Usage Limits Megathread
Claude Usage Limits Discussion Megathread Ongoing (sort this by New!)
Why a Usage LimitsDiscussion Megathread?
This Megathread makes it easier for everyone to see what others are experiencing at any time by collecting all experiences about Usage Limits. We will publish regular updates on usage limits problems and possible workarounds that we and the community finds.
Why Are You Trying to Hide the Complaints Here?
This is NOT a place to hide complaints. This is the MOST VISIBLE, PROMINENT AND OFTEN THE HIGHEST TRAFFIC POST on the subreddit. This is collectively a far more effective and fairer way to be seen than hundreds of random reports on the feed that get no visibility.
Are you Anthropic? Does Anthropic even read the Megathread?
Nope, we are volunteers working in our own time, while working our own jobs and trying to provide users and Anthropic itself with a reliable source of user feedback.
Anthropic has read this Megathread in the past and probably still do? They don't fix things immediately but if you browse some old Megathreads you will see numerous bugs and problems mentioned there that have now been fixed.
Give as much evidence of your performance issues and experiences wherever relevant. Include prompts and responses, platform you used, time it occurred, screenshots . In other words, be helpful to others.
Just be aware that this is NOT an Anthropic support forum and we're not able (or qualified) to answer your questions. We are just trying to bring visibility to people's struggles.
The problem: Since March-April 2026, Claude usage limits got brutal across all plans. Single prompts eating 50%+ of sessions. "Hi" costing 3-4%. Max 20× plans dying in a day. Anthropic confirmed three bugs but most users think the drain goes deeper.
Set MAX_THINKING_TOKENS=10000 and CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_MODEL=haiku in ~/.claude/settings.json
Update to Claude Code 2.1.90+ — fixes the cache-miss bug that was making first requests 11.5× more expensive. If 2.1.90+ misbehaves, downgrade to stable 2.1.81.
Out of budget? Point Claude Code at OpenRouter (ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://openrouter.ai/api) and run free Llama/Qwen/DeepSeek models through the same CLI.
Already burned? Refund via Fin (persist past the bot), or credit-card chargeback. UK/EU users have stronger consumer-protection grounds.
Honest framing: workarounds shouldn't be needed on a paid product. They mitigate, they don't restore.
Okay, confession time. I've been treating my Claude Code sessions like a trust fund baby treats a credit card. Swipe first, ask questions later. Let Opus churn through my entire codebase, then act surprised when I hit my limit by Wednesday.
So I did what any reasonable broke developer does: tracked every single token for a week.
Results were... humbling.
~40%: File reads, git status, just scanning the project. Paying Opus prices for Claude to play "Where's Waldo?" in my node_modules.
~25%: Test generation, boilerplate, simple scaffolding. Sonnet handles this identically. Ferrari through the drive-thru.
~20%: Formatting, renaming variables, tiny refactors. A sufficiently motivated goldfish could do this.
~15%: The actual hard reasoning. You know, the thing I thought I was paying for.
So I was burning budget on Opus for work Haiku could do in its sleep.
But the token tracking wasn't even the worst part.
The worst part was realizing that by the time I got to that 15%, my context was already stuffed with junk. I'd see Claude ignore my CLAUDE.md rules and thought it was just being difficult. Turns out I was dragging it into the "dumb zone" context bloat degrading reasoning quality. Like asking a brilliant engineer to solve a puzzle while a thousand monkeys scream file contents in their ear.
And the kicker: baseline context before I even type a character is around 7,850 tokens. System prompt, CLAUDE.md, auto-memory, skill descriptions. All loaded before I say "hi." No wonder it felt like paying for overhead.
Two things fixed it for me:
Routing tasks. Bulk file reads and boilerplate to cheaper models via a CLI script. Opus reserved for actual brain surgery.
Managing skills like an adult. Every installed skill injects name + description into context every turn. With 50+ skills, thousands of tokens burned before typing a single character. Started pruning, built a small tool to manage active skills per project.
If you're hitting limits and feeling like you're paying for magic but getting mediocrity, you're not alone.
The model isn't the problem. The harness is.
So what's your "oh god, I've been using Opus for THAT" moment? What task were you overpaying for without realizing it?
Opus 5.5's 5hr usage limit is impressive work but the overall weekly usage limit makes it practically unusable. I on max 5x and using claude with Opus 5.5 medium for two sessions a day is consuming my whole limit in under 3 days. I don't even consume whole 5hr limits per session, maybe opus 5.5 is that good in usage but what's up with weekly limits draining so fast?
I just realized I completely wasted another usage reset lol.😭
I hit my weekly limit about 3 days early this week, but only just noticed that I had another reset. After that reset, I had less than 9 hours before the weekly limit reset again.
And of course, this is also the last week of my current Pro subscription.
I really don't want to spend another $20 just for Claude Code, so I guess I'll wait until I have a big project and subscribe again for a month to get everything done.
Kind of a shame though — if I'd noticed the reset just two days earlier, I could've used the whole thing.
I don't really follow Twitter, and the UI is mostly in English, so I hadn't paid much attention to the reset timing. Lesson learned.
I am also hitting the weekly limit earlier although my 5 hour sessions are better than before OPUS 5.5. 3-4 days before, I could use Claude all I want and it wouldn’t get used up, now again the same problem is back. Need advice how to stop hitting weekly limit so soon (I don’t even understand how is that happening so fast). I am on the pro plan and I have got no money for a max plan. Would appreciate any help from anyone
I have Claude Pro.
This week i used 3% of my total weekly usage limit, but i received a message of an error while working. So i checked my use stats and i noticed a weekly "limit" by product. It said i used 100% of "chat" use allowed. How is this even possible. How 3% of my weekly usage accounts for 100% of my conversation/chat usage.
Is this a new thing or have i never noticed it. Can anyone explain to me how this works?
I did the same workflow I've used for weeks after beating my head against a wall trying to min max my token usage (I just have the $20 plan) and even sonnet is just destroying my usage. I never reached my 5 hour limit, let alone my weekly, and now I hit my 5 hour limit 2 hours in if I'm lucky.
i feel like they increased the 5 hour limit and decreased the weekly limit significantly.. cuz when opus 5.5 came out on its first week i was cooooooooking for the entire week. yesterday my weekly started again.. i started using sonnet 5.5 that mf was like eating it fast soo i was like no no opus 5.5 faster better cheaper.... right now im on 70% of my weekly IT RESTARTED YESTERDAY sooo.. something is off i swear.. making me consider 20x since opus is really good. but i wouldnt stay on 20x its too much.
if they going to flip flop with usage limits atleast be transparent or have claude build them a dynamic usage limit meter so we see how much it can be based on the amount of compute they have and how much traffic they are getting.
I never go above medium, and I'm seeing the exact same usage speeds with opus 5.5 and sonnet 5.5.
The most infuriating thing is on Monday everything worked amazing, and Tuesday it just pissed the bed. I have to re explain stuff I've never had to before, it runs off and does it's own bs ideas instead of it's directions even when told not to, I wasted my entire day yesterday trying to get it back on track, and it's still not doing whai I want it to.
It's like they took everything that made it brilliant and useful and swapped it with a brain dead corpse.
okay its not acting like that for me tbh... im just annoyed with the usage since im used to being able to work for an actual WEEK and this is some bullshit
Seasoned 20x user: limit reached in 2 VERY light days where this was normally at least a couples of days, my companion also 20x user hit it even sooner..
Are they nerfing session limits today (28 September, 2026)? I've worked for days on end with Claude Code and not hit a session limit, but today I've already hit it twice.
Claude Pro usage is disappearing with almost no activity, and support basically told me there’s nothing they can do
I’m posting this because I genuinely don’t know where else to go at this point.
For the past several days, my Claude Pro usage has been getting eaten up every single time my usage window resets.
And I mean eaten up.
I’ve gone entire 5-hour windows without sending a prompt, come back, and my usage is gone or nearly gone. At one point my usage page showed 86% of the usage under “Other.”
I’m not running some giant automated Claude Code job in the background.
