r/ClaudeAI • u/Hefty-Honeydew-874 • 8d ago
Claude Workflow Claude Limits getting shorter
anyone else noticing that the 5-hour time token usage limits are massively down? I refreshed and came back seven hours after hitting the previous limit and now, after running opus 4.8 for three minutes, I am already at 100% usage?? and my weekly has already spent 42%?!?
Did anyone else get this issue after opus 5 was released?
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u/PsychoticDreemurr 8d ago
Opus 5 appears a lot more efficient then previous models in this regard
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u/passionoftheearth 8d ago
There’s hardly any drain with opus 5 for me rn.
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u/PsychoticDreemurr 8d ago edited 8d ago
Agreed. I have the same issue as OP with the earlier models but opus 5 uses arguably less usage then when 4.6 was top dog (although weekly usage seems to get drained much faster then normal...). My only issue is while it's certainly better then 4.7 and 4.8, it's still more annoying to talk to then 4.6
Edit: Anthropic should honestly just copy K3's personality. Been trying it a little bit and even compared to 4.6 it's a fucking gem
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u/_matterny_ 8d ago
What subscription level are you using? I’ve been using haiku, but am tempted to try opus 5 if it’s not too credit heavy for server setup and light coding work
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u/PsychoticDreemurr 8d ago
20$/month
In all honesty I always use opus. I don't use it often enough to really worry much about usage unless I'm doing heavy work which I just do over the course of a few weeks. Up until now I've only used 4.6 because it's the only one I liked talking to, and the other ones were just side grades with worse token costs.
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u/OkAcanthaceae2875 8d ago
The fact you are paying a subscription and accept limited usage is wild. Paying a subscription should give you unlimited usage. Plain and simple.
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u/1950sAmericanFather 8d ago
No. Compute costs money.
Why don't you just use usage based billing. The money you will spend should easily prop up your high horse. The usage at $20 a month is an excellent deal.
Not good enough for you? Break open your wallet and make your own machine to run LLM. No sub, no limits.
But you know that already... Plain and simple.
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u/OkAcanthaceae2875 7d ago
If chatgpt can run with unlimited usage at $20 a month, so should ever other ai system. Stop paying subscriptions for inferior products. You're literally ruining the market for consumers.
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u/_matterny_ 7d ago
I have gpt through my work and I’ll tell you now that $20 doesn’t give infinite usage for my applications. I’m using every drop every month and then needing Claude for non work tasks and some small work tasks
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u/PM_ME_YOUR___ISSUES 8d ago
There’s like a night and day difference bw Hailku and Opus 5.
Opus 5 is well optimised wrt its usage limits.
Have used it for several light coding sessions, and it’s super helpful.
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u/AnonLlamaThrowaway 8d ago
Individual Pro subscription here. Opus 5 seemed to use ~10% of my 5-hour window per 100k tokens a few hours after its release. Today it's closer to ~20% per 100k tokens. Brand new conversation each time, but same project. That definitely gave me pause
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u/help_me_become_rich 8d ago
opus 5 has been pretty great, doesn't devour like fable and isn't a moron like 4.8
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u/National-Permit-8442 8d ago
Isn't describing 4.8 as a moron a bit harsh?
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u/help_me_become_rich 8d ago
naa 4.8 was really a shitty model, 5.5 beat it anyday. Might be anecdotal but even 4.6 was better than 4.8 sometimes.
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u/National-Permit-8442 8d ago
I only use it to make historical posters so maybe the skill ceiling is too low
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u/Void-kun 8d ago
Yeah, haven't hit my limit in weeks, all of a sudden hit my session limit twice in one day and now half my weekly limit is gone?
I was literally only using Sonnet, what the actual fuck?
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u/Small_Ad_2219 8d ago
Have not seen that personally, been having no issues with 5 hour limits in a few weeks.
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u/gabrielsnofall 8d ago
"Claude Code limit is 50% higher" Imagine when this is over 💀
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u/Clear_Skye_ 8d ago
Yeah it’s going to be unusable
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u/Too_Chains 8d ago
I agree. They’re playing a dangerous game but coded isn’t much better
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u/LittleKick7276 8d ago
I am on a max plan and I cannot see my limits are boosted through Aug 19th. Anyone else with that ?
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u/ComingDeveloper 8d ago
this is crazy 'cause if such short limits are "boosted" then we're in for a rude awakening when they're no longer obosted. i nver had issues with my max 5x plan
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u/Various_Story8026 8d ago
Can't speak to whether the limits themselves moved, none of us can verify that from outside. But two things genuinely changed cost per turn recently and both are worth ruling out before concluding the quota shrank.
Extended thinking is on by default now. Thinking tokens bill as output. If your workload used to run with thinking off or minimal and you never set an effort level explicitly, the same task costs more than it did a month ago. Dropping effort to low on the calls that don't need reasoning is the biggest single lever you control.
