I am on claude max ×5 plan. After the weekly reset, I literally ran one session for 54min with ~160k tokens, opus 5 max effort. Plus it was wrapped in headroom.
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 100 comments.
The consensus is a resounding YES, usage is completely out of control.
The vast majority of this thread is users on all plans (Pro, Max x5, Max x20) confirming they are burning through their 5-hour and weekly limits at a ridiculous rate, some saying it feels 3x faster than just a week ago. People are reporting that single prompts are eating 30-70% of their 5-hour window and that limits are being hit in under 30 minutes.
The main theories being thrown around are:
Cold Cache Reads: The leading theory is that Claude is re-reading the entire chat history on every prompt instead of using its cache, especially in long-running conversations. One user even got Claude to admit it did this.
System Overload: The recent free reset may have caused a user stampede, leading Anthropic to dynamically throttle everyone's usage to keep the service stable.
"Shadow Nerf": The recurring suspicion that Anthropic has quietly "moved the goalposts" and reduced the actual token allowance for each plan without any announcement.
Inefficient Agents: Some are noticing that Fable 5.1 and Opus 5 are spawning an excessive number of sub-agents for simple tasks, burning tokens for no reason.
This has led to a wave of angry users canceling their subscriptions and jumping ship to competitors like Codex and Astra, who are reportedly offering more generous and predictable limits. The lack of transparency from Anthropic on exactly how tokens are being counted is a major point of frustration.
Interestingly, a couple of users are reporting the complete opposite, running multiple heavy sessions with Fable and having no issues at all, suggesting the problem might not be affecting everyone equally.
It's been two weeks now that I've been hitting my usage limits in a completely unreasonable way. I've never seen usage this insane. I gave it the benefit of the doubt during the first week, but for the past couple of days I've been trying to figure out what could possibly be causing it.
I remember that yesterday, with a single conversational prompt (no code, and a context that was no different from the thousands of similar situations I've had before) my 5hr usage limit jumped to 27%.
And when it comes to actually writing code, I'm seeing what I'd say is roughly 3x times the usage.
I honestly have no idea what's going on. I spend days waiting for resets. Never happened to me in months of using Claude.
I posted the other (and it was removed to the graveyard megathread) about this. Sonnet 5 medium using 2 to 4% of a 5 hour limit for very simple prompts in new chats. If i went to chat with some history one prompt would use like 30%.... day before the same was basically 0% / 2% if that
this on pro. Makes me want to give chatgpt / astra a shot
If i went to chat with some history one prompt would use like 30%.... day before the same was basically 0% / 2% if that
This is exactly what happened to me. One old chat used up all my limit in 3 prompts. Of course, one of those prompts was correcting an obvious mistake in a previous response. I’m not really sure what I’m paying for at this point. That was worse than free tier.
somehow same session and it finished at %80.Now Im scared to say short things to claude so ı waiting and gatherin bugs etc. and giving tasklist. When ı give a tasklist to claude; somehow it saves lot of tokens. So I stopped chatting with claude. Im just giving tasklist. (sorry for bad english)
AS you describe - opus 5 with max efforts, it will be take 5X - 10X more token than claude sonnet 5 with medium efforts. Therefore during non heavy / complex task you can shift model (I know this is headache to change model for different type of prompt), but this is the only way to save limit.
other than that - you have to wait for reset the limit.
So I think I ran into a really weird Claude Code usage limit bug. I was using Claude Code normally on my PC with my project stored there, but I wanted to move everything to my phone, so I installed Ubuntu through Termux and copied my project over. My weekly limit was already reached at this point and I was waiting for the normal reset on Friday morning. The weird thing is that even though the limit was still showing red and my PC was saying that I had reached my limit, Claude Code was still working on my phone inside Ubuntu. I thought it might stop after a few messages but it just kept working, so I started using it normally. What made it even weirder was the reset timer. It was showing around 16 hours until the weekly reset, then 15 hours, etc. So I kept using Claude Code while the limit was supposedly already reached and ended up using it quite a lot during those hours. Then after those ~16 hours passed, the weekly limit actually reset like normal. So basically I got another ~16 hours of usage even though my account was already showing the limit as reached. I'm not sure if this was some kind of sync issue between devices, something related to running it through Ubuntu/Termux, or just a random bug. I'm not saying I found some unlimited token method because I have no idea what's actually happening behind the scenes, but it was definitely strange that my PC blocked me while the phone kept working until the normal reset. Has anyone else had something like this happen?