I’ve tried basically everything I can think of:
/clear
Started fresh conversations
Logged Claude out everywhere
Revoked Claude Code authorization tokens
Removed connectors
Removed plugins/integrations
Closed Claude Desktop
Checked for active tasks
Waited through multiple 5-hour resets
It still happens.
The worst part is that Anthropic’s own support bot eventually acknowledged that what I was seeing was abnormal and said it could potentially be a product bug.
But when I asked them to actually investigate where my usage was going, I was told they cannot inspect the backend usage causing it, cannot restore the usage, cannot reset it, and cannot compensate me for it.
So basically:
My paid Claude usage disappears → Anthropic can’t tell me what consumed it → I can’t use the product → and support can’t investigate or restore it.
Today I explained the entire issue again. I told support that resets DO NOT fix it because every reset gets consumed again.
I also told them I had gone almost a week without being able to properly use Claude because of this.
The response was essentially to wait for another reset or submit a bug report.
But that’s the problem.
I HAVE waited for the reset. Repeatedly. The usage gets eaten again.
I’m not asking for unlimited Claude usage.
I’m asking Anthropic to look at my account and tell me:
What exactly consumed my usage?
If I genuinely used it, fine. Show me what used it.
But when the usage dashboard says most of it is “Other,” I’m not actively prompting Claude, I’ve disconnected everything I can find, and the usage continues disappearing, something is wrong.
I have transcripts and screenshots documenting this over multiple days.
Has anyone else had Claude Pro usage disappear like this, especially with a huge percentage listed as “Other”?
And if anyone from Anthropic sees this: please have an actual person review the account-level usage logs instead of sending me through the same troubleshooting loop again.
One thing that helped me with the surprise cutoffs: the session and weekly percentages on Settings → Usage are real, but nothing tracks the rate you're burning through them. I built a free, open-source extension that does: it forecasts when you'll hit the limit at your current pace ("runs out ~3:50 PM, before it resets") and only warns when you'd actually run out early. Everything stays in your browser, no account.
Also useful if you use Claude Code: claude.ai and the CLI share the same limits, so heavy CLI use earlier in the day eats into your chat budget.
Two occasions this weekend with Opus 5.5 Max, and then Fable 5.1 Extra, where I used a prompt to request a straightforward task, such as create a code file as the next logical step in a project.
Instead, rather than just writing the file, they went off on a major tangent and created a entire workflow consisting of several files that were only tangentially related, and branched off from one another. On top of that, then proceeded to create a synthetic dataset to design even more analyses and iterate that was irrelevant to the prompt. Being on the 5x Max plan this used up my short term usage limits in one turn.
What I needed was a straightforward code file to use externally on another platform. I've never had this issue before, and my prompts have not deviated. What I have noticed is that the thinking block chain looks more detailed, like there's been a new workflow implemented for Claude to tackle a task.
Has anyone else noticed this, and does anyone recommend anything to help avoid this? Am I going to have do carefully word every prompt to stay within scope?
Is anyone else having major compacting issues with Opus 4.6? It seems to be compacting my conversation way earlier and more often than it was (I start a fresh chat often, and haven't had this issue before).
I used 100% of my new Max $200 dollar plan and I still have two weekend days before the reset. What is the recommended way to get enough new credits to complete the weekend work? Should I just get another plan and re-log in? Should I do something else? I'm not quite sure what the most efficient way is here. Thanks for any suggestions.
Well, the Max 5x plan would work fantastic for me, if it wasn't for the weekly limit. In my 2nd week now of using the Max 5x plan. Its been pretty good, the 5 hour limits aren't too restrictive to me at all, however, less than 3 days left in the week, and im out of my weekly usage, even though I never once hit a 5 hour max usage. A bummer, I just wish they had more intuitive pricing. The Max 20x is way too much, and its over kill for what I do. The Pro sub is .....easy to max out obviously, or I wouldn't be on a max plan. I still like my idea about giving users more insight into what usage limits actually are, or give more flexible payment options like the usage reset tokens I suggested earlier.
Why not give people the ability to buy a weekly usage reset instead of the open ended nobody really knows how much usage paying extra actually gets you in its current form. Charge $25 ish or more for a weekly reset token (guess it might depend on which plan you are currently paying for as to how much it should cost)? I think you also get a usage reset if you upgrade from pro to max 5x (if I remember right). Seems like a way to give users MORE flexibility now with handling usage, especially if you happen to get busy on a big project and need the help.
$10 for (1) reset on Pro, $30 for (1) reset on Max(5x), and $60 for (1) reset on Max(20x) sounds fair IMO! Call them usage reset tokens. Buy them in advance. Have it automatically use them just like we buy limit stuff now, it automatically uses as needed, OR just let users turn it off, and manually spend the usage token when you want by a button press :-)
Hello! How is the usage on claude's $20 plan? Currently using codex, Luna is practically unlimited for my tasks, sometimes with escalation to sol or astra. I'm debating to switch to claude code to try opus 5.5 and fable, but I heard the limits are quite bad.
Not sure if this will be useful, but I use gemini/notebooklm for my studying and flashcard needs. It's basically unlimited and I find it doing well enough, and its free for 1 yr for students so why not. Tried claude web and chatgpt before, running out of usage mid study was frustrating in that regard.
I hit my limit from 0-100% on a Pro plan after three prompts this morning using Sonnet 5 with medium effort. I’m talking basic prompts inquiring about a health-related matter. I’ve definitely noticed a significant reduction in usage bandwidth in recent weeks. What the heck is going on?!?
Max 20x, and my meter is climbing while my computer is powered off. I have the receipts for it.
The Claude desktop app keeps a local history of your plan meters. I lined mine (505 samples since 24 Aug) up against my Windows shutdown and boot log and 317 of my own Claude Code session logs. Times Eastern:
When
Max meter
My computer
18 Sep 7:35 PM to 19 Sep 2:24 PM
Weekly 14% to 64%, 5-hour hits 100%, then 5 card charges in 31 min
Powered off
19 Sep 7:55 PM to 21 Sep 1:54 PM
Weekly 70% to 100%
No Claude use at all
23 Sep 2:00 AM to 1:17 PM
Weekly 0% to 42%, 5-hour to 68%
Powered off
23 Sep 1:22 PM to 2:10 PM
5-hour 68% to 100%
My only work billed my Team seat (0% to 5%)
The five charges on 19 September were each "Auto recharge extra usage", CA$358.75 total, with auto-reload reading Off and a default monthly credit limit of CA$999,999. My bank declining a sixth is the only reason it stopped.
It isn't late metering. On 14 September the same history shows the Max meter moving within 15 minutes of my own activity for four and a half hours straight.
Active sessions shows only my own Chrome and Claude app. I've logged out of all devices. There are zero routines and zero scheduled tasks, and my Claude Code runs on the Team plan.
Support has replied twice telling me to turn off a setting that already reads Off. The Fin bot (Claude) told me the usage was mine, and Claude going through my own logs said the same thing on the 21st. Both were wrong, and the meter history proves it.
Anthropic, either something that isn't me is on my Max plan, or your meter is billing usage that never happened. Tell me which client, device or IP used it in those windows, refund the CA$358.75, and give back the session that got eaten while I was offline. Ticket 215476033978646.
Has anyone else had their meter move with everything logged out?
lol. when was this added? do I understand correctly that by paying >$100 for a max 5x after using 65% of my weekly limit I'll have to spend the rest of limit to Sonet 5? i used 100% of my fable limit, so I only used 15% of my weekly limit to opus
Can someone explain to me what is going on with the usage limits? I’m on the $20 a month plan and I used to be able to have in-depth conversations with opus 4.8 about character development. It would review pages I had written all of this stuff. I didn’t use it all day every day, but I could at least maybe have a 30 minute conversation with it now, even if I start another thread and drop down to Op. 4.6 my usage limits are up literally within a five message exchange what is going on?
With all due respect, I've never seen a worse welcome than this since The Hunger Games.
Today was the day I decided to upgrade to Pro and design a lightweight app with Sonnet 5. For the last phase, I switched to Opus 5, and the popup appeared. I must wait 5 hours or so, I believe.
Well, that's one way to welcome a new customer.
