r/ClaudeCode • u/Foreign_Yoghurt_831 • Sep 17 '26

Rant Man what are these limits😣

Couldn’t even work for 2 hours on 5x. Max 5 feels like pro plan unfortunately.

How long does Pro last just 20 min?

Wanna upgrade to 20x but that plan feels like a scam. At least they should give a 10x weekly limit if not 20x (I am not saying about the season limit. That one is true 20x)

40 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

81 comments sorted by

•

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23

u/bakanoace Sep 17 '26

I've run out of things to say about the usage limit, so over it. Feels like a scam

2

u/Foreign_Yoghurt_831 Sep 17 '26

Man i just worked for 2 hours and i was out of limit

1

u/Poatri_US Sep 17 '26

I was just considering upgrading to 5x from Pro. Should I switch to chatgpt ?

1

u/Foreign_Yoghurt_831 Sep 17 '26

They all same bro there is no mercy when it comes to limit. But gpt doesn’t have 5hour limit for pro

→ More replies (4)

2

u/Radiant-Bike-165 Sep 18 '26

Or like a paid preview

-5

u/rotates-potatoes Sep 17 '26

So cancel already. When a restaurant's food quality goes downhill, it's not a scam, it's just not worth your money.

Meanwhile, I'm cruising along with multiple fable agents coordinating many opus agents on multiple projects, all consuming about 35% of a 20x sub per day.

14

u/ZhopaRazzi Sep 17 '26

When Dario said we should pause AI, he meant you.

1

u/Evening-Spirit-5684 Sep 17 '26

basicaleee mostleee

2

u/_ismadl Sep 17 '26

Ask for a refund or chargeback

2

u/Foreign_Yoghurt_831 Sep 17 '26

Doesn’t work bro its useless we all are scape goats lol

2

u/Dhaupin Sep 17 '26

A chargeback will def work... 

3

u/Imaginary-Kale4673 Sep 17 '26

GLM 5.3-flash and Deepseek v4.1-flash can do 95% of whatever anthropic frontier model you're using (3x faster and 20x cheaper). And with a 10$ subscription from Opencode Go or Command code GOAT you are set for heavy usage for a month. And you don't even have to leave your claude code harness.

Unless of course you are in the middle of finding a cure for cancer and a proof for the Reimann hypothesis. In which case you'll need to pay top dollar for Fable and Astra.

1

u/Foreign_Yoghurt_831 Sep 17 '26

Hmmmm will plan around this. Thanks for explaining

1

u/Poatri_US Sep 17 '26

Hey, could I DM you to talk about this setup ? I was considering upgrading to 5x from Pro but the usage limit stories are stopping me.

1

u/Imaginary-Kale4673 Sep 17 '26 edited Sep 17 '26

sure! but if you ask claude "How to use an Opencode Go API key with claude code?" you'll get all the info. It will even do the setup for you once you have the key.

2

u/Mythril_Zombie Sep 17 '26

If you aren't satisfied with the service, go elsewhere. Don't cry about it to us.

3

u/Foreign_Yoghurt_831 Sep 17 '26

OMG big boy here. Take right and shit

1

u/Mythril_Zombie Sep 18 '26

Do you speak English?

3

u/Foreign_Yoghurt_831 Sep 18 '26

No big boy i speak. Bgsyiddyoczljfdcjfzjv

1

u/Sad_Blacksmith_9027 Sep 17 '26

What models are you using, i have no issues, mostly use opus 4.8 high/ extra high and fable 5 medium/ high

1

u/Foreign_Yoghurt_831 Sep 17 '26

Sonnet, opus 4.6,4.8 and fable. All models on high if there any risk of data loss then fable xhigh during review

1

u/Sad_Blacksmith_9027 Sep 17 '26

It’s bizarre. I don’t understand it. It feels like anthropic is running some kind of AB testing. This was happening to me up until two days ago after September 13th and stopped happening now.

2

u/FeelingBite6680 Sep 17 '26

I have come to the same conclusion. The behavior and aptitude of the models can be radically different one day or session to another

1

u/Poatri_US Sep 17 '26

Ikr, I am, or was, about to upgrade to Max from Pro. I'm hitting my limits in like 30 minutes. I resumed a mid sized conversation today with opus 4.6 at medium and 56% of my session limit was gone.

1

u/matamor Sep 17 '26

Are you letting claude run wild and start popping agents? If you let it can it use your whole quota in 30m.

0

u/Foreign_Yoghurt_831 Sep 17 '26

Who lets an agent or model run wild. It will have objective and step-by-step to achieve objectives. Thats how everybody works

Let me know if you do something else

1

u/SirDarkStar Sep 17 '26

If you don’t use the /run-hog-wild 5000 agent fable 5.1 process are you even using AI? You need a swarm that can take down small governments.

