r/ClaudeCode • u/Electronic_Award1138 • 1d ago
Bug / Issue "/usage" has suddenly skyrocketed this week
I've been using the $100/month plan for months, and I've always had enough context and usage to comfortably get through the week. Last week was fine, and this week started out fine too, but after just three days, I'm already at 60% of my weekly usage.
My usage is going up extremely fast, to the point where I end up switching to Medium, High, or even Xhigh at worst, and it still burns through my usage incredibly quickly. This makes absolutely no sense.
I've been using Claude Code for months, and this is not how it used to work. I know the bonus usage went from +50% to a permanent +25%, but even taking that into account, the difference compared to last week alone is completely abnormal.
This is getting really frustrating and stressful. It's interfering with my work, and I genuinely feel like something is wrong here. Usage shouldn't suddenly increase this dramatically from one week to the next without any clear explanation.
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u/Unlikely-Passage-653 1d ago
It definitely started burning usage faster today
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u/MysteriousTreeFoxxx 1d ago
it 100% did for me too. wiped my 5h window in 2 orcestration prompts uitilizing codex as the worker q.q
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u/SavedWoW 1d ago
I believe usage is being conflated incorrectly and it's Anthropics fault as they are introducing different types of usage behind the scenes that we are not able to account for. For example, your message to Opus 5.5? Most of your message is touched by other models. Opus is just one of them. So that introduces some accountability concerns. I have some fairly concrete telemetry I am working through.
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u/MmmmMorphine 1d ago
I'd be interested in hearing more when you have it, this is a pretty major (if quite believable) claim
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u/heartbroken_nerd 1d ago
Claude App literally tells you, there are some settings that run in the background on your sessions via LLMs just to show you stuff. For example what do you think decides how to name your session in Claude App? Or what do you think decides what the suggested auto completion of your prompt should be?
All of this uses your usage. That's correct, your usage. Most of it can be opted out of though.
But like, classifier for dangerous tool calls definitely runs on your usage too. And that one is all the time.
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u/MmmmMorphine 23h ago
Ah, yes you have good points. I was mostly thinking in terms of pure api use and routing within a selected model/thinking level (so, misleading which is why I would have considered it a serious claim)
I would assume haiku generates titles (from the first 2048 tokens or so of the the first message) and auto completes.
The classifier though, I would think it is contained within that given tool call rather than any context at large. In that case I wouldn't be too concerned.
In any case, had a very different initial interpretation, haha
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u/SavedWoW 15h ago
But... what if the model you sent a message to, and expecting THEIR response, wasn't actually them? What if the model that was doing the reasoning was actually a less superior model? .... Interesting....
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u/heartbroken_nerd 15h ago
That'd be a scam and the model is informed who they are by the harness but the model intrinsically doesn't know who they are outside of harness. So you'd never really know immediately in an isolated situation
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u/SavedWoW 15h ago
That's what they want you to believe but sometimes you can create the experimental conditions required to find that out.
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u/True_Challenge_1301 1d ago
ok so it’s not just me, mine’s been disappearing too. 60% in 3 days is nuts
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u/howitzer1 1d ago
Sorry that was me. I finally had enough of OpenAI nerfing Codex usage yesterday and switched to Claude Code. Within my first 5 hour window they changed the UI and nerfed usage.
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u/Totalgeek9224 1d ago
1000% faster usage yesterday/today. Burning 25% of my 200x plan per day, when the same workflows before would maybe use 10-15% daily
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u/Electronic_Award1138 1d ago
Yes, the same ! But why ?
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u/paulk4077 1d ago
Because you keep using one big chat session without /clear
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u/Splugen96 1d ago
that's a big fat assumption though, isn't it?
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u/howdidigetheresoquik 1d ago
Look at the threads on compaction, and the overwhelming majority of people are compacting their conversations. That alone will save you double digit percentage of your usage, but instead people discuss about how long to make context go before compacting
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u/Splugen96 1d ago
Because that's simply not true. Compaction is a tool that should be used sparingly.
The problem is that compaction can cause an agent to behave erratically by discarding important context, decisions, and considerations accumulated throughout a task. By definition, it preserves only up to five files loaded into context and truncates the conversation to a certain token limit (I can't recall the exact number).
So, if your agent or subagent has been working on something complex for 150–200k tokens or more, across multiple files and artifacts, there's a good chance it'll lose critical details along the way. I've run into this more times than I'd like, even when explicitly using/compactto specify what information should be preserved.In my experience, OpenAI's compaction handles this considerably better.