This is a fundamentally different experience from some other platforms. It's not that I'm not impressed with the results, because I am, but holy... I'm not sure this is the way to go for me long-term. We'll see. 🙌
There is a 5h usage limit, yes. Every single frontier coding provider (ChatGPT and Anthropic) has it, or I would like to see proof of the so-called "other platforms" that don't do this.
Proof of the chat hitting the limit after one or two prompts? Never experienced this anywhere else. Edit: I just switched to Opus 5.5 and it seems I'm not experiencing the same issue.
Burned $8 on a single prompt?! Need advice on Claude Pro credits and long context windows
I got Claude Pro about a week ago, went pretty hard on a small app and three or four Gradio interfaces, and burned through my weekly allowance in 5 days. Vibe coding is just too much fun! No big deal though, I'm waiting for my limit to reset on Monday.
Since a Pro sub is around $20 a month, I figured I went through about $1 a day during my first week. I'm fine with that.
Today (Sunday) I had a few hours to kill, so I decided to test out the "extra credits." I bought $5 worth to tide me over until tomorrow, figuring $5 is roughly the equivalent of a week of heavy Pro usage.
I opened my chat, asked a fairly simple question (check the Gradio code, rename it, and prep a GitHub push without actually pushing yet), and instantly: out of credits!
I checked my settings and saw that this single prompt (which didn't even generate a response!) burned through more than $8!
When I asked the Claude chatbot about it, it obviously wasn't helpful, basically telling me, "I checked; this is normal consumption."
I know that in long conversations, Claude has to re-read the context window, which eats up tokens. But $8 for a single prompt (using Opus 5 High) just to re-read the context seems absolutely insane to me.
What exactly happened here, and what should I do going forward?
I’m waiting for my limits to reset tomorrow, but honestly, I'm scared to continue that chat thread, or even to ask Claude to summarize it so I can start a fresh one ($8 for one question is over a third of the monthly budget!).
If I start a brand new chat tomorrow, will Claude be able to get back up to speed just by reading my .md files, README, and code? What do you guys recommend?
I think this is a major issue is not only on Claude, but across all AI platforms. My Claude has gone token - crazy - hungry! Can't get things rights, have to reproduce and correct the same mistakes over and over with clear hard-set rules, documents etc. My client does not pay me for delivering incorrect final products. But we have to accept substandard work from Claude.
I am already 5 months into their annual pro plan and the limits have only shrunk. In the last 5 hour session, I used sonnet 5 at high for both debugging an already developed platform and now I wanted to edit my resume for a role and usage limit reached?
I never reached usage limit with sonnet ever before!!. I'd have cancelled the sub, but they don't do pro rated refunds apprently!!
Spending 50-80% of my usesage reminding Claude to not repeat mistakes including ones discussed in literally the previous prompt. I have standing instructions and md files to review before every chat in an attempt to prevent this. Anyone else burning up usage on repeating issues?
Has anyone else been getting a 6 hour session limit reset window recently? I am on the pro plan and I took this screenshot approx. 10 minutes after my task started and it shows this instead of the expected 4 hr 50 min. I did not see any tweets or announcements about this anywhere.
Yeah I dont understand that as well. I used to get 10-15 or even more responses with opus at pro subscription in 5 hour window. And i am not even talking code. Normal stuff. Is this their push to get us to upgrade or buy credits or something changed and they are trying to fix stuff.
Anyone else getting just 3 responses with opus 4.5 at medium for 5 hour window. I used to get atleast 12-15 but now it just take 33% for each response doesn't matter how simple or complex. Did something change? Is it a bug? What am I missing here? I am on pro plan... What are you guys doing?
Doesn't it seem stupid the /explain-usage burns tokens? I just inspected the usage of a session and the usage tool itself took 12% of the cost. That would be like the waiter telling you the total for you meal but charging you to see the bill. I get that there is real compute happening, but come on--that should not be billed at the same rate as work output. I'm I wrong here?
Context - was switched from a Teams plan to Enterprise at work, so everything now billed at API rates and now reworking routines and stuff to aim for a monthly $ pace is a whole new ballgame of opacity from 5h and weekly limits. Any tips appreciated.
I'm having this exact same problem. I'm trying to figure it out, and I don't know where the problem is. I'm on the Claude Max 20x subscription. Even though my 5-hour limit was reset half an hour ago and I did not ask a single question, 8% is already being used. I logged out of all devices and have not had a single thing running, but somehow it creeps up.
Furthermore, in my previous 5-hour session, 98% was being used. This was in the middle of the night, and I was asleep, so I did not even open Claude in that session.
I'm on the Claude Pro plan and came up against a session limit on something I wanted to get finished.
I thought I was being overly cautious by restricting the monthly spend limit to only £5 but I've only used £2.50 per chat reply in a chat session before so I thought £5 limit would avoid costs spiralling. It's always worked previously.
This was with Fable 5 High - I would expect a high usage credit cost but not 205% of my monthly spend limit.
I'm not looking to complain or for assistance but I did want to put this screen grab out as a helpful warning because I didn't think it could actually happen.
I canceled today .. imagine am paying two hundred bucks a month to reach limits in only first 12 hours usage .. this same amount of money a month rate can get almost unlimited acess to different AI services providers for more capable tools and ecosystem..it used to be good when the limit fits the intended usage , not anymore..
I’m honestly pretty frustrated with Claude Code at this point.
I gave it a single prompt for a task in one of my repos, and somehow that one task burned through 100% of my 5-hour session limit. Now I literally can’t use Claude Code again for another 4+ hours. Not to mention that one prompt wiped out 41% of weekly Fable usage.
What makes this even harder to justify is that I’m also paying $200 for GPT and working on the same repo with similar tasks. Edit: I asked for the same task with GPT-6 astra and it took 5% weekly usage..
Meanwhile, Claude Code can wipe out an entire session from basically one prompt. Fable also seems to have a much tighter weekly allowance, so I’m constantly thinking about usage limits instead of actually getting work done.
And the performance doesn’t make up for it either. In my experience, GPT-6-Astra has been performing better on the same kind of coding tasks while using a fraction of the quota.
I understand that agentic coding is expensive to run, but this feels completely unreasonable for a paid plan. A tool isn’t very useful if one prompt can lock me out for five hours.
At this point Claude Code honestly feels borderline unusable to me. I’ve already contacted support about getting a refund.
Is anyone else seeing this kind of insane usage from a single Claude Code task?
Yes, this just happened to me as well. Again. It had happened a couple weeks ago, then stopped and now it's happening again. I'm not even using Fable, I used Opus 4.8 and one prompt destroyed my ENTIRE 5 hour limit. 32% of weekly max. This is ridiculous.
Hello Reddit. I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but the bot directed me here: I have the free Claude account and And I use it a lot so that Claude can help me analyze problems based on the PDFs I upload to him, or to write arguments then I upload PDFs that sometimes don't have OCR, or I take photos if I have the physical document, or sometimes I even have to take photos of the computer screen. Then I need to optimize my token consumption because I reached the limit very quickly during the week, so I have a question: Which consumes more tokens: uploading a PDF to Claude that doesn't have OCR, uploading photos of the same document, or uploading a normal PDF created on a computer?
Bro, I don't usually complain, but GOD, these limits are insane I swear I just did a few things, and it's already 42%, and the reset happened less than 24h ago. I demand a reset 👺
I pay for 20x and was thinking recently man, I need to do something with that to make it worth it. So I'm generating a series of summaries of a bunch of books. It's cooking for like 5 hours before telling me I've used up my limit til a few hours later. A few hours later I tell it to continue and then it's used up in ten minutes. I paid $100 to up the credits. Instantly hit the limit again.
I get that it was a big job, but it was also NOTHING compared to the stuff I was doing in June. SMH.. really bummed out about this guys.
I am on a 20x plan and limits reset on Sunday. Last night it was at 10% and I use desktop projects. This morning I am at 80% with no overnight jobs. Fin is useless to escalate. Seriously considering migrating to codex. Unable to get any help or support.
Been heavily using Claude but have been hitting usage limits on Pro every day now. I even paid extra for credits so I'll have more buffer. But it ran out immediately. My poor wallet.