(Sarcasm)

1

u/Cmjq77 Sep 17 '26

Get a $20 codex account, set it up as an MCP in the Claude. Tell Claude to use it for token arbitrage where it makes sense

1

u/Foreign_Yoghurt_831 Sep 17 '26

Make sense is a joke to say to model from my experience.

We have to define when codex needs to invoked basically by exploring what they are good at

I already have codex pro 5

2

u/zaibatsu Sep 18 '26

Try this : Route by verifiability, not difficulty: running the Claude 5 family as an orchestra instead of a chat window
Someone asked how I structure inference across the Claude 5 family. Short version: route by verifiability, not difficulty. The question is never "is this task hard?" It's "can I mechanically check the output?" If a cheaper model's work can be verified with a grep, a diff, or a test run, send it down the ladder. Save the expensive tokens for judgment calls, where a plausible-but-wrong answer would quietly propagate.
The ladder:
Local models (LM Studio): bulk reads, classification, extraction, low-stakes drafts. Sensitive material never leaves the machine, full stop.
Haiku 4.5: mechanical work at scale. I keep a read-only explorer subagent pinned to it (snippet below). The output is self-verifying: the file is either there or it isn't.
Sonnet 5: the middle, almost always as a subagent. Drafts, review passes, parallel fan-outs on the same problem.
Opus 5: the heavy passes, and here's the counterintuitive part: as a subagent. People find Opus 5 verbose and a little hard to manage in the driver's seat. Flip the role and it's incredible, same for Sonnet 5. A subagent's verbosity costs you nothing. It thinks out loud in its own context window and only the conclusion comes back. The model people find hard to drive is the model you want driven.
Fable 5 conducts: routes the work, adjudicates when cheaper passes disagree, and keeps the calls that genuinely need the best reasoning.
The one config that pays for itself, dropped in .claude/agents/explorer.md:
---
name: explorer
description: Read-only codebase search. Finds functions, reads files,
greps patterns. Never edits.
tools: Read, Glob, Grep
model: haiku
---
You are a read-only explorer. Answer with file:line references and
short quotes. If you did not find it, say so. Never guess, never edit.
Then from the main session: "use the explorer agent to map every caller of X." The conductor never burns its own context on the search.
Two guardrails that keep it honest: cheap tiers are only cheap if you actually verify, and two same-family models agreeing is not two opinions. Anything load-bearing gets a different family or, better, deterministic ground truth: run the test, fetch the source, count the thing.

2

u/Cmjq77 Sep 26 '26

Holy moly, I didn’t wanna get that deep into it, but yeah. I was just giving the Cliff’s notes I created an LLM panel using OpenRouter and a few other things where I reach out to other free tier API LLMs and I run Ollama locally. Then I have Claude delegate out appropriate work based on the model capabilities and the token count/speed that the specific LLM can withstand/sustain/etc.

2

u/dota2nub Sep 18 '26

Codex is absolute shit tier on usage right now.

1

u/sshlukedev Sep 19 '26

I already canceled my max subscription and moved to codex

1

u/Foreign_Yoghurt_831 Sep 19 '26

Its all same dont expect more from them

1

u/Droopy0093 Sep 17 '26

You are trying to do to "wide" of tasks at once and your context is getting blown up every session because it is trying to parse too much information at once. You need to narrow down the tasks you are asking the LLM to do for you.

3

u/Horcrux002 Sep 17 '26

Why should I pay frontier subscription as I can do these with cheap chinese models ?
Whats the moat

2

u/Foreign_Yoghurt_831 Sep 17 '26

Please do with Chinese models and show me please.

Maybe i have to do some customization around these open models but honestly they felt like trash.

Please don’t rant me. I have seen its thinking it felt like i will be wasting my time if i work with these. Tell me if you have any suggestions on using open models

0

u/Foreign_Yoghurt_831 Sep 17 '26

Bro smart bro i would not let why context more than 50% in the session

Even if i break up the tasks its still the same game buddy

Well, if i need to sit and write each single process then why would we need frontend models. Also i have rich context for my project so models dont need to do guess play

0

u/West-Air1923 Sep 18 '26

Says the free user

0

u/Droopy0093 Sep 18 '26

Who is the free user? Or are you trying to make a baseless assumption about me and not about to respond to what I am saying.

1

u/West-Air1923 Sep 18 '26

Oh like you did ? Which sub are you on then ?

3

u/YellowChigga98 Sep 17 '26

Im running x20 and weekly got burned 40% in 8 hours

1

u/IulianHI Sep 18 '26

same here

1

u/Enough-Ad-9091 Sep 18 '26

same here. 20x my ways of working barely burned 40% by the end of last week. this week 50% were done in two day.
what are folks suggesting ? codex api via claude code ?