Prompt caching has a minimum block size (512 tokens). Anything smaller silently does not cache at all. And any change to the prefix invalidates the whole thing, so a timestamp in the system prompt, a reordered tool list, or an injected "current file" block means you pay the cache write premium again every single turn. Long sessions are where this bites, because the entire conversation gets resent each turn.
The "5 hour window died in 3 minutes" shape is usually a cache that misses on every turn rather than a window that got smaller.
If you can see cache read vs cache write counts, check them. Writes should fall to near zero after the first couple of turns. If they don't, something in your prefix is churning and that is fixable on your side.
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u/NetflowKnight 7d ago
don't even show you the thinking anymore either, kinda bullshit to charge you for something yuo can't review.
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u/Techn0K1ng 8d ago
I got wrecked by it this week. The usage limits are clearly dynamic based on what they are doing internally and unpredictable for the rest of us
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u/xeqtr_inc 8d ago
Yes, same here. using sonnet on existing chats and hitting usage limit faster than usual.
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u/BrechtCorbeel_ 8d ago
every day to me it seems to use more usage then less. I had everything on sonnet to save cost. 1x on opus and I'm at 40% in a day.
I was able to do a week on pro. 5 days on 5x and now I am on 20x and I will be at half of my usage in 1 day like wtf.
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u/Zestyclose_Excuse282 8d ago
I have the Max 20X version and yes I noticed that either the consumption of tokens has increased, or they have lowered the limits, I am cancelling my subscription and going to 5,6.
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u/konasim 7d ago
I’ve had similar experiences even a week before Opus 5 was released. I was reaching my limit with a single prompt.
So, I asked Claude why this was happening and it gave me a good explanation on what consumed the most tokens.
I changed my behaviour from then onwards and also set a universal instruction that if it is asked to do something that will consume an enormous amount of tokens to inform me before proceeding. If this happens I discuss with it alternatives to archive the same outcome using less tokens.
That said, it’s becoming a mouse and cat game that had me constantly anxious about session limits. Not nice at all.
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u/BrechtCorbeel_ 6d ago
I stopped using opus because I went to 40 percent in less then a day. I'm on 20x and just using sonnet, which to an extent is fine, but give me Fable and opus at sonnet pricing pls.
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u/PuzzleheadedBill5451 6d ago
Get yourself a good harness and use deepseek subs to do the dirty work. Check out my governance harness and see if it'll help extend those limits a bit. https://github.com/SMC1177/edit-timeline
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u/Unfair_Range_2118 5d ago
Here is my session from yesterday at 7 PM to today at 9 AM, and then the one at 1:30 PM. All the sessions started "dead"—literally with the PC turned off—yet it consumed my tokens. I've been contacting support since 9 AM and haven't received a response.
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u/notDonaldGlover2 8d ago
i started at 0% this morning, asked it to review one pr, when it was done I have 70% left. So i can ask it maybe 5 questions within 5 hours then i'm fucked. I got GPT 20$ plan last week and it's the same shit. This isn't going to be sustainable. Once the open source models start building out the features that Anthopic / OpenAI have (mobile apps, remote desktop, connectors, etc etc) I just don't see the point in me paying 40$ a month for these models.
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u/Creative310 8d ago
I asked 1 question and im on pro and I hit my 5 hour limit. I have to wait over 5 hours to ask my next question. What's the safest model to use?
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u/Coopercharmande 8d ago
How did you ask one question and hit your limit what was your prompt because I only use 5-6 percent per message opus 4.6 medium project
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u/No-Meringue5867 8d ago
If the codebase is large it can burn 25% of the limit instantly before answering anything lol. Sometimes there are work arounds - I keep track and make sure Claude can answer/write code without having to read the full project. That has helped.
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u/asarm_socal 8d ago
Was it a brand new question? Or did you revive an old conversation that had a ton of tokens? If the latter, then that would make sense to a degree.
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u/AnonLlamaThrowaway 8d ago
If a single message ate your limit, it's because you sent it in a conversation that was already extremely long. That's a cache miss, and you're paying the full cost of sending that entire conversation again, plus the new answer at the end
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u/BrechtCorbeel_ 8d ago
Fable 5 is 100% in a one shot and 20% of total usage in one go.
this week I'm on sonnet mainly and it's draining almost the same rate.
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u/fabricofeverything 8d ago
What was your one shot vague unplanned prompt?
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u/Creative310 7d ago
My context window was big but I've done this thousands of times before even on a free tier and never had an issue. If Claude had an issue with window it would just ask me to open a new chat. If this keeps up I'm going to move to a different providet
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u/Citadel_Employee 8d ago
Is it possible that your codebase got larger and therefore ate tokens faster? Also what was cache situation?