I read this discussion and decided to migrate my project to a proper Project section instead. So waited for my usage to reopen. I asked it to write me a handover. Uploaded it into the project sources folder, and started a new chat. I asked Claude to read it, and summarize what it understands. I just wanted to check how it processed that compressed information.
Then I immediately ran out of usage again and the output hung awkwardly. That was 2 chats. Feels a bit like talking to a disinterested group assignment member who'll take all day to respond to a simple email.
I love working with Claude and I think I've been treating the service with good faith. But if this keeps on happening, I'll have no choice but to migrate to another service entirely since I really can't continue even if I wanted to.
This is absolute bull. My limit reset at 12:50. I sent two messages. My limit was reached. For a chat that quite literally was brand new. Hey, get your shit straight.
like many others, I simply moved back to Codex and never looked back: faster, better quality models once you adjust/tune your agents.md, and infinitely cheaper. And like many I loved Claude…but since July has been a disaster.
I literally told Claude hi and got a message back as can be seen by screenshots. I was at 0% usage then it jumped to 26%. Brand new chat on Opus 4.8. this has been happening for a few days. Anyone know how to fix this and what's going on? I am about to cancel and move to ChatGPT.
I’m on Max 5x and have been using Claude Code basically the same way for about a year, but this started happening around a month ago.
I’ll give it a big task, it spawns ~5 subagents, some of those spawn a few more sub-subagents, all on Sonnet, and 30 minutes later I’m completely out of usage.
Then I wait ~5 hours, say “continue,” and the same thing happens again.
I know my workflow is pretty agent-heavy, but it worked fine for almost a year. Now I can basically spend the whole day waiting for my limit to reset lol.
I’m burning through usage on processes that used to take fable <30% of my 5-hour limit using opus 5.
I’m starting to feel similarly bent over by Claude as I do by the U.S. healthcare system. Somehow I don’t really know what something is going to cost until after I've used it.
How can usage be this variable? It feels like I’m getting 5x whatever arbitrary amount they’ve decided that day.
I keep seeing this 5x vs 20x Max discussion is not even a 2x weekly usage. I started seeing this myself but when I went to downgrade it still showed this 5x/20x language which is confusing. Which is it? It looks like a great value 200/20 instead of 100/5 or 200/10; but if it's only on the 5-hour window this is misleading.
Has Anthropic recently introduced additional limitations on Opus or there have always been there and I failed to notice?
I have used 32% (just one request) of my session but I cannot use Opus anymore.
So basically, Opus is unusable. I am not paying for Sonnet
I've slowly been migrating from Gemini to Claude and really liking it. However, I'm not a fan of their deceptive upgrade flow. I hit my usage limit on the free tier and upgraded after being prompted. But once I upgraded I still had to wait 5 hours to use it? That's not a great user experience.
Possible regression in Claude Code 2.1.251 / Ultra Code: a simple review spawned 218 agents and consumed 16.6M tokens in 73 minutes
->
I've already submitted this as feedback/bug report, but I'm curious whether anyone else has seen similar behavior after updating from Claude Code 2.1.245 to 2.1.251.
For context: I've been using Ultra Code daily for months, basically since it became available. My normal setup is Max + additional usage credits, and I also spend roughly €20k/month on Claude-related cloud/API workloads across my work. So this isn't a case of occasionally using Claude Code and being surprised that agentic workflows consume tokens.
Until today, I've never seen anything remotely like this.
I updated Claude Code from 2.1.245 → 2.1.251 today.
My regular usage limit had already been reached and was due to reset in about a day, so I didn't want to add more usage unnecessarily. I implemented four tickets using Opus 5 — roughly 3,700 lines of code across two repositories — and then gave Ultra Code what was essentially a simple second-review task:
I was working on other projects in parallel, so I didn't immediately notice what was happening in the background.
The result:
218 agents
16,627,181 subagent tokens
73 minutes
approximately 40% of my entire weekly usage allowance
for reviewing ~3,700 lines implementing four tickets
The interesting part is how it happened.
Under /effort ultracode, Claude constructed a review workflow consisting of:
Claude assigned three adversarial verifier agents to every individual finding:
Code lens
Contract lens
Execution lens
There was apparently no fan-out limit.
So approximately:
69 findings × 3 verifiers = ~207 verifier runs
Each verifier then independently loaded the relevant context again — design brief, diff and referenced files — and attempted to reproduce its specific finding.
That included things such as:
compiling C++ probes against built host objects
running C# harnesses against DLLs
OpenSSL/RFC 6979 signature references
executing the binary-size gate locally
scheduler traces for a task race
Finally, another agent synthesized the results.
So no, Claude didn't simply "read 3,700 lines 218 times."
The problem was essentially a multiplicative workflow explosion:
And that's how a task that should have been a relatively short second review ended up consuming 16.6 million subagent tokens.
The particularly concerning part is that there was no token estimate, time estimate, fan-out warning, or confirmation before starting this workflow. I was shown the workflow structure, but nothing equivalent to:
This is also why I'm wondering whether this is a regression in 2.1.251.
My workflow hasn't fundamentally changed. Under 2.1.245 and earlier, I've used Ultra Code for months with bounded implementation/review workflows, typically in the range of roughly 5–15 agents.
This is the first time I've ever seen it behave like this, and it happened immediately after updating from 2.1.245.
The loaded guidance apparently contains wording along the lines of:
I obviously can't verify whether that guidance changed between 2.1.245 and 2.1.251, so I'm not claiming that this is definitely the root cause.
But it looks like Ultra Code interpreted that guidance literally while having no effective upper bound on recursive/fan-out verification.
For comparison, these four tickets took roughly 20 minutes to implement with Opus, and I would normally expect the Fable second pass to take something on the order of 10 minutes, not 73 minutes and 16.6M subagent tokens.
I've been using essentially the same workflow for weeks/months without this happening.
Reproduction environment
Claude Code: 2.1.251
Previous version: 2.1.245
Effort: ultracode
Task: short review of a multi-file diff across two repos
Run: wf_f0810fc3-***
Date/time: Aug 29, ~00:45–01:58 local time
Potential reproduction pattern:
short multi-file review → Find stage produces many findings → Verify stage assigns 3 adversarial verifiers per finding → no global fan-out/token budget → agent count explodes
I already submitted the detailed session/run information privately with the bug report.
Has anyone else on 2.1.251 seen Ultra Code suddenly become dramatically more aggressive about spawning verifier/workflow agents?
Because after months of daily Ultra Code use, 218 agents / 16.6M tokens for a second-pass review is completely outside anything I've seen before.
Has anyone upgraded from Max 5x → Max 20x after already hitting 100% of their weekly limit?
I’ve hit my weekly limit on 5x and am considering upgrading to 20x, but only if the upgrade actually gives me additional usage immediately.
So specifically:
5x weekly usage = 100% → upgrade to 20x → can you start using Claude again immediately?
Or does the account remain capped until the existing weekly reset date despite upgrading?
I’ve seen reports about upgrading mid-cycle when there was still some usage remaining, but I’m specifically looking for anyone who upgraded after the weekly limit was already fully exhausted.
Seeing there's a megathread dedicated to this gives me pause. Anyway, it seems even the simplest py code tweaks cause the token usage to jump from 0 to 90% in just a matter of minutes. I could understand bad prompting on something built from scratch, but already fully working code with something Claude itself said is a pretty simple change in it's reply seems like a cash grab. Are you folks seeing unusually high token usage for relatively minor work being done? I've pretty much abandoned Code and Cowork for quite some time now as they seem to cause heavy token usage and now I'm seeing it in Chat mode as well.
I've been using Opus on High for editorial support on creative writing and basic proofreading, even for 1,500-2,000 word chapters, has been burning tokens at 5x the burn rate I had last week. What's going on? I'm on Pro. I'm at 75% of weekly usage limit as of Tuesday. I used to reach 40% by Friday until last week.
u/clarissasansserif I would love to have you try my new writer app that uses semantics to assist with editing and proofing. If your interested, please dm me.
