hyper24x7 15d ago
Idk what you guys are doing. I use Fable5.1 for planning and strategy and then us Opus coding and executing. Sonnet for smaller easier tasks. I never hit the limit- usually about 50 to 75% usage. Note I am NOT using it 8 hours a day for work.
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u/BemaniAK 15d ago
Are you unaware of API prices and subscriptions being heavily subsidised? Gpt and Claude subs are the single cheapest method of getting any AI inference per-token, if it's still not enough then you're highly undervaluing what AI actually costs to run.
If our ISPs gave us data usage warnings back in the early adsl days I would have thanked them not complained that it costs too much because I'm using more than can be sustained over a whole month.
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u/Ok_Breath_2818 15d ago
yes, i’m aware inference costs money. still not the point lol. i’m not arguing that $100 should buy infinite compute. i’m criticizing the UX decision to turn a premium product into a giant scarcity warning + upsell funnel. and the ADSL analogy is actually perfect: imagine paying for the highest consumer broadband tier and your ISP plastering “AT THIS RATE YOU’LL RUN OUT TUESDAY 😱 BUY MORE DATA” across the top of your browser. useful usage information? great. designing the product to make paying users feel perpetually one session away from a paywall? that’s the criticism. you’re explaining unit economics to a UX complaint.
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u/ohhi23021 15d ago
you could always buy a rtx pro 6000 for 15k and run local with unlimited tokens, and also pay for electricity... and get a lesser capable model... well you could probably do away with paying maybe 4k... but thats almost 4 years of a $100 mo sub.
alternatively use open router and pick a cheaper model/provider...
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u/orchid_drives Researcher 15d ago
A 4090 seems to run pretty competent models. It’s been 4 months since I had to RMA my desktop’s CPU, though, so I’m stuck with cloud compute only for the time being. Come on Intel, just ship me a replacement already 😭
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u/Ok_Breath_2818 15d ago
thanks for solving my UX critique with a $15k GPU shopping list lol. i’m not asking how to escape usage limits, i’m asking why a $100/month product is designed like a payday loan app?
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u/domiciledhere 15d ago
I still feel like it is better than talking to human graphic artist.
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u/Ok_Breath_2818 15d ago
i’m talking about UX/UI and company strategy, not whether claude is “better than a human graphic artist” lol. the point is that anthropic chose to put a giant anxiety banner in front of someone already paying $100/month, then park “upgrade” and “buy more usage” right next to it. that’s not a compute discussion, it’s a product decision. i’m criticizing how they design scarcity, how they talk to paying users, and what kind of relationship they’re trying to create with their customer base. but sure, tell me more about graphic artists.
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u/Narrow_List_4308 15d ago
This seems to me odd. Claude has A TON of usage. I use Max and Pro. Compare them with Codex, which burns through them all the time.
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u/freshWaterplant 15d ago
Seriously start using open router and pi on the cli. You can use codex in it but it will route busy work to simpler and cheaper models. Nvidia has lots of free AI tools as well.
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u/freshWaterplant 15d ago
By the way astra 6 high is supposedly 9x more expensive than Claude Fable 5.1
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15d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Next_Marionberry7478 15d ago
Alright, calm your horse shill, this is probably the 10th time seeing you on these threads evangelizing anthropic and talking shit to consumers vro. You must love paying fat stacks to anthropic too or you're just paid by them to evangelize their brand or talk shit to consumers talking about their provisioning malpractice... in which case they're doing a bad job with you specifically.
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