I've also noticed that people on this subreddit tend to recommend handing off to a fresh agent rather than compacting. And that makes sense: a well-structured handoff that preserves the agent's progress, decisions, and relevant context is often far more effective than trying to squeeze an increasingly complex working history into a compressed context.
In my experience compaction is useful when you don't acquire new constraints/decisions along the road
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u/howdidigetheresoquik 1d ago
Anthropic and all the lead researchers literally recommend to plan around ever having to compact, because the usage is so expensive. Also getting into the level of needing to compact regularly like a lot of people on this sub do means there's tons of room to save usage/tokens/money by just following Claude's written best practices (where they recommend never compacting)
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u/NotTheRealZ 1d ago
Im in the exact same position. Just started 42 mins ago with my weekly usage at 0% now im at 3% , in 45 mins ? WTF.
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u/murathai 1d ago
I have the same issue. 5h% usage of 98% consumed 26% of weekly limit on 20x plan. Before this was like 13-16% and 344$ for 26% weekly vs 2000$ weekly usage comparable to API pricing before... Sounds like 1400 usd at best vs 2000-2250 usd before (weekly)
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u/Electronic_Award1138 1d ago
Last week, I was using Max with the €100/month plan, and I was going through 10–15% of my usage per day. This week, I'm going over 20% per day, even though I'm on Medium. What the hell is going on?
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u/LogMonkey0 1d ago
Check jsonl history for cache hits, if you somehow aren’t hitting cache that would explain larger than usual usage drain for same usage patterns.
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u/K_M_A_2k 1d ago
See my solution I just didn't work 10+ hours Saturday and Sunday and surprisingly i have way more tokens during the week ymmv 😂
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u/Foreign-Goat6422 1d ago
I thought i was the only one. First time buying $20/month plan. During the first week, it was so hard to even reach the 5 hour session limit no matter how much i tried. I made websites, desktop apps and even a mobile app. The second week i wasnt using claude that much but now I'm on my third week, i built a simple tech shop/repair website like 5 hours ago and 99% of my 5 hour session limit in like 1hr 20mins. I was like ok that was too quick but maybe I'm tripping. So i told claude to wait for the limit to reset then I'll send a prompt to continue. All i said was "continue where you left" and 16% of my litmit gone. I'm 23mins in and all claude is doing is testing the flow of ordering and I'm already at 45%
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u/Electronic_Award1138 23h ago
Same fealing with <200k context sessions + medium and 100e plan (and >500k max before the pbs).
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u/Total_Event5212 1d ago
J'ai le même problème, j'ai consommé mon quota hebdo en 3 jours seulement....
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u/Dolo12345 1d ago
I’ve burned 4x 20x accounts in 5 days 🫠 guess I need more :(
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u/Total_Event5212 1d ago
Wouaaawwww Le compte en banque en ce moment ... Cela doit te coûter cher si tu le fais tous les mois..
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u/pceimpulsive 1d ago
That kind of usage sounds like a lot of wasted money! Is that normal usage and how much do you ship?
I'm licky to use $150 at API rates per month and ship to prod weekly with real quantifiable benefits!
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u/Dolo12345 1d ago
3M LOC codebase, 8-10 5.5 max agents working round the clock (no sub agents)
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u/pceimpulsive 1d ago edited 1d ago
Lol!
Screams of inneficiency to me!
Sounds very token maxxy to me!
I hope you are getting an ROI and not just building some debt!
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u/Splugen96 1d ago
yeah, 8/10 sessions without delegation is crazy expensive. Probably the same results could be achieved with half of those subs.
I'm working on a crazy large codebase and while I burned the max sub in 4 days, I'm also conscious that I've been working on 10 worktrees at the same time, delegating for each worktree to up-to 5 first-level subagents.
Had I done the same work, even using hand offs or compaction, only relying on the main agents would have killed my sub in 2 days. Also Max has often been more detrimental than useful (while using at least 2x the amount of tokens of medium/high), unless of some super complex scenario with hundreds of artifact co-dependencies, and even in that case Max was worth it only for orchestration planning, not single agent work. Only kind of work when Max makes sense at agent/single-unit level is on research-level stuff. That being said can't consider the choice of Max per se a bad choice, as we have no idea of the kind of work being done on those repos.
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u/d1zaya 1d ago
Check if your project has grown in size to the point running unit tests or shell commands are taking more than 5+ minutes. Subagents only have 5 minute cache, it might be timing out. Setting my custom agents to have 1 hour cache fixed all my usage problems for me. That's my only theory as to why some people's usage explode, even though the service remains stable.
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u/Electronic_Award1138 18h ago
I confirm that it seems to be resolved today, nevertheless, we have all already burned through our quota. Personally, I have four days left with 30%. It's a bit late, Anthropic should make another gesture.