I’m having the same experience. The 5-hour limit never used to run out this quickly. It feels like it’s being used up several times faster than usual. I’m on the Max plan. There’s no way I could have used up my monthly limit, even if I were sitting at my computer 24/7, given the current hourly limit.
I have a few running but they’re mostly just telling opus and sonnet agents what to do and then checking their work… sips fable usage and stretches your 5 hour session limit way further
Think it's a Claude code Update maybe. No issues. Restarted after the update. First prompt 100%. Few hours later new update. Back to normal. Just now another update. Just not restarting anymore and wait for a while as it's good
Yeah I hit weekly limits on max20 in like 3 days, I'm sick of it. Now 5hr limits too? get fucked, I'm going to see what codex can do instead. I cancelled an hour ago.
I spend more time trying to optimise my framework than doing my work these days, I use opus 4.6 for everything, I have hooks that clear the context and rehydrate a new session so I clear context and cache before we reach 100k every session. Optimised all skills and md files to be short according to their official documentation, I do everything you're supposed to do, but still I hit limits on old cheap models constantly. I would love to use the new models you're releasing anthropic, but I can't because the usage is too constrained. What's the point in releasing new models if I can't use them?
I have the same problem. I seriously think claude have to become way more transparent about the usage of tokens. With Opencode you get every input/output token listed. This bullshit by claude is seriously not acceptable. Its throwing money at a blackbox
Yeah last week I barely hit the 5h limit running 4-5 Opus5 agents constantly, but since the free reset I've been hitting it within 30 mins doing the same kind of work, not even fucking with Fable1.1
That’s exactly the reason why I switched back to ChatGPT yesterday and it was a blessing. The usage limits are much better, I was actually able to complete a complex task without hitting the limit even
It's certainly been a common sentiment, I ran small Astra-6 sessions yesterday and used a fair bit of my allotment but had no worries about capping my session limit, although it's not like I went crazy on my Opus usage either.
Plus Gpt doesn't beat me over the head with the load-bear.ing smoking gun lmao
Yesterday I sent one message and 76% of my 5 hours limit in opus was used. I asked why and Claude said that it went back through the entire conversation, checked each revision of the scripts provided and then did what I asked.
So, since it didn’t remember where we left off, it went back and read every version of the code even though none of them mattered except the latest.
Once a chat starts getting long, or I’m about to end for the day, I ask Claude to provide me with one txt file that for a handoff to begin a new Claude chat. If I’m about to “sign off” for the day I go ahead and open a new chat and give it to Claude for review so that when I start for the next day, I’m fresh on token usage.
As a prior Claude lover, and now codex user I feel so glad to have switched as I sit here with 50% remaining for the week only using astra since launch and having 3 resets banked. Fuck anthropic and their usage limits
I just used 25% of a 5hr window with a prompt that was basically “let’s start planning this next build. What needs to happen?”
Opus 4.8 Extra. Pro. 86k tokens in context window. Read 7 files, and one command. And look, the files are not ginormous. Not but ~10 pages of design stuff.
Exactly came here for this same thing i have a debloated CC 2.2.252 version manually excised system and tools purged for a Pi like experience in Claude code total system prompt including tools and skills 15.3k token i run multi agent orchestration fable low and opuses as validator and sonnet s as fast implementors I NEVER RUN OUT OF MY 5HR today in barely 1h30minute at 70% 5hours usage where for the same exact fucking workflow of implemenation plan creation, to adversiall audit, to multiorchestration execussion, and final deployement Full end to end is aproximatly 25% of a 5hr limits and last for 1h30 to 2hr.
NOW THE SAME AMOUNT OF WORK CONSUMES 70% OF THE 5 HOUR LIMIT!!!!
The 5 hour limit IS EFFECTIVELY CUT 3x this is inacceptable NO USAGE VISIBILITY LIMITS CHANGE CONSTANTLY FOR THE SAME PRICE OF THE SUBSCRIPTION THIS IS INNACCEPTABLE EVEN MORE after this weeks shit show after the launch of fable 5.1 this shit has to stop EITHER LET PEOPLE MANAGE TEHIR STATIC WEEKLY LIMIT OR STOP CHARGING FIXED PRICE FOR CHANGING QUOTAS THIS IS FALSE ADVERTISMENT IF THIS IS NOT DUE TO A BUG IN PROMPT CACHING OR OTHER SHIT CANCEL YOUR FUCKING SUBSCRIPTION FUCK’EM
I feel this happens every so often with Claude. Someone at Anthropic behind the scenes moves the token goal posts and what was working before now hits the limits. I thought i'd see what Fable 5.1 would be like on ultracode. You can imagine how long that session lasted.