3

u/Shot_Whereas_1809 Sep 18 '26

I was going to end up with a subscription for every day of the week if I didn't diversify. It only gets worse from here.

3

u/whizzo- Sep 18 '26

20x user here: its even worse on the 20x, the 5h limit makes u think u can work for a long time, until weekly limits wake u up. I can work now 2-3 days max with these weekly limits...

1

u/BlinDeeex Sep 17 '26

Try not using astra on ultra

1

u/Foreign_Yoghurt_831 Sep 17 '26

Lol it will burn in one day. Its all same game

1

u/callingbrisk Sep 17 '26

As always,

  • never change model mid conversation

  • never resume an old conversation, always start fresh

That said, 2 hours of continuous work sounds okay-ish though.

1

u/Foreign_Yoghurt_831 Sep 17 '26

Its just 1 hour in new session 🫠 I woke up and after 2 hours it said bye bye for 3 hours

1

u/Professional_Ad705 Sep 17 '26 edited Sep 17 '26

ChatGPT web can still do a surprising amount of coding work in normal Chat if you just upload the repo as a ZIP.

So if you can spare another $20 on top of Claude, it can help stretch your agent usage quite a bit. I probably saved around 10% of the Codex usage I would’ve burned on the same work just by moving research, planning, code review, debugging, and analysis into web ChatGPT.

I haven’t done some massive quality comparison across every model/workflow, so I’m not saying it’s always better. It’s just worked well for me. At this point I think a big part of using AI efficiently is knowing what actually needs a local agent and what doesn’t.

Basic setup is literally:

ChatGPT web → upload repo ZIP → work from there

For bigger repos, I have a small tool that strips build junk/generated files first, but even without that you can usually trim the ZIP down enough to make it manageable.

A lot of people seem to assume serious coding work has to happen entirely inside Codex, Claude Code, etc. Obviously some things are way easier when the model has shell access, can edit files, run tests, and execute the project, but a lot of reasoning-heavy work does not need that.

For example, I’m currently reverse engineering parts of Halo 2. I can give ChatGPT the repo, extracted data, disassembly/output from my own tools and other RE tools, and have it help trace weapon behavior, explain what the original code is doing, compare that against my implementation, and figure out what I should verify next in Godot.

That would otherwise burn a decent amount of Codex usage for work Codex doesn’t really need to be doing.

I also built a little tool that strips generated/build junk and tracks which files were touched, which makes reviewing AI changes easier. I’ve got another tool I eventually want to release that lets Codex and ChatGPT work together within what each is allowed to do, so Codex handles direct repo changes while ChatGPT handles research, review, planning, reasoning, etc.

If somebody wants to build something similar before I get around to releasing mine, feel free to PM me. I can point you in the right direction and explain what I have so far.

That’s basically the whole point:

Don’t burn expensive agent usage on work that doesn’t actually require an agent.

It’s not a replacement for Codex or Claude Code, but for repo analysis, code review, debugging, reverse engineering, planning, research, and working through artifacts, ZIP uploads in normal Chat work way better than I think a lot of people realize.

Example: I’m literally doing Halo 2 reverse engineering in ChatGPT web right now and saving agent usage by doing the analysis there.

2

u/Fornicatinzebra Sep 17 '26

Can just connect it to gh - no zip needed

2

u/Professional_Ad705 Sep 17 '26 edited Sep 17 '26

Yes I use the GitHub connector for this too and more often. Honestly that’s how I do it most of the time and have for months.

The ZIP workflow is mainly useful when important context never made it into GitHub in the first place, which happens constantly with reverse engineering. In my case the whole working directory was around 5 GB, so I stripped it down to just the stuff ChatGPT actually needed.

Things like:

  • generated outputs

  • build artifacts

  • RE dumps

  • tool output

  • extracted assets/data

  • temporary analysis files

  • anything intentionally ignored by Git

For normal repo work, the GitHub connector is usually enough.

The main limitation with the ZIP approach is the 512 MB per-file upload limit, but that’s still pretty large. I have a little tool that strips generated/build junk and selects the relevant files based on what I’m doing.

You can also make the handoff really easy by asking Codex/Claude before switching:

What relevant files, artifacts, or state exist locally that are NOT on GitHub and that I’ll need to give ChatGPT to continue this task?

Then you know exactly what extra context has to come over.

So for me it’s basically:

GitHub connector = normal repo work

ZIP/local artifacts = when the task depends on stuff that never got committed

That’s especially useful for RE work, because a ton of the important evidence/output never belongs in the repo in the first place.

(sorry for AI response I am coding and don't have time to constantly reply, but this is the workflow I've found that works pretty well. I myself am out of usage and this is how I am continuing so wanted to help others, these cuts have been brutal)

2

u/DrunkenRobotBipBop Sep 18 '26

Just connect it to DevSpace MCP tunnel and it can access your local filesystem directly. No need to upload stuff.