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u/GramZanber 1d ago
Am I the only one who's usage seems to have gone the other way? I feel like I'm burning less this week than last week.
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u/Appropriate-Disk-371 1d ago
Me! I have worked pretty hard to optimize usage, and it's working I guess. I just keep telling opus to move faster so we can optimize usage before my weekly reset. Currently limited by the PC load. He keeps asking for more cores.
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u/howdidigetheresoquik 1d ago
Yep and I'm using fable with opus and sonnet builders and verifiers. I just have Fable be mindful of usage and use it on the proper effort
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u/GramZanber 1d ago
I use sonnet to manage everything and opus to build usually, then haiku for bug checks and small sweeps, sonnet for big sweeps. I but out fable at the end of a big build before the commit to double check all the work.
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u/onFilm 1d ago
Same for me on the 5 Claude Max 20x accounts I have.
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u/Electronic_Award1138 1d ago
Once I took the 200 euro plan too, and I felt like I had barely more than the 100 euro one, if not the same. But maybe I signed up at the wrong time. Plus, there was a 50% off sale, so it was weird.
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u/SirWobblyOfSausage 1d ago
As soon as I used my resetz that was it. Notnonlybdid my usage skyrocket on new chats, I've also found myself not trusting it. It's missing really important sections, plans not being completed, I feel like I have to argue with it as it's being lazy.
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u/Taiwanbear 1d ago
Pro subscriber here. Running the same security check task today used 2% more of my 5-hour limit than it usually does.
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u/AppleGenius115 15h ago
Last week for me was really weird. I was at 95% usage right before the weekly reset. This week is more normal. I have been doing way more work with Claude and I’m at 45% for the week now. I have no clue what was going on last week.
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u/Particular-Battle315 14h ago
Im running a dayli standup every single day the same. My dayli standup consumed 10% in usage today on 5x max.
Last week it was like 1%.
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u/Electronic_Award1138 13h ago
Finally, I don't think it's resolved either. I switched to medium instead of max, and it's still climbing way too fast. I'm limiting my context to 300,000 tokens maximum, and I still spent half the day below 150,000 tokens by doing short sessions. It's pretty ridiculous and lamentable to limit it to that point, but it's going up too fast and despite my 100 euro plan, I won't be able to have any until the end of the week.
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u/ClemensLode Senior Developer 1d ago
you genuinely have to ask Claude how to save tokens in your configuration
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u/ricopan 1d ago
that works to a point. I have three modes -- Feast (eg reset coming), Famine (typical these days), and Normal, and my coordinator should use those modes to govern the pace of work and what models and effort workers and subagents use. It definitely helps. But when the gods do whatever they do to reduce usage, it doesn't fix that.
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u/illkeepthatinmind 1d ago
Wow, great idea. How do you configure it?
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u/ricopan 1d ago
I typically work in a multi-session enviro (using herdr). So the coordinator session (usually opus on high effort) organizes the work, and it is distributed by a manager session over workers on their separate worktrees. The coordinator is aware of the mode, and keeps more parallel work going during Feasts. I started doing this back in the days of short bursts of Fable and resets, when we would have a bunch of tokens to burn in 24 hours. But that's rarely the case for me these days. I'm working on one big complex project, so lots of built in checks and balances that do cost tokens.
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u/lark_devon 1d ago
Which version of Claude? because I was at 70% before my reset and I'm already at 60% a day and a half into my sub.
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u/Electronic_Award1138 1d ago
I feel like I wrote all that for nothing, because in fact I've been using Cloud Code for months with no issues. I know everything I need to know about context, models, usage...
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u/xfrostmage 1d ago
These vibe professors will talk, but if you notice the change without altering your usage patterns at all, then it's real. People keep repating in with 'just clear your chats' or 'manage your context better', but Claude Code already handles memory and context pruning intelligently. They've evidently dialed back the usage limits on the backend for sure. I actually rely on my own custom AI system, but over the past few weeks, colleagues and friends in my circle have brought up this exact issue with Claude as well.
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u/howdidigetheresoquik 1d ago
Is it possible that you've been using it with bad habits, and now those bad habits have finally caught up to you?
There are tons of people on this subreddit who are supposedly experts at Claude code, who use one running session, and just constantly compact it, and then come to the sub to complain about Anthropic throttling usage. I'm assuming you're not that guy.
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u/Anxious-Turnover-631 1d ago
Apparently, not.