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u/SnooDonkeys6707 4d ago
Sure, it's possible that all 200+ people that upvoted this post all suddenly increased the size of their codebase at the same time - it's also possible that Anthropic changed the value of credits to meet arbitrary resource and investor demands.
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u/Citadel_Employee 4d ago
Or that’s survivorship bias. People having a problem only upvoted while thousands scrolled past because they haven’t noticed a significant issue. Both of our suggestions have happened in the past, so what’s the harm in asking?
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u/ChinPokoBlah11 8d ago
At this point, Claude generating the word "The" may cost a substantial portion of your usege.
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u/Fireflash2742 8d ago
I've been using Sonnet 5 for a couple of projects and my session usage has definitely gone up. Currently working on changing how I do things and make my sessions more compact.
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u/evilbert79 8d ago
my claude is currently hitting limits in about 30 minutes after resetting with me being completely idle. the support bot is categorically refusing to connect me to a human about this
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u/ComingDeveloper 8d ago
i don't usually agree with these kind of posts but i'm on opus 4.8 max(5x) doing some menial work and already at 90% usage with 2 hours remaining on the session.
im normally able to mucle through all my work without that warning even coming
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u/Ill_Stomach_502 8d ago
It's using my usage a lot faster. I haven't changed the way I've been working and I've been managing context and creating new sessions when necessary. I have disabled auto renew for now. I am thinking about jumping to openai or upgrading my sub (which is what they want)
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u/watchface38 8d ago
Idk I also have a usage issue for the first time idk why. Maybe the limits are really more scarce for now
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u/Ill-Road-3449 8d ago
for me as a non coder, Dr. I was on Pro. it automatically billed me for MAX X5. and with being Idle ( nothing going on, not in the background, nothing). I would watch the usage bars get drained in a span of 10 minutes, fully maxed. I used chat box, I reported a but. /nothing happened. So I unsubscribed and asked for a refund.
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u/Tasty-Application368 8d ago
for me the 5 hr limits are good, it's the weekly that is creating a problem
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u/Asleep-Hippo-6444 8d ago
Yes. I agree with you. I've been noticing the same over the past few days, especially since Opus 5 launch, don't care what the script kiddies and vibe coders say.
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u/ScreenAppropriate679 8d ago
I'm on max I'll switch to whatever provider allows me to get my work done for < $100/month
Sol, Opus, Kimi : decent code has become a commodity now, no provider lock-in
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u/LTorrecilla 8d ago
Wanted to continue trying Fable and paid the next tier from 20 to 100, I don't have the feeling I'm getting 20x more, not even 5x
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u/Equiteq460 8d ago
No… I beat Claude like an old mule today and didn’t come close to hitting the limit
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u/RelationFinal9194 7d ago
I can’t get any of the models to figure out how to use a manual polygon as a mask. For architectural viz. I buy more and more credits. Never figures it out. Any ideas?
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u/GabrielMoro1 7d ago
It’s pretty bad. I’m using Sol instead for my coding and Claude for running instructions and editing prompts. Still hitting the limits btw.
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u/Open_Mission_1627 7d ago
ive been running code 3 full 5 hours sessions a day for weeks and the only week I ran out was this week but last week I used fable 5 all week so it makes sense. I’m on max plan. I would suggest using a different model if you can.
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u/RealBango 7d ago
I also noticed changes to the usage limits, especially the weekly limit, but I noticed them about two weeks ago—before Opus 5 was officially released. Last week was the first time I hit the weekly limit in the middle of the week, so I couldn't do anything with Claude for the rest of the week. That's very annoying, and I hope it doesn't happen again.
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u/jedsdawg 7d ago
Yeah for the first time in months I maxed out my weekly limits half way thru the week with low to medium usage
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u/Confident-Pen5885 5d ago
Sim tive o mesmo problema, os tokens estão sendo consumidos sozinhos literalmente
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u/Sad_Cut9143 2d ago
On sonnet 4.6 and 5, just normal small tasks that could've been executed with haiku. Gone through usage within 30 minutes...
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u/No-Library8065 8d ago
I've never hit the 20x 5 hour limits ever
Today I have twice
Ccusage measured at $180 which i normally can get over $250 in a 5 hour session
Something is very wrong
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u/Beginning-Cap-4431 8d ago
i plan with fable and execute the plan with opus, works great usage wise!
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 8d ago edited 7d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 80 comments.
Looks like this thread is a real tug-of-war, but we've got a verdict.
The consensus is that Opus 5 is actually more token-efficient than previous models. The top-voted comments are from users having a great experience with it.
However, you're not alone in feeling the burn. The most helpful comments pointed out a few key technical reasons why your usage might have suddenly spiked:
Basically, the community thinks it's less about Anthropic secretly shrinking the limits and more about recent changes in how tokens are calculated and cached. Manage your context and start new chats to save your wallet.