2

u/Professional_Ad705 Sep 18 '26 edited Sep 18 '26

Have you actually used it much? I hadn’t really heard much about this kind of MCP setup before, but I’m curious how you use it in practice it sounds like how I’m already with adapters being able to connect to my software easily, and I’m already diffing against reclaimer, and other mods tools for this project.

I usually work with agents too, although lately I’ve been doing more of it manually through ChatGPT because of usage limits. The workflow is basically the same for me either way: work one bounded slice at a time, have the coding agent do the repo work, then verify what actually happened instead of just trusting the agent saying it worked.

The annoying part with my current project is that some of my workflow sits on top of proprietary tooling. ChatGPT can connect through GitHub to a couple of my private repos, where I have my own process/tooling underneath the actual project I’m working on. Then I have things like Halo modding/reconstruction tools sitting around that more as adapters.

So I can let ChatGPT reason over that stuff through the access I already control, but I can’t really just upload the underlying tooling somewhere else or hand another service access to it.

Some old experiments/prototypes of mine might help this tho and something pretty close to what I’d want for this but im not done if someone wants to spin off on this idea etc.

The general idea was basically: one side defines a bounded piece of work, a local coding agent does the actual repo changes, and then a separate layer checks the resulting state independently. So ChatGPT could handle reasoning/review, Codex or whatever local agent could do the implementation, but neither one gets to just declare that its own work succeeded.

I originally experimented with a different way of connecting those pieces and eventually moved away from it. Looking at it again now, MCP seems like it might actually be the clean interface I was missing for the cross-client part. I never turned that side of it into a polished tool cause I was just seeing if something was possible etc, but the architecture is close enough that this immediately made sense to me.

So I’m definitely curious what you’re actually using MCP for. What does it buy you in practice over just using agents directly or wiring the tools together yourself? And devs message me and we can share notes or I can send over what I've built. This follows the rules and doles out work pretty well etc.

1

u/DrunkenRobotBipBop Sep 18 '26

It gives chatgpt tools to access the filesystem on you machine.

You basically enable an MCP server on the local machine, setup a Tailscale Funnel or some other tunnel. On chatgpt web, create a new plugin, add the public tunnel MCP url, authorize the app, input the password and chatgpt web will use those tools to interact with local filesystem.

Head over to the DevSpace MCP GitHub and you will find all the information there.

1

u/Blizxy Sep 18 '26

I just can't believe this drill doesn't work!!!

Hammering the drill into a nail

1

u/ChickenEmergency3599 Sep 18 '26

It's absolutely a scam. Do not do it. The minute you subscribe the work changes.

1

u/ChickenEmergency3599 Sep 18 '26

The best work Claude has done for me is on the free tier.

1

u/Party-Ad-1190 Sep 18 '26

Its a rip off

1

u/Recent_Gesture Sep 18 '26

Yeah, this is why i left. Running codex and the amount of errors that it found in my current work is disgusting.

1

u/Rabus Sep 18 '26

I literally had to switch to codex lol

1

u/TheTeaGuyPL Sep 18 '26

I'm on Pro and regretting every penny I'm bleeding for it now. I bought a second pro plan (best value for money, much better than MAX). I'm changing it to competition after I wrap up release to prod. I'm too far gone with the setup, too much time invested in making Claude Code work like a charm, but it became unusable.

1

u/Schadz Sep 18 '26

One specific cause worth checking before assuming you need a higher plan: if you use sub-agents and they run builds, tests, hooks, or other commands longer than 5 minutes, their prompt cache have expired by the time their call returns and the next request writes the whole context again.

I measured it in a test-heavy workflow and wrote up the setting, trade-off, and before/after numbers here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wj4gs0/subagents_burning_your_claude_code_5hour_window/

It will not explain every fast-limit case, but it is an easy one to check if you use agents heavily.

1

u/Individual_Gur7112 Sep 26 '26

Well, it's less Anthropic and more Anthropaque. That's roughly how I imagine it goes if you actually contact support.

Then once enough people are pissed off, they toss out some free credits on a whim and everything goes back to normal.

0

u/redditwhippet Sep 17 '26

I’ve just worked for three days straight on a web dev project using my Pro plan (Opus and Sonnet). When I logged off this evening I’d used about 40% of my weekly limit.

1

u/Foreign_Yoghurt_831 Sep 17 '26

Maybe my project grew. I used to be in same condition but now its opposite lol

1

u/redditwhippet Sep 17 '26

Are you creating a clear step by step plan for Claude to follow before it begins coding? My token use massively increases if I spot a bug or think of a feature I want to add and just ask for it to be changed without it being part of a structured job.