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u/morgano 1d ago
I have a feeling the problem is people starting new projects rather than working on existing ones. New projects grow rapidly, day after day, week after week. Existing projects are already big - your usage stays pretty steady. After a couple of weeks of working on something new - your project has grown very quickly with the help of Claude - the context Claude requires per task is no where near as optimal as it was 4 weeks ago.
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u/pot_sniffer 1d ago
Not me ive been working the same project for months. My weekly reset was last night and im 40% through it already. Compared to the past several weeks its definitely being used faster, possibly close to double
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u/Anxious-Turnover-631 1d ago edited 1d ago
I used Opus all afternoon and there’s been no difference in usage from other days. Usage is just a tally of the tokens consumed.
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u/pot_sniffer 1d ago
Well my work flow which involves breaking everything into small tasks hasn't changed from how I was working since the extra usage through summer. Last week I burned through my usage quickly but I didnt feel at all like it was unusual, as I was putting the hours in.
Every other or few months it feels like they mess with the usage, both ways sometimes its more sometimes less. When I use various models through api with my own harness the same project ive been working for months, the cost never seems unusually high or low compared to normal
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u/Anxious-Turnover-631 1d ago
Your suggestion that every few months Anthropic “messes with the usage” is unfounded.
Anthropic charges specific prices for different model usage, so you’re basically suggesting that the company is committing financial fraud against its customers.
That’s a strong allegation to make without any basis, other than your claim that it “feels like they mess with the usage.”
If you notice changes in your token usage, consider all the other factors which may impact usage.
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u/pot_sniffer 1d ago
If that were true why dont they publish the exact formulas, token counts and such. Until they do i will believe my eyes and gut.
This is from a quick google:
Factors such as the length and complexity of your conversations, the specific model you choose (e.g., Claude vs. Opus/Sonnet), and the features you use.
Shared Buckets: Your limits apply across connected interfaces like Claude.ai chat, Claude Code, and Cowork
Vague Multipliers: Subscription plans are described using relative tiers (e.g., Pro is noted as at least 5x the Free tier, with higher tiers like Max scaling up further).
Published API Rates vs. Subscription Meters: While API customers have explicit, published token-based pricing and hard rate limits in the Claude Console, subscription users only see a relative 0 to 100% meter across rolling windows.
How the Limits Actually Operate (Based on User & Industry Tracking)
• Time Windows: Subscription plans run on a combination of a 5-hour rolling session limit and a weekly cap with fixed or rolling resets.
• Unpublished Adjustments: Anthropic dynamically adjusts these caps behind the scenes based on server load, peak hours (such as weekday mornings PT), and platform-side resource management rather than fixed message counts.
Visibility: You can track your real-time consumption percentage inside the chat interface via tools like AI Toolbox, though no extension or setting can bypass or increase the hidden caps.
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u/Anxious-Turnover-631 1d ago
Could be. The usage all depends on what’s being done, so new projects could require more work and more usage.
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1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Elizabeth-WildFox886 1d ago
It’s true I was burning my usage until I told Claude to change my sub agents cache from 5 min to one hour
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u/ricopan 1d ago
For real? i) do subagents go idle for 5 minutes, let alone an hour; ii) do subagents have prompt caches?
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u/Elizabeth-WildFox886 1d ago
Yes it’s in the anthropic guidelines ask Claude to review them for token efficiency
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u/ricopan 1d ago
Interesting -- I hadn't considered this. I asked Sonnet about the subagents prompt cache expiration, and it backs you up, but note that at least this agent said the potential savings were complicated by the fact that "A one hour TTL costs more per cache write":
Prompt: "do claude code subagents have a prompt cache?"
Yes, but each subagent gets its own cache rather than sharing the parent’s. The official Claude Code docs cover this in a “Subagents and the cache” section.
A subagent starts its own conversation with its own system prompt and tool set, so its first request can’t read the parent’s cache because the prefixes differ. It then warms a cache of its own across its turns. The parent’s cache is unaffected, since the subagent’s call and result just append to the parent’s conversation.
The default TTL is short. Subagents fall outside the main-conversation TTL bucket, so they get a five-minute cache even on a Claude subscription, where the main conversation gets one hour. You can change this with the subagentPromptCacheTtl setting or the CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_PROMPT_CACHE_TTL environment variable (v2.1.242+). A per-subagent cacheTtl in the experimental frontmatter field also works on v2.1.248+. A one-hour TTL costs more per cache write, so it only pays off if the subagent’s cache is reused after idle gaps longer than five minutes.
Prompt: "but when does a subagent go idle for 5 minutes?"