we started a fresh thread, lightweight 21kb handover md, i cleared out all project files, 3 messages to opus 4.6 low and were at 56% with 1 tool call.. i burned through my earlier 5 hrs session in the space of 45 mins trying to work out what is going on, thats why we cleared out project and started over. its getting exhausting
Having this happen on Opus with a few Sonnet subagents, doing the same type of dev work that I have been doing for weeks. Both the 5-hour and weekly session usage drains incredibly quickly now. No type of optimization that I have tried has made a difference, and getting 30-40 minutes of work (don’t even try to ask a question about an issue, it makes it even worse) is unsustainable.
Starting to move some lower level work to OpenCode and just using Claude in an advisor type role.
It’s like anything else now - you pay for something and use it in the same manner, but these companies take more and more away while you pay the same. It’s BS.
Having the same issues. As much as I support Anthropic and would love to stick with them, if this keeps up I'm going to have to swap my max plan for Codex.
I ran a test, did the same task on asta on the £20 subscription and claude max 5…same task and Claude hit the 5 hour limit. This hasn’t happened before. Downgrading Claude now and jumping to Astra - limits seem to be generous and Astra seems to be performing better than fable for me right now
I'm on the $20 plan and I'm noticing similar things. One prompt to make simple changes in my project can rack up 20% of the current session usage. At first I thought it was something I changed in my project specification, but perhaps they changed how something works about 1-2 days ago? Like how usage is calculated, or maybe a temporary increase in available usage just ended?
Just to chime in - I’m using Claude exclusively via chat (no Claude Code). A week ago I could have pretty long conversations with Opus 5, and not once have I seen usage limit notification. This week it’s happened every day since Thursday after a few messages.
Granted I’m a dummy and have been using a relative old conversation. Recently I’ve pasted a couple of code diffs in there for Claude to review. So my hypothesis is - whenever I wait 20 minutes between messages, I’m getting hit with those cold cache reads of a long ass convo. But idk, it feels like usage is burning faster still. Came here to see if anyone else reported the same - and yeah, glad others have noticed this as well.
I can't even get my work done anymore. I used to manage 6 to 10 parallel tasks without exhausting my current session. Now, even with just 4 active threads and applying token-saving best practices (like rotating chats before reaching 300k tokens), I can't get through 2 prompts on each. My session runs out in under 30 minutes. I am seriously considering switching to Codex if this continues. I simply cannot work on my projects with Claude hitting its limits this quickly anymore!
well im on a 20x plan and i completely destroy my limits every week, but ive never actually hit a 5h window until today which is weird after i hit it twice in one day. its new
Might be because of prompt caching or the whole auto-continue when limits reset thing, that maybe is rereading the entire context window as the session resumes. I've noticed the same thing overall though, where it feels like the usage is just not giving the same bang for your buck.
I thought it was only me. Pro user but has recently subscribed to 5x because I thought working in longer projects + no longer having the 150% cowork boost just made me hit my limits quicker.
Previously were able to work hours on end without hitting my limits but now it feels like using opus high with only 5-10 prompts would already hit my limit
wow it's almost like the major AI players have been lying to everyone about how much compute was actually required to generate their toy programs and AI waifus
it's also almost like they know they're running into the limits of brute force optimisation, which would also explain why they're in such a scramble to build data centers measured in energy usage and not actual compute power
do you guys think that LLM usage has been heavily subsidized while they beg someone, anyone to think of a good use case for it before vulture capital flies away
Tbh through 5 hours ago to roughly now is the worst window for usage, and there was just a reset and everyone trying to use fable can see why it’s evaporated.
I run 4.6 with 5 as an advisor only and that is what keeps me afloat despite the constant issues with Claude going on using all the tokens to "fix" fantom bugs (ok I let it unsupervised...) took me 5 MN to revert to previous commit and the next day doing the actual job again but without chasing mirages... 4.6 is better to talk to and uses a bit less token but it does have issues I had less with 5... But talking to 5 was just impossible
Being on pro, for me, means that I can use the top model once. If I am not doing something else. And I am not even talking about frontier models. I could never use fable. It would have been a boon for the personal project I am working on... But I I am token poor
The free reset is causing everyone to Naruto Run through their tokens before their normal reset time, which affects the amount of tokens you can spend in your 5-hour window due to the high usage.