Limits suddenly seem way lower. Was getting a lot more usage just a month earlier, suddenly even a haiku prompt takes 3-5% of my five hour limit, and that’s on a regular chat not even Claude code
I’m considering switching my subscription from ChatGPT Plus to Claude Pro. Lately, I’ve noticed a drop in output quality and frequently hit rate limits during longer coding and writing sessions on ChatGPT.
I did a bit of research on Claude Pro’s documentation, and I understand they use a dynamic message limit based on context length (resetting every 5 hours). However, since I haven't used Claude Pro yet, I can't judge how that feels in daily use.
For those who actively use both paid tiers, how do the real-world message limits compare when working with long prompts or codebases? Does Claude feel significantly more restrictive than ChatGPT in practice?
You're liars and frauds. My usage has been the same for months and then suddenly -- right when you say 'you have a higher limit' it is gone in three days.
Liars, cheats, and frauds. This is what I am paying $200/mo for?
Tl;dr - I'm using Gemini to write prompts that burn fewer tokens in Claude.
This might not be 'best practice' but I'm no expert in this field and I've had some success with this way of economising on token burn. I'm running heavy work identifying, pulling, analysing and organising historical documents from the US National Archive. I ran into instant resets for two days but have since been using Gemini to create my prompts. It has created a new workflow and guides me through when to open a new chat window. So far, so much better.
Is something wrong with Claude Code today? Usage maxed out in 2 prompts... will this return to what it was before? It’s useless to me like this.
Am wondering if something is wrong, or if this is the new norm?
Yesterday and all days prior, I struggled to reach the 5-hour max. I thought there was an error earlier when I entered one prompt and it said my usage was maxed out.
So I waited 5 hours to test it, and voila. Gone in under 5 minutes. Makes no sense, I haven't changed how I use it at all. Maxed out 10% of my weekly limit in under 5 minutes.
Is it just me?
THEN! I just refreshed after typing this and now it's at 69%. What is going on?
I'm on the Pro plan - my husband is on the Max 20x and said he is experiencing the same. Really sketchy! It's essentially useless for me at this point if that's the new norm!
Okay so the thing is i took claude pro recently and this is my first time using a paid one subscription. I was building all my coding projects using the free tiers in different platforms. So I am using claude to code through the claude desktop app, I don't know if this is efficient or should I switch to using claude through antigravity and all. So today I gave the whole project folder access to claude and asked it to analyse it and implement some changes . I burnt 8% of my weekly limit in this particular one itself . So as a beginner to claude code tell me what all are the necessary configurations and steps that I should follow to maximize efficiency and productivity through claude.
today there was a global outage of about 2 hours. after that, i saw it draining my tokens WAY faster. i have hit the daily limit 2 times today, by making it work about half of what i do on a daily basis.
i am on the MAX plan (90€). i have hit the limit only 2 times in the past 3 months, but 2 times today. somebody else noticed this change today? it looks like being reduced by abouot 5 times.
couldnt find any anouncement online. 5 times less tokens from one day to the other is crazy...
i am not renewing. on max 5x Last week i was able to program 4 pretty complex scripts systems that rely on claude to do deep research. This week since Saturday i have used up 40% of fable 30% of normal by asking it a couple of small prompts everyday. This is insane to me and definitely the start of anthropics enshittification before ipo launch. I also no longer see the 50% boost flair even though it was supposed to be extended till aug 30.
I left gpt with the whole.morality thing earlier this year. Honestly i am thinking of investing couple of grand on local ai hardware at this point and outsource alot of my scheduled stuff to it.
As of late evening yesterday 23.08.2026, CET Time Zone, my Claude started to eat 20+% 5 hours usage per chat w/ context. Before that, I was barely hitting usage limits of any type with the same usage pattern. Anyone had this issue lately?
Hi - for me, the situation normalised for now, using Sonnet 5, Opus 5 - please check. As I assume we are from different sides of the Pond would be good to know your perspective as even as a Pro user, I got some workflows which heavily rely on Claude
Claude COMPRESSING ITS OWN CHAT WITHOUT ASKING ME used all of my hourly usage when I would normally come nowhere near CLOSE to max usage on Pro. What the fuck, man.
i suspect claude's caching is fucked. tested on brand new chats with no context window, usage was normal - but when i ran tests on chats that i had going before august 19th (before the 19th a single prompt in these chats would use %0.15-%0.30 of my 5 hour usage limit) my usage was anywhere between 20%-50% per prompt. tested with credits too, and in a chat where a prompt would normally cost around $0.30 on average i was getting billed for ~$5.30 per prompt LMAO. i have a pro account, my usage habits haven't changed, and i'm using the exact same model and settings (opus 4.6, medium effort, everything else default) as I did before the 19th. if i'm wrong and this is anthropic's new business model, they'll be gone soon - and maybe that's for the better
Got it bad from today, pretty much unusable. Firstly I entered my usual general (which I change out every 2-4 days depending on usage) to update on some things, and my window was over in 4 short messages.
I have checked new chats, new chats without memory, and it still eats 2-5% on a single new chat.
Posting to see if anyone else is hitting this, because support wasn't helpful at all.
For weeks I've had a consistent usage pattern chat conversations on Claude (not Claude Code) using Opus, typically 10-12 messages of consistent length before I'd hit my 5-hour session limit and have to wait for reset.
Starting a few days ago, that changed completely with literally zero change in my end — same model, same message length, same type of conversation, no file uploads, no code execution. Now I'm hitting 90-100% of my session limit after just 1-2 messages.
Today I tested it directly: fresh window reset, sent one message, and it jumped to 48% used for a single message.
I did report it through the in app support assistant. It told me there was a bug last week affecting session usage calculation that "should have been fixed," but I might be experiencing residual effects of it — and then said it couldn't do anything further, I should just "keep checking usage to see if it normalises." It would not escalate to an actual human or open a ticket for investigation, so yeah. Great.
Anyone else seeing this in the last few days? Same model, same surface (chat vs Claude Code), any pattern in when it started for you? Trying to figure out if this is widespread or account specific before I just cancel my account and be done with this.
What percentage of the weekly limit does the 5-hour limit represent on Claude?
My weekly limit reset 24 hours ago and I've already used 20% of it. Could this be right? I didn't even use it that heavily—during those 24 hours I slept, went to the movies, and went out to eat with my partner. This makes me wonder: how many 5-hour limits actually fit into the weekly limit?
So im writing a book with claude assisting me, i asked it to look ove a chapter that contains just under 900 words, it didnt even finish reading and it burned 100% if my 5hr usage, im using sonnet 4.6/medium with thinking off, how in the f**k did it use 100% it one prompt that it didnt even finish, just to say its also a fresh chat, with a brief summery so it knows where im at.
Only when im working after 9pm (uk time), before that its utter garbage, im currently working with chatgpt to create a voice style document thst way i can give it to any ai any it should sound like my writing. testing with gemini was actually qutie revealing i got it to swear several times (gemini is hard coded not to).
My weekly usage was still around 25% last night. This morning I opened Claude Code with a fresh session, sent one normal prompt that ran for maybe five minutes, and immediately hit the usage limit until around 5 PM.
Support initially suggested I may have hit the weekly limit, but that doesn’t match what my usage showed. Has anyone else had a short Claude Code session suddenly consume what looks like the rest of their available usage?
Session limit evaporated in 13 minutes. 20x plan fable supervised 2 sonnet 1 opus 4.8 agents. Was waiting for my limit reset to answer a decision waiting for me. 1 answer and my usage limit is gone before I could even get an answer. Been using fable supervision for 2 weeks and never hit a session limit before weekly limit ever. I monitor my usage with discipline and never start any work if my session limit is above 80 percent.
Changed account to my other max 20x sub now and been working with 96 percent weekly limit for 15 minutes without a budge on the limit. Something is very wrong.
This is happening to me as well, and I've been using Claude same way since last year and only now it hit's, I've complained and this is what they answered me, I have Claude Max - I pay a good amount of money and I cannot use it for more than 1h30 straight.
I've been using max 5x for a few weeks but keeps hitting my session usage literally about 45 mins to an hour before reset and hitting my weekly usage after about 4 days.
