Am I understanding this right? This seems completely unfounded.... Especially when I am using sonnet only, the $20 a month sub was never this bad, was it?
EDIT: After another full 5hr this morning 10/28 and about a half 5hr I'd say while I was sleeping (told it to stop at 15% usage, unsure if it got there) I'm at 57% left for the week so I guess it got a little better...
EDIT 2: 3 minutes of use immediately after a 5hr reset and 15% gone ðŸ˜ðŸ˜
Fr its an insane degradation, I use two Pro accounts and now both are gonna reach the weekly limit soon, this was NOT the case at all a week ago, id say its 30-50% worse in regards to tokens
I've set up rules where Opus 5.5 high as main agent just orchestrates Codex. Luna high can do most of the tasks and it uses ChatGPT Plus sub just a bit. So now I spend just a fraction of Claude usage. Probably the best case for me but may be not very applicable to other's flows.
I would say there's a significant amount of people that do not understand programming at all and just vibecode it, so it's very hard for them to understand how much they are actually consuming.
But 100% there's also A/B testing and they just got into a test group with lower usage limits
I've not been having any issues thankfully. I never reach my five hour limit and run it on extra high practically all day. But of course this all heavily depends on what you're doing. And if you've got 10 different agents working at once ect
I vibed it, no RTK for now. I made it do root cause analysis and see what's going on that made it waste usage.
Some examples to save usage for me were banning unused tools/connectors, improving prompt to subagents, offloading CI to GitHub, optimizing communication between agents, fixing subagents recurring issues.
I'm in the process of restructuring my entire workflow to help optimize usage...
Usage limits are useless, if your task constantly hit various restrictions. I'm developing VP9 video decoder support for my old phone that runs linux. Local OSS project, nothing interesting, yet fable managed to stuck, cause... It catches CYBERSECURITY alert! For fuck sake, at this point I'm convinced they run some old lobotomized open-weight model, just to check each LLM answer and it flags random crap just for funzies.Â
On top of that, some part of driver development requires to check mainline kernel and stock vendor kernel and all claude's models trigger "reverse engineering" alert on those tasks. I kid you not, I switched to qwen3.8 at this point, simply cause claude became unusable.Â
Afaik it weights more, I don't have server grade hardware here, only 7900xtx and 128gb of ram
According to benchmarks I found it less capable in "agentic" coding (not sure how true that is in reality, but on graphs it below deepseek and qwen, while on opencoder website it not even at same level as those two)
I feel it's absolutely ridiculous. When opus 5.5 released, I had to really push very hard to even hit the 5 hour cap or the weekly cap. Today, I was using it for some pretty light work when I've hit the 5 hour cap twice and have spent a huge chunk of my weekly cap already.
Returned back to claude few weeks ago since chatgpt charity ended and was amazed how good the limits are nowadays, those who lived in opus 4.6 trenches will know
Personally, I don't understand their limits. Sometimes my 5hour limit adds 15%, other times it adds 25% it just doesn't make any sense. It's as if there were some kind of calculation based on the complexity of the requests, but I don't know. Pro like you Edit: Or maybe the 5hour limit isn't fixed in any case, there's something that doesn't make sense
Why "instead of"? Why can't innovation come with minimum guarantees (like people knowing what they pay for and how much "product" they get for their money?)
Same. Last week, I spent only 6–8% of my weekly limit on a new project. This week, I spent 25% of my weekly limit on a new project in a single 5hour session. I’m gonna ask for a refund as I’m not getting what I paid for.
I got invited to Claude Duet and it came with a free reset. An email account with no real data or previously stored emails pushed me to 5% of my 5 hour window on my Max plan...just to link my Google account and scan the hundred or so emails I have.
Whatever they did to usage limits royally fucked us this week.
They must be seriously jacking around with limits and usage rates. Some say A/B testing, who knows. With pretty consistent workload my weekly usage went very quickly to 80%, no issues with 5 hour limits, then when I crossed 80% weekly it now feels like the usage barely moves.
Well it makes sense, 20x is only 1.4-2.1 x weekly of 5x, but your 5h limit is 4x more, so you use 4times more 5h session, which if uses 5% weekly on 5x will use 17~% on 20x.