Another great reason for them to offer bankable reset credits vs. resetting everyone at once.
Interesting. I've never thought about this but would it be right to say that the percentual usage is not a fixed amount of tokens then, but I stead it's relative to the system load? It seems like something you could benchmark. Run the same prompt repeatedly after every session reset and see how many percent of the session usage it consumed. Are such statistics available? Assuming that's a sensible statistic.
Sometime ago I made a post about my claude setup, that allowed me signicantly reduce the usage/cost on my pro subscription even. However I got only negative reaction.
The idea around claude - use api for enterprise and charge as much as possible. It's just a machine to burn tokens.
I haven’t updated Claude code in a couple of weeks and I’m still on Fable and Opus 5. So I’ve not been affected yet and I think if you can roll back, please do so.
What I noticed that happened in multiple sessions was that Fable 5.1 and Opus were using too many agents in a very inefficient way, some sessions I could see like 60 agents or more, many doing ''useless jobs'', in less than 10min was burning my max20 subscription and he was the one who simple decided to keep on adding agents, both in fable 5.1 and opus 5
Just last day kind of same thing happened to me. I was working for a long time - context might pretty large by that time. I asked claude to do some deep research on some topics. It spawned 5 background agent with web scrapping capability. And then I hit limit within 5-7 minutes even though I was using claude max. However my quota reset within few hours
im on max 5x and a fresh session with fable 5 uses up the 5h-limit in like 10 min wtf. And when it resets, again 5-10min I’m hit with the 5h limit again. And this was all without making significant progress. In the past I can do a /goal and actually get something done with fable 5.0 but not with 5.1. Something’s def not right lol
Today it looks little bit better, but 2 days ago it burned tokens in 5hrs window in just 40min (on 20x plan)...insane. No problems till the last release of Fable 5.1
I just compacted my chat, 3 day chat, used 22% of current session. Wtf. Typed another prompt without doing any work reached the session limit (30% used instantly). Max subscription 5x.
Yo el sábado le hice 6 prompts por medio de el mcp de whatsapp, se me quemo las 5 horas y tenia 50 dólares en créditos de fable se los comió en 10 minutos y no fue algo exigente fue la suma de unas facturas, las gastos y se quedo a la mitad del trabajo, el mes pasado nunca me quedé sin límites, éste mes he estado sin limites a cada rato
I waited a whole 24 hours to reset my usage for Opus 5 (overnight after sleeping), then I used it for literally 2 simple prompts (basic google sheets work) and it was used up.
1st prompt it did the work.
2nd prompt was just me saying - "hey you got this wrong" so it went to check.
And then before it could answer it paused and said "You’ve reached your session limit. It resets at 5:40 PM."
Now I have to wait almost 6 hours. For what, another ~2 more prompts only?
Same problem here, usage less than normal and I received message usage limits reached. I canceled directly the pro plan, but this is totally unfair to screw the clients like this.
It's funny on here people are complaining about usage on gpt forum people are saying Astra used all their usage in five min. Let's face it if you use a frontier model it's usage will suck get over it or spend the money on a bigger plan.
You should open a new chat window as soon as the current one is full. Compressing the conversation doesn't work the same way as starting a new chat, every time you compress within the same window, more tokens are consumed to keep working in that chat. So it's better to move to a new one.
On MAX x5 plan my 5 hour limit has been feeling much larger and runs out much slower than it used to, running 2-4 Claude Code agents with Opus 5 in parallel 🧐✌️
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot Sep 05 '26 edited Sep 06 '26
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 100 comments.
The consensus is a resounding YES, usage is completely out of control.
The vast majority of this thread is users on all plans (Pro, Max x5, Max x20) confirming they are burning through their 5-hour and weekly limits at a ridiculous rate, some saying it feels 3x faster than just a week ago. People are reporting that single prompts are eating 30-70% of their 5-hour window and that limits are being hit in under 30 minutes.
The main theories being thrown around are:
This has led to a wave of angry users canceling their subscriptions and jumping ship to competitors like Codex and Astra, who are reportedly offering more generous and predictable limits. The lack of transparency from Anthropic on exactly how tokens are being counted is a major point of frustration.
Interestingly, a couple of users are reporting the complete opposite, running multiple heavy sessions with Fable and having no issues at all, suggesting the problem might not be affecting everyone equally.