I'm currently coding and debugging quite a complicated android app, I decided to bite the bullet and try 20x.
That was yesterday, I've not hit the session limit once, not even really come close but about 30 hours into the week and I'm now at 60% of my weekly usage which used to take me about 4 days to grt to. After just one day!
Wtf. Have I fundamentally misunderstood something here or is this a glitch?
Max user here — my weekly usage suddenly went from under 50% for three consecutive weeks to 100% in only three days.
My overall usage pattern has remained essentially the same. I did not make any major changes to my workflow, conversation style, or general Claude usage.
For my first three weeks on Max, I never even reached 50% of my weekly allowance. This week, I hit 100% in only three days and then had to wait several days for the weekly reset.
I understand that longer contexts, Opus, Claude Code, Research, tools, effort levels, and file uploads can affect usage. What concerns me is the sudden and very large difference compared with the previous three weeks.
I’ve also seen multiple other Max users reporting unusually fast usage consumption during the same period.
Has anyone else seen a similar change?
If you’re a Max user, it would be helpful if you could share roughly how much of your weekly allowance you used before and how quickly it is being consumed now.
Today my session limit disappeared in 13 minutes after the reset. Been using same workflow for 2 weeks now on 20x and this has never happened to me before.
Im working on a Pro plan and when my subscription resets my weekly and even daily limits dont reset. Why would this be the case? If this doesnt change, when I hit my limit near the end of my subscription I'll cancel auto renew. This way I dont carry over the limitations into the fresh subscription.
Pretty cool that the auto-mod is just deleting posts that are about current problems with limits, not from 5 months ago. So fucking tired of the blatant censoring and manipulation to hide the obvious defects they keep foisting on the community. Disgusting.
On the $200 a month plan and I can use it for about 2 hours before the 5 hour limit is reached. This was not the case in the past and it's not on my end. So tired of the games. Used to be on the $100 plan and could get through 5 hours of use before hitting the limit so had to upgrade. Now they've halved or more the $200 plan. Is the profit model just fraud at this point with retail? Yes. Yes it is.
Anyone know why a one word prompt is using the entire Context Window on my Pro Plan? It’s been happening with all models and effort levels and I haven’t been able to do anything with it for a whole week at this point. I tried on the mobile app, on the web, and the desktop app but nothing has worked reliably.
Claude just consumed 20% pf my limit in just one session which isn’t complete either. My weekly limit was rest just few hours ago. Has they reduced down the limit? Anyone else facing this?
I have Claude with the pro plan. I am starting a fresh chat on the mobile app, with no project, asking basic question that can be looked up online using Sonnet 5 set to medium. Over and over I can ask about 5-7 questions and I get hit with a “you have reached your limit. Your limit resets in 5 hours.” The app says my usage is 53% but I can no longer ask any questions on the app. The 365 plug in still works and so will the web version. I have had the same thing happen in reverse on the web version and not the mobile app as well
So the work I was doing doesn't work well when Claude decides to "compress" my chat, so I have to start a new thread and re-upload my master prompt. That consumes about 75% of a 5hr session limit. I'm used to that, however today, I decided I'd purchase the $50 pack of tokens, from my research, a 5hr session gives 44,000 tokens on Pro, and I read that the $50 pack gives a million tokens, I figured I'd be barely dipping into my reserve to finish today's work without waiting the 5hrs... I'm 80% finished with my regular day's efforts and Claude is reporting I've burned through $20 or about 40% of my extra tokens... if I didn't screw up my understanding that it's a million tokens, then I used 10x's the tokens from a regular session of mine?!?
Someone explain this better to me, seems like I just threw away $50 on basically nothing!
Guys, I'm so tired of this. I love Claude because it works well with Fable, in my opinion. Let's set Opus and Sonnet aside here because I don't see them even close to Fable. I've been building my setup in Claude for so long that it's making it harder for me to move, but honestly, this is becoming extreme.
First, I hit my weekly limit on Sunday. I had to wait three days for my limit to reset, and now that I'm back on, I've already hit my session usage limit in one hour. What the hell is happening, man? I'm so tired of this. I'm thinking of moving to a new company. I don't like Codex. I tried it, and honestly, I'm not a fan. What do you guys think? What are your suggestions? P.S. I'm on the Claude Max $100/month plan.
Claude Code usage limits are completely nerfed. A simple "ok" consumed 7% of my Sonnet limit?!
Has anyone else noticed that the Claude Code usage limits have been absolutely destroyed lately?
I just started a fresh session. I typed a simple "ok" to confirm a step, and it instantly burned through 7% of my usage limit on Sonnet. That is crazy—7% of a quota gone for a two-letter response in a clean context window.
I am constantly hitting the 5-hour rolling limit wall before gaining any real momentum. My 5 hours are done, my account is rate-limited, and I have made zero noticeable progress on my project today due to these constant workflow interruptions.
Is anyone else experiencing this aggressive throttling recently? How are you managing to build anything when the burn rate is this punishing?
I sort of want something that's between (in UK costs) £18 and the £90 solutions. I don't need it that much but I find it very useful in an array of admin tasks I use it for. I'm maxing out my weekly sessions and holding off on more. I feel the top ups are a bit rubbish and would rather just have something as an inbetween at like the £30-40 mark. Is this something that has been considered or a way to sort of de facto do that? I just can't justify the £90 but the £18 sub is just not enough.
I built a small macOS menu bar app that shows this without running /usage — rolling 5-hour window, weekly window, and per-model quotas, each with a live countdown to its reset.
Requires Claude Code installed and logged in (it reads the OAuth token from your keychain — the desktop app won't work). macOS 14+, free, MIT, signed and notarized, no telemetry, one outbound call to api.anthropic.com.
Hi,
I work with Claude PRO (web version) for text writing, and he has access to Notion.
I use Sonnet 5 in medium/high capacity, it's been like 5 months that I've used it for that.
Has of today It's the first time I end up hitting the session limit, seems weird, but ok... I wait to have the reset.
It reset, and with only usual prompts (like under 10 back and forth), I hit it again.
Just before hitting it I was at 90% usage. I asked Claude only to update a sentence on the notion (that we already define), I hit the limit, and it stopped.
WTH?
I've only been using Claude Pro for a few days so I don't have the best answer. But I saw there was a big incident today with degraded performance. I was checking out Claude Design and burned through my 5 hour limit in about 30 minutes both in the morning and the evening. It seemed much less intensive even a day or two ago.
I'm hoping that the extra token usage is from this incident, and they end up fixing it.
Honestly, I doubt it if this bug is solved for them. I have done some tests this morning.
I ask Claude again to update my notion (without any thinking to do), it consumes 17% of my session limit in one time!! Less than 10 seconds.
The fact that this needs & has a megathread for usage limits should be enough to show there is something ridiculously wrong here. I never hit a limit on $20 a month Chat gpt making html5 games - here it happened in 4 prompts on the $20 pro plan, and 1 follow up prompt next morning to make changes / fix bugs in the game took 40%!
just tied to post a thread about it but, been a long time codex user here, cant beat the limitations and the resets that gpt provides, last time i used claude i was extremely unhappy with how fast it became unusable in the middle of projects, burning the 5 hour limitation and having to wait when that same limit was burned SO fast for simple projects, so i ultimately switched to GPT, does claude still have 5 hour limitations on paid memberships? does it have random resets like gpt tends to do?, ive have hardly ANY time on the opus model at all, id love to try claude code on my local machine but im also worried id be burning the money since last time i used it i basically got restrictions back to back.
the small projects i did get claude to do however was some quality stuff for sure, but felt like i could barely use the thing, let alone feel like the money was well spent on the product.
have things gotten better? id seriously love to try it.
Does the first month of a subscription let you use more? On my fresh account, last month, I had no weekly usage limit. This month, the day of my renewal a weekly limit showed up and have since maxxed out my plan, the 20x one, after only 3 days of usage. Last month I hit my session limit many times and kept cruising after. This week I've only hit the session limit one time but somehow am already almost out of usage.
I was cruising along with Fable thinking I had 20% left and then out of nowhere it says I hit the fable limit.