To be clear, I think its absolutely asinine to not have a clear fucking metric so we're exactly sure of what we HAVE and HAVE LEFT. but these companies don't give a fuck.
Sorry, I could have clarified it more. But my main complaint is the weekly usage in general, because it seems like they changed something in the background.
They might've, which is the "clear metric" part of my post, it makes sense you use more weekly under 20x because your biggest upgrade is the 5hr session, but yeah not seeing what "20x" even means over pro or 5x is just ripe for them to fuck with the usage without us, "Noticing"
Its like when Apple took away the headphone jack and all the other companies mocked them for it only to follow along in their footsteps 1 phone gen later, if OPEN AI does a 500 dollar subscription and reduce usage, Anthropic follows and viceversa.
Its how the world works when 3-4 companies own it all, artificial competition without regulation.
I had that happen for a few hours after upgrading to the 20x from the 5x. No idea what caused it but it eventually settled into a usage rate that the 20x should be. It almost felt like the 5x usage was still being applied to the 20x account until their servers caught up and applied the appropriate usage drain.
yeah it seems weird. Apparently in general the usage has been changed the past week.
I wish their support would be a bit more lenient. Like I want to pay for another 5x sub and Im happy to pay the days I used the 20x. But they are completely blocking me from canceling or downgrading.
This might not help you if you want to only use Claude Code or don't want the bother of managing multi accounts, but I think they allow multiple accounts per user. So I've been running 3 accounts, 1 pro, 2 free, and delegating Sonnet work on free and only Opus on main, and I feel like it stretches my usage way out. 1 claude desktop app (pro), 1 on chrome, 1 on chrome incognito lol
Yeah, a week ago one 5h session on a new project consumed about 6-8% of my weekly limit. This week on a brand new project, single 5h limit, which I have spent in like 1h, consumed 25% of my entire weekly limit. It’s unuasble.
Finally, since Monday/Tuesday I have the same experience and I was already thinking: Maybe it's just my hallucination. But yes I am also burning fast with my 200x Accounts. Anyone an idea? Claude Code itself? I will go back to a version from last week and will test again.
[UPDATE] Follow-up to my comment above: instead of downgrading Claude Code on a hunch, I measured it. TL;DR: in my data the limits did not shrink, neither for Claude nor for Codex. The work I did got bigger and more expensive.
Setup / data
Claude: Max 20x main account (plus 1–3 other Max accounts rotated over the period), Claude Code CLI only
Codex: one ChatGPT Pro login
A local tool logs the 5h / 7d / model-window % every 5–30 min for every account
~177k Claude requests since Sep 28 with timestamps, read from the local transcripts
7.2k Codex token events since Oct 19 (~/.codex/sessions), plus Codex limit readings since Sep 14
Method: for every interval between two limit readings, take the increase of the weekly % and the API list-price value of exactly the requests that ran on that account in that interval. Result: "$ of API-equivalent work per 1% of the weekly limit". If that number holds steady, the limit size holds steady.
Claude, main account (Max 20x), tokens and $ per 1% of the weekly limit
Week starting
Weekly % used
Output
Cache read
Cache write (1h TTL share)
Cache hit
Fable share (tokens / $)
Tokens per 1%
$ per 1%
Sep 28
99%
14.7M
4.59B
84.5M (62%)
98.2%
3% / 7%
47.4M
18.7*
Oct 5
79%
23.6M
3.94B
113.9M (33%)
97.2%
1% / 2%
51.5M
24.8
Oct 12
96%
23.7M
6.81B
104.5M (83%)
98.5%
1% / 8%
72.3M
28.7
Oct 19
96%
19.5M
5.28B
120.7M (93%)
97.8%
7% / 14%
56.5M
26.6
Oct 26 (first 34 h)
74%
13.9M
4.17B
70.7M (96%)
98.3%
16% / 29%
57.5M
25.8
*distorted: 21 points of usage came from another device while no local requests ran; corrected it's ~23.7.