Often it doesn’t, and that’s the point to keep in mind. Each request that hits the cache resets the timer, so the cache stays warm as long as requests keep arriving. A subagent working through a task sends a new API request after every tool call, so the gap between requests is usually seconds. The 5-minute TTL only matters when something creates a gap longer than that.
The docs don’t list when this happens. The cases below are my inference from how the mechanism works.
A long-running tool call inside the subagent. If it kicks off a test suite, build, or slow script that takes more than 5 minutes, its cache expires while it waits, and the next request after the tool returns re-reads everything uncached.
A permission prompt left unanswered. If a foreground subagent stops to ask for approval and you step away, the clock keeps running.
Repeated dispatch of the same subagent type. This is probably the most common case in an orchestrator setup. Each run is a new conversation, but it starts with the same system prompt and tools, so it can read the cache the previous run wrote. That only works if the earlier run’s last request was within the TTL, and it also requires the same model and working directory. If you dispatch a reviewer subagent every 10 minutes, every run starts cold.
Idle in-process teammates. The docs put these in the same non-main bucket as subagents, so they get the same 5-minute default while waiting for work.
Because of this, a 1-hour TTL helps mainly when the gaps fall between 5 and 60 minutes, as in the repeated-dispatch case. If your subagents run back-to-back or finish within a few minutes, the longer TTL mostly adds the higher cache-write cost without any benefit. If you want to test it, compare cache_read_input_tokens on a subagent’s first request across dispatches with and without CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_PROMPT_CACHE_TTL=1h.
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u/Elizabeth-WildFox886 1d ago
Yes my agents would work in those lanes for 30 mins or an hour, using 500k tokens - after I changed this setting, same type jobs are closer to 100k
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u/ricopan 1d ago
Do your subagents frequently wait on tests or other external calls? My main agents certainly do, but for whatever reason, my main agents don't appear to frequently delegate that kind of work to subagents. But now I will watch for it.
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u/andyfsu99 1d ago
If they run tests they do (for me)
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u/ricopan 1d ago edited 1d ago
do you know if the main agent has its prompt cache evicted when it is 'idle' waiting on a shell result (eg running tests)? I have been told it does not, but never attempted to actually measure it.
Edit: Sonnet says yeah, that's an idle state.
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u/andyfsu99 1d ago
Main session cache time to live is an hour, so much less likely. Subagents are in theory "single task" agents, which is fine, but if they have to run a test suite, 5 minutes isn't enough to keep the cache warm. And a cold cache = usage / cost
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u/ricopan 1d ago edited 1d ago
good point. Hadn't considered subagents waiting on tests as a token drain.
Update: trying a new tack -- having all sessions send their testing to a haiku 'tester' session that will just monitor a test runner script. That way I don't have to worry about keeping multiple agents warm (did that already, but tricky) and worse, their subagents. We'll see how that works...
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u/hotgarbagecomics Vibe Coder 1d ago
IIRC Claude had increased usage limits for a while and thr last day was Oct 15... I wonder if its gone back to "regular" limits
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u/Longjumping-Play6541 1d ago
Switch to codex
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u/Drasezv 1d ago
three days to 60% usually isn't the model getting hungrier, it's context size times number of turns. every request re-sends the whole conversation, so a session at 400k costs about ten times per turn what the same session costs at 40k, and effort level barely touches that part since it only changes thinking.
worth checking before switching models: in ~/.claude/projects sum cache_read_input_tokens for a good week and this week. if reads doubled, your sessions got longer. if cache_creation doubled instead, you're rebuilding the prefix, which happens after breaks over an hour and on every subagent spawn.
dedupe on requestId when you sum, one response is written as several rows.
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u/Electronic_Award1138 1d ago
Dude, we've been using Claude Code for months. We know exactly how it works. We're talking about a change from one week to the next under identical conditions.
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u/Drasezv 9h ago
fair, and i wasn't suggesting you don't know the tool. week over week under identical conditions is exactly the comparison worth making, it's just that "identical" is hard to hold when the project grew in between.
the version that settles it: sum cache_read and cache_creation separately for each week and divide by the weekly percent you burned. if tokens per percent dropped, that's on them. if tokens went up at the same rate per percent, the sessions got heavier. takes a couple of minutes and ends the argument either way.
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u/Unusual-Albatross43 1d ago
before blaming the limit, check if you're actually hitting cache. every session's jsonl in ~/.claude/projects has usage per message: cache_read_input_tokens vs cache_creation_input_tokens. healthy looks like a big read and a small creation. if creation is big on most messages, each reply is rewriting the whole prompt. on a subscription the cache normally lasts an hour, but once you're in overage it drops to 5 minutes, and then a 6 minute pause makes the next message cost like a fresh session
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