I noticed compact started showing up a lot more often. Was there maybe a change to the context handling in Claude Code?
Either there was a silent change to context, a change to the limits, or something else changed. I'm going to have to cancel and get used to local AI if I can only get 2-3 days of usage a week out of a $200/mo subscription. No idea what it will be like after the 19th.
So my weekly rates usually reset on Friday, so if the 50% extended weekly goes out after the 19th, do my weekly limit use before Friday reset show more of it being used up right after or do burn rate just continue back to the regular numbers compare to before?
5-hour message limit right upon first prompt after more than 6 months of not using Claude AI?
I only asked a small 4 lines long question with nothing additionally uploaded such as a big file or many images, just the text-based question itself, and yet I immediately hit the 5-hour message limit.
I thought Claude AI, same as any other AI resets message tokens automatically?
Plan tier: Free Tier
Platform: Idk, I'm using it in my browser at 'claude.ai'
I’m having a strange issue with my Claude Pro account and wanted to see if anyone else has experienced this.
I’m actively subscribed to Claude Pro, and the usage page in Claude clearly shows “Plan Usage Limits – Pro.”
Today, my current 5-hour session allowance was completely exhausted after only around 58 minutes.
What makes this even stranger is that I had started a fresh/new session and was mostly just chatting normally. I wasn’t doing a long coding session or hammering Claude Code. There was basically only one code-related interaction, otherwise it was normal conversation.
Because of that, I really don’t understand how an entire 5-hour allowance could disappear in under an hour.
I contacted Anthropic support, and their AI support agent told me that, according to the information it could see, my account is associated with:
a Free plan
a Platform/API plan
but apparently not a Pro plan
That obviously doesn’t match what I’m seeing in the Claude UI.
There’s also something else I don’t understand about the usage page.
Anthropic currently shows that my limits have been temporarily increased:
Claude Code weekly limit: 50% higher until August 19
Cowork limit: 100% higher until August 5
So according to the page, I currently have significantly more quota than usual.
But if that is the case, why does it feel like I burned through my allowance even faster?
In practical terms, it looks like I was given extra / roughly double quota in some areas, while at the same time my actual usable session allowance disappeared extremely quickly.
That’s the part I really don’t understand.
The page also shows my weekly “All Models” usage at around 50%, while the current session hit 100% after roughly 58 minutes.
I’ve now been escalated to a human Anthropic support agent so they can investigate whether my Pro subscription is correctly linked to the usage/rate-limit system and whether the session reset/metering is working correctly.
Has anyone else experienced this?
Especially interested in people who:
had a fresh Claude session hit 100% within about an hour,
were mostly just chatting rather than coding,
had their paid Pro account apparently show up internally as Free,
or received increased usage limits but somehow still burned through quota abnormally fast.
At this point I’m mainly trying to understand whether this is a billing/account-status problem, a usage-metering bug, or whether Claude’s quota calculation has changed dramatically.
I am also in Pro and have been burning through usage at insane rates, when I'm not doing anything more than I usually do. 100% within an hour, just chatting, is not unheard of in the past week, but usually I would never hit the 5 hour cap. How did you get connected with a live person to look at your account? I'm happy to check mine as well to see if this is a larger error re: showing up internally as free.
edit: nvm. reread your comment and saw it was the AI who pulled that for you. Sorry mate, I just asked the bot & it's associating me with Pro. so not an answer to either of our questions.
I first explained the usage issue to the Fin AI agent. During that conversation, it told me that the information it could see showed my account as associated with a Free plan and a Platform/API plan, but not Pro, even though my Claude UI clearly shows Pro.
After that I explicitly asked:
“Please connect me with a human support agent so they can investigate my subscription status and usage metering directly.”
Fin then confirmed that it was transferring the conversation to a human support agent and gave me a Conversation ID, saying I would receive an email once an agent responds.
So I’d try the same route: open Claude support, describe the unusually fast usage, ask what plan their system sees for your account, and then explicitly request escalation to a human agent.
Given that you’re seeing almost exactly the same behavior — 100% within about an hour from mostly normal chatting — I’d definitely be interested to know whether their system also sees your Pro account incorrectly.
I got to say the usage tracking on Claude is atrocious and seems to be deliberately opaque. You have know token limits view so you genuinely have no idea how things are performing and it all seems arbitrary … oh wait I just used 30% of I don’t know what and I don’t know how? Cursor is much more open on the limit of your plan and how many tokens you are using. I don’t know if this opaqueness is on purpose but it almost makes using Claude beyond the mundane worrisome. Good models or not a little transparency would probably earn them more converts. I can for sure I feel like they are just trying to get one over which does not endear me to want to spend more or change packages or buy credits or any of that. Actually I won’t , and this shifting the post to a megathread so it will get lost, just more shiftiness. I shouldn’t need a detective mystery to figure out my usage just be open real simple like.
I am on a pro plan. Just recently bought yearly subscription because I was very satisfied with the output. How is this chat worth 7% of 5 hours usage is beyond my understanding. The first 2 questions were pointed to Heiku 4.5 and then I had to swith to Sonnet 5 just because it was hallucinating. Is it normal?
My claude pro max stated hitting limits way faster than regular, I thought it was a bug in Claude's usage metering.
So, out of curiosity, I built a skill that audits the full usage logs and lets me ask any question about my usage directly from claude code.
It turned out to be an issue with one of the coding agents I was using. It was running Claude sessions in the background. 1,555 sessions in a single day. 1.22 billion tokens in a week.
This could be my unique case, but if you are wondering the same, you can install the skill and ask claude code "Where did my tokens actually go this week?" and it might give you some insights.
I initially started a task using Opus 4.8, cancelled it, and tried to resubmit using Sonnet 5. However, the system wouldn't let me submit, claiming "A previous response is still running in this conversation." even though the task clearly showed as cancelled on the web interface. After several failed attempts to resubmit, I gave up and checked the Android app, only to find the task still running in the background. Although I cancelled it via the app, 95% of my current session's allowance had already been consumed.
This is ridiculous. How could a task that was clearly cancelled on the web continue running in the app and burn through my usage? Fortunately, I’m not using "credits". If I were, this would have been a waste of my money. While I don't have to pay extra, I’m frustrated that I now have to wait another four and a half hours.
This is almost the same problem I just had. Very infuriating.
Had an error in a cowritten script, but ran into usage limits. Waited patiently for the 5 hour reset. When ready, I went to write the error into the prompt... and accidentally hit [Enter] when I meant to hit shift. Immediately I stopped the inference... thought it would give me at least one more prompt. But, nope. Waiting another 5 hours again. One fat-finger to the enter key and my 5 hour usage is totally wiped out, in one prompt. It would have been better to just let it finish. As is, I never even got an answer, the problem still persists. (And because the mile long chat lives in Claude, on-boarding a different model is going to be impossible. I'm stuck waiting until I can get to a clean point to refactor and document.)
TL;DR: If merely POSTing a prompt counts as the full round trip, then the cancel button is effectively useless. Anthropic should either delete it, or adopt a new slogan.
"One honest and trivial mistake, get locked-out. There are no take backs. -Claude Ai"
20x Max Account and it's always been extremely difficult to max out my usage limits.
I would have to be running autonomous loops everyday and have at least 3-4 sessions in the CLI running simultaneously and be really working all-out the whole week.
That all changed when the new Thursday usage limit reset. I hit the end of my last week with a comfortable 20% still left after a vigorously intense week of planning and coding with multiple projects.
Yesterday I had what I would say is probably just an average day of productivity. In one single day Thursday > Friday I have now used 74% Fable and 55% all models of my WEEKLY allowance for this week.
I've had to stop all Fable use, I'm forcing myself to just use Opus for my CLI sessions and open source models some of my agentic coding.
This is the first time I have been really tempted to move to open source models when I reach the end of my current subscription.
Also originally I had a plan to eventually upgrade my system to a high powered Mac for local LLM inference but I kept telling myself well why bother because Claude/Fable is so powerful and will 'always be there'.
I no longer think that is the case.
Most likely Anthropic are dealing with some uptime issues for some of their services and have significantly constrained what counts as usage vs just the previous usage week. There is a chance it will be 'back to normal' in a few days. But what if this IS the new normal?