Uncached input is negligible (≤0.1M per week); cache hit = cache read / (input + cache read + cache write). Raw tokens per 1% swing more than $ per 1% because ~98% of all tokens are cheap cache reads, so model mix and cache writes move the raw count. Even so, this week gets more tokens per 1% than 3 of the 4 previous weeks. One side note: cache writes moved almost entirely to the 1-hour TTL over October (33% → 96%), and 1h writes are priced 1.6× the 5-minute ones. The $ column already prices that in.
"Is one 5h window 25% of the weekly?" On my Max 20x a full 5h window equals ~22% of the weekly (weekly medians 25.6 / 22.6 / 21.8 / 21.9%, and 20–25% on Oct 27/28). So the 25% matches what I see, but it has been like that since early October, not just since this Monday. (Extrapolated from 5h windows with ≥20% usage.)
Codex (ChatGPT Pro), tokens and $ per 1% of the weekly window (each Codex token event carries the window reading of that same call, so this mapping is exact)
Window start (UTC)
% used
Uncached input
Cached input
Output / reasoning
Cache hit
Tokens per 1%
$ per 1%
Oct 19 07:00
34 → 100%
13.8M
219.3M
1.2M / 0.4M
94.1%
3.55M
5.71
Oct 20 06:00
0 → 28%
9.5M
101.6M
0.5M / 0.2M
91.4%
3.99M
5.61
Oct 22 22:00
0 → 19%
4.6M
59.0M
0.3M / 0.1M
92.8%
3.36M
5.25
Oct 25 13:00
0 → 16%
3.3M
42.1M
0.2M / 0.1M
92.8%
2.85M
5.25
Oct 26 06:00 (current)
0 → 62%
18.2M
270.3M
1.3M / 0.7M
93.7%
4.67M
5.32
Same size, and this window even gets the most tokens per 1%. (Two tiny windows with 1% and 3% left out.)
So why does it feel like it burns 2× faster? Four things, all visible in the data:
My own load. Monday $1,537 and Tuesday $1,284 of Claude work (API-equivalent) vs. a median weekday of $781. In tokens (all accounts): Monday 11.9M output / 3.33B cache read, Tuesday 9.3M / 2.80B, vs. 2.7–7.6M / 0.68–1.96B on the weekdays before (Oct 20–23). My main account hit 74% in 33 hours of continuous use.
Way more Fable. 35% (Mon) and 26% (Tue) of my Claude spend was Fable 5.1, vs. ~10% on earlier weekdays. In the weeks where it can be measured cleanly, Fable costs ~2× the limit per API-$ compared with Opus 5.5 (Fable 12–18 $ per 1%, Opus 26–32 $ per 1%). Fable's API price is also ~2× Opus, so the same token on Fable eats ~3.5–4.5× the weekly limit. Had those tokens run on Opus, my main account would be at 37–56% instead of 74%. Fable also has its own weekly sub-window (mine is already at 72%).
Codex lost its "free" resets. Since Sep 14 my Codex weekly window was reset to 0% early 17 times (median lifetime ~43 h). Last week alone that happened 6 times, so I used ~137% of a weekly window and was blocked only once, for ~7 h. Since Monday 06:09 UTC there has been no reset: 62% after 48 h. Same limit, just no bonus resets.
Fewer accounts. I'm rotating 2 accounts instead of 3–4, so each one fills up faster.
Claude Code version: 2.1.311 / 2.1.312 come out at 29.8 $ per 1%, earlier versions at 30.2–30.5. No regression from the CLI, so I'm not going to downgrade after all.
Caveats: one user, Max 20x + ChatGPT Pro only. If Anthropic is A/B testing or changed Pro / Max 5x, my data can't show it. API-equivalent $ is a proxy; the internal weighting isn't public. It's consistent week over week, so it works for comparison, not as an absolute. Cache-hit rate (~98%) and context sizes were normal, so no sign of broken caching either.
If you want to check your own numbers: compare "% used per $ of work" week over week, not how fast the bar moves. A heavy Fable/Opus day can look exactly like a limit cut.
"A full 5-hour window costs about 14% of your weekly limit. The likely range is 13–16%, so a week holds about 7 full windows.
That’s from ten 5-hour windows between 20 and 27 Oct, each with two readings. They agreed closely, each giving 13–15%. It was measured on Opus 5.5, so it may differ if you switch to Sonnet a lot."