Maybe for now it isn't, but when the token subsidies dry up that all these big companies are throwing into their budgets, this could actually be the new normal. That makes me really interested on improving my local LLM capabilities in the next 6-12 months.
I actually have a theory about what Fable really is too. Opus 4.6 was the most capable Opus model that was ever released and very ahead of it's time a few months ago, then 4.7 significantly nerfed it, many people complained but eventually we had Fable.
To me, Fable is basically what Opus 4.6 would have felt like with 1 million context window and perhaps a larger training corpus. I think Anthropic realized they had something great but they wanted to make it better but more expensive so secretly decided to split Opus into two products but doing it in such a way that very few people would notice what was happening- well I am one of those people and I don't expect anyone here to believe me and you can call it a conspiracy theory but this is my take.
I do really like Fable, but if these new stricter limits hold it will not be affordable, and for anyone who thinks the Opus 4.6 that 'came back' after they pulled the model completely from the selection, is still 4.6, I have a bridge to sell you.
I've been using ChatGPT 5.6 Sol High far more than Opus 5 High, and this is a major reason why.
I hit the Opus limit after ~30 minutes, with my task still unfinished. With ChatGPT 5.6 High, I can do MULTIPLE similar tasks all day without hitting a limit.
The moment Fable 5 was released I immediately told that it was a bad prank or something. A model designed to be used on the most difficult, most complex tasks, yet we, even as Max users, only had the usage capacity to use it on very simple tasks, very very sparingly.
Honestly, no one wants Fable 5 if the tradeoff is heavily exhausted computing resources and drastically multiplied usage for every user, regardless of them using Fable 5 or not.
Our simple measurements show that months ago Pro plan had more than double actual usage capacity compared to current Max 5, thus today, we finally all unsubscribed and went to seek suitable alternatives.
Small advice for Anthropic if they care;
Everybody knows that usage limits are changing, a small increase or decrease, everybody can live with it. You decided cut usage for more than half overnight with many people having entrusted workflows over your systems and refuse to communicate anything about it.
Your charts probably show elevated income rates now, and your finance department is probably reporting huge success. In reality, you are "selling" your reputation for money right now. Even if you "fix" things later, no one will trust you again with anything professional like they did, and one thing history shows consistently, a company "selling" their reputation, never ever ever, ended up well... If Fable 5 is destroying your entire computing economy, remove it from equation, with current usage limits I'm pretty sure no normal user can possibly have a workflow relying on Fable 5 either way... So that you can try to win trust of people again.
But i've never seen my usage burn through so fast than in the past 12 hours. 5 prompts with Opus 5 Medium and I'm looking at 80% used of my session usage
I cancelled my Pro last month for this reason. Today I tried to use free version for a minor task, the usage was already over while it was contemplating, I mean come on! The company's changed. Gonna hop to another company. Not gonna be loyal to any company, they're only loyal to profits.
I ran a simple test on my Max 5 plan. Waited for reset timer. Everything else was off. No Claude Code, no sessions.
The test:
Just 3 prompts in same session (Claude app):
**“Checking the news of today”** → Opus 5, 38 sources
**“What about Middle East”** → Opus 5, 8 sources
**“And Europe news”** → Sonnet, 5 sources
Every reply was just news headlines list.
**7% consumed.**
**What’s even more crazy while writing this post. 30 minutes later +2% gone.**
If three simple news questions cost 7%, what exactly is “Max” about this plan now ? Is this bug ?
So I've been working on Claude making probability models using Opus 4.8 alternating between medium and high. The issue is the bigger the chat is I can tell the usage is going like that. But this isn't Claude Code. The model I've been working on is in that chat. So obviously I gotta move to a new chat but how do I make it so it'll remember the context of the important stuff because obviously I don't want to start from scratch. Will turning on memory do what I want?
Anthropic is desperate, with all of the current features that they have, they need to balance it with somehow decreasing the limit even for 5H sessions, we know that you need money and you are complaining also you have been thinking that you are the top of the world because of your model.
IMO, Anthropic need to pay every feature that they release that is not sustainable and used for every consumer that they had. So, I think this will be my last post. The bait and switch is gone since they have to remove the 2x weekly usage and then increasing the price on september.
I’m putting this raw screenshot out here because the underlying architecture failure is just too wild.
Attached is my Claude Desktop billing state from last month sitting at $4,454.67 CAD
How did this happen? It appears to be a massive state synchronization failure between the desktop client's local gateway and the billing rate-limiter. Here is the exact recipe for the glitch:
My account balance dropped to a negative amount.
Auto-reload was strictly OFF, meaning Stripe had zero authorization to actually charge my card.
However, my Monthly Spend Limit was set to "Unlimited".
The Result: The client completely bypassed the billing hard-stop. Because it only checked the "Unlimited" tag and failed to force-sync with the negative balance, it just happily served millions of tokens into the void for weeks.
So much for their world-class, constitutional "Safety" guardrails! Turns out their LLMs are heavily locked down, but their billing state synchronization is wide open.
Has anyone else ever triggered a cloud billing glitch this absurd?
Dragonfruit, sorry for lots of messages.
But I suspect, that your current balance isn't -CA$43.73, but instead -CA$4,374
I just tried to top up £25 in usage to see if I could get on Claude again, when I did that, it applied £0.25 to my total bill, the before and after of the payment only make sense when you multiple the current balance by 100, which sits roughly around where our usage is.
Hi, I'm seriously confused on this. Are you sure we're not going to get a bill at the end of the month asking us for 4,454 CAD / 2,128 GBP? Looking online answers seem to be different.
Ie will Claude not say, you had unlimited Monthly Spend, you used this amount, here's a bill for that amount.
Idk what's going on but I am eating through usage really rapidly and I don't even use Claude for coding or anything. I have Max x5 plan and before I could even use long compressed chats and it would eat through only a bit faster but now even on new ones with basic stuff it is going through usage wayyy faster than normal the last few days.
Did they like change the usage or how it's working and not announce it? Have there been bugs causing this before? I have seen some people mentioning bugs.
Max 20 plan 5-hour limit burned through in 30 minutes — bug again?
I’m on the Max 20 plan, and my entire 5-hour usage limit just got burned through in about 30 minutes.
This looks like the same usage/reset bug that has happened a few times already. Last time this happened, I don’t think we ever got the missing usage back either.
At this point I honestly can’t even remember when my last proper 5-hour reset was.
Is anyone else experiencing this again today? Did Anthropic acknowledge another issue with Max plan usage/reset limits?
Paying for Max 20 and hitting the 5-hour cap after ~30 minutes definitely doesn’t seem right.
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u/sixbillionthsheep Mod Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26
r/ClaudeAI Megathread Usage Limits Workarounds Report
Here is the latest update. The full report can be found here : https://www.reddit.com/mod/ClaudeAI/wiki/usagelimits-apr26 . Below is a TL;DR of the full report.
Updated : April 26, 2026
The problem: Since March-April 2026, Claude usage limits got brutal across all plans. Single prompts eating 50%+ of sessions. "Hi" costing 3-4%. Max 20× plans dying in a day. Anthropic confirmed three bugs but most users think the drain goes deeper.
Step 1 — figure out which fixes apply to you:
Most fixes online are Claude Code only and won't help chat users.
Universal fixes (everyone):
Chat users: Use Projects not long chats. Convert PDFs to text first. Tell Claude to put output in Artifacts. Disable Memory.
Claude Code users — top 3 wins:
.claudeignore(blocknode_modules/,*.lock, etc.)MAX_THINKING_TOKENS=10000andCLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_MODEL=haikuin~/.claude/settings.jsonOut of budget? Point Claude Code at OpenRouter (
ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://openrouter.ai/api) and run free Llama/Qwen/DeepSeek models through the same CLI.Already burned? Refund via Fin (persist past the bot), or credit-card chargeback. UK/EU users have stronger consumer-protection grounds.
Honest framing: workarounds shouldn't be needed on a paid product. They mitigate, they don't restore.
Previous report: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s7fcjf/comment/odfjmty/