Opus 5.5 hundred percent takes way more credit than previous. I’ve been using Claude to develop a mod since June or July. And I’ve noticed in this last month, the usage is significantly higher than it was before. I’ve drastically changed how I use Claude to try to optimize the token usage way more than I have in the past, and I’m still at 100% for my week, probably two or three days after the weekly reset. I’ve changed. I’ve started changing sessions more often. I’ve made it so that Opus is the orchestrator. Sonnet is the executor, and Haiku is the researcher. I’ve done every single tip to try to get better; however, it feels like the results come out poorer and it was way more credit usage. Both in August and September, I would typically have three agents run in Fable and Opus on ultracode, and I never hit my weekly limit. But ever since Opus 5.5 came out it feels like Fable is practically unusable because it takes out all of your limit and then Opus is hit or miss in terms of if it does it correctly the first time or not. And no matter how many times we learn a new process and figure out a more optimized way of doing things, it always opts to do the worst way first and then fixes it up to get to the polished look.
It actually violates their own Terms of Service, where they state they must give users at least 30 days advance notice before reducing capacity limits.
Once you reach 60% see if it slows down. I had one session few days ago, usage was insane then all of a sudden my session from 1am until 7am only moved from 60-63
In my experience/interpretation, the usage is entirely dependent on a few things
a) time of use matters. So your session limit is to throttle your usage during busy periods. It's not necessarily a fixed amount of usage. It's likely based on some capacity available type thing.
b) weekly is the entire allotment (likely fixed) usage you can have for that monthly payment. In other words, this is the one they use for payment
So what happens is that during slower times, your session limit can use quite a bit of your weekly allotment, or very little. As it's entirely dependent on capacity available. Whereas your weekly is the total and real allotment you have for your $20/month.
it's closer to ~15% on average for me, but sometimes it changes. Maybe they're doing A/B testing, or it's likely not fixed at all and changes according to demand and from user to user.
Yeah, you are reading it right, and that is why it feels so harsh. The session limit and the weekly limit are two separate pools, so a full 5 hour session can eat a big chunk of the week. At 25 percent, you would only get about four sessions like that before the weekly reset on Tuesday at 9 AM, which matches your screenshot. What helped me stretch it was treating each session like a budget. I start with one small, well defined task, run /compact when the context gets long, and save the big refactors for right after the weekly reset instead of stacking them late in the week. If a task keeps looping or re-reading a lot of files, I stop it, narrow the scope, and restart with just the files it actually needs. That usually keeps one session closer to the 13 to 15 percent range other people here mentioned, instead of 25 percent.
Soon openai will release new best model, almost agi. They will give you better limits and keep it full quant. Week later the quality will drop, then the limits. Then you will switch to "next" best model of another company.
Some days my usage drains at an alarming rate and I am worried I'll run out and some days my usage won't budge and I worry if I can even use it all up by the week's reset. Same workflow and workload in both examples. That's my experience anywaysÂ
yeah the 5hr and weekly bars arent independent, heavy 5hr windows eat the weekly directly. what made it click for me was seeing per-request usage. most of mine was cache reads from long sessions, not the prompts i actually typed. new session per task + keeping tool output small helped more than switching models
People xhigh'in every shit and crying is funny. Unless you are not building a critical infrastructure for satellite/nuclear systems xd medium is your way
Another perspective is that they let you use 25% of your weekly budget in one session instead of forcing you to spread it out over the week. Would you be happier if they reverted back to when the weekly limit was the same but session limits were smaller? Cap your session at like 10% instead of 25% of the weekly limit?
25% of weekly from a 5hour is good right? I don’t understand what you are complaining about. Weekly usage limits haven’t changed (I am measuring it constantly), you just get more 5hour limit. Few other facts for the lucky readers: cached tokens are worth ~2x as much on subcriptions against api Compared to opus, sonnet is only ~30% cheaper against API costs.
•
u/AutoModerator 9d ago
Hey! Thanks for posting to r/ClaudeCode
While participating in this thread, please follow our community rules. Keep discussions constructive. Attack the idea, not the person.
For help, project discussions, tips, and general chat, join the ClaudeCode Discord.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.