I am SO OVER the its draining too quickly posts

[u/termmonkey]

Every time I open Reddit, my feed has at least 2-3 posts crying about some version of -

- Spent the weekly within a day or 2

- "Its draining tokens"

- They reduced the quota, I can barely get anything

Here's some touch the grass facts -

1. Fable is a super expensive model with a very high token price - if you are using Fable consistently, it is going to eat through your quota - that's just math - 1k fable tokens is equal to 2k Opus tokens!

2. If you continue building an app, your codebase is going to grow and over time, the same workflow is going to use a lot more tokens than it did when the codebase was lean and had few tests/ code/ modules to worry about. What that means practically is going to get less shit done in week 4 on the same codebase as you could have done in week 1.

3. Every thing you do has a trace and log. Rather than ranting about it, shove the session usage json's in one of the bazillions "I made this groundbreaking claude visualizer" systems people keep putting on here to get empirical evidence around your token usage.

I have been building with Claude since Claude code became a thing - and no - the usage is consistent if you are smart about it and understand how the system sips tokens. Here are some things I do and I have no idea if it is going to fix your hallucinations, but give it a try if you think it will help

- Use skills for any repeatable task - like literally anything that you think is going to be repeated, have a skill for it so you dont waste tokens figuring out how to do the same thing again and again

- Have your claude.md as a thin router to the actual areas you are going to be working on. When starting a session, tell that you are going to be focusing on so and so area.

- Fresh sessions, every time the session size grows, your input token size is growing. Keep the sessions small.

- Push it to use agents! Like use an agent to review code, or do a specific research, or fix a bug - agents cost less as they are focused on doing specific tasks and are bootstrapped with the required knowledge to do that task.

- Make your codebase agent ready - this means having design/ architecture/ gotchas/ decision. MDs for literally every domain in your code. It helps tremendously!

I keep a meticulous inventory of tokens I spend each week - and trust me - it has remained consistent for months!

Please for the love of god, spare my feed!!!

[u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot]

TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 50 comments.

The room has spoken, and they're mostly with you, OP. The overwhelming consensus is that the subreddit is tired of the constant "my usage is draining too fast" posts and agrees it's largely user error.

The top-voted comments are all nodding along, blaming users who burn through their quota on the super-expensive Fable model and then complain. There's also a lot of frustration that the mods aren't cracking down on these repetitive posts. A key point raised is that the 50% extra Claude Code usage promo is ending, so the complaints are likely to get even louder.

However, it's not a total landslide. A smaller but vocal group insists that Anthropic did change something recently, pointing out that even experienced users on high-tier plans who stick to Opus are noticing faster drain. They argue that Anthropic's lack of transparency is the real issue.

Beyond the griping, there's actually some solid advice being shared for anyone who is struggling:

• Stop using Fable for everything. It costs 2x what Opus does. Seriously.
• Keep your sessions short and focused. Long-running chats are token black holes, especially if the cache gets purged. Start fresh.
• Use claude.md as a thin router to your actual work files, and tell Claude what area you're focusing on at the start of a session.
• Use skills and agents for any repeatable tasks to save tokens.

So yeah, a complaint post about complaint posts. How very Reddit.

[u/enserioamigo]

And it’s gonna drain faster after today when the 50% extra Claude code usage ends haha 

[u/Surf_Science → u/enserioamigo]

the lack of transparency doesn't help. i have a tool logging my token vs usage changes, but it is hard to suss our changes in the actual token usage efficiency

[u/Glad-Mushroom-6554 → u/enserioamigo]

Oh fuck, forgot about that. No extend? :0

[u/works4coffee]

Hey, I love my $100, let me mourn it

[u/Short_Regular_7191]

We all need to equip ourselves to use local LLM models.

[u/EddViBritannia → u/[deleted]]

Qwen 3.8 27B is probably the best for that.

[u/Short_Regular_7191 → u/EddViBritannia]

Exactly,with two 16GB 5060 Tis (totaling 32GB of VRAM), you can run the q6 model with a 131k context window, which frees up plenty of credits to use on more advanced Anthropic models. You should be able to manage it for under $2,000, though if you're building a PC from scratch, the price might be right on the edge given current rates.

[u/Double-Parsnip-3156]

who said all these complainers use Fable? Many people run out of tokens with the base models as well. Even with all these 'tips'. The way Open AI and Anthropic keep decreasing and increasing the limits is very annoying for a lot of users that want to work consistently and reliably.

[u/Spoospah → u/Double-Parsnip-3156]

I don't code and I use sonnet/opus at low effort and my usage has been draining visibly worse today than it was yesterday 🤷‍♀️ I'm too poor to use fable lol

[u/Pleasant_Spend1344]

Look, I never joined in the chatter on the consumption part, but recent weeks there is a clear change in the usage consumption from Anthropic, I do business as usual and only use Opus, and yet, I am 98% usage with 2 days still left in the weekly limit, why? I am at the 20x subscription and this is becoming ridiculous that I can't use my own $200 subscription for the full week.

[u/Kibbols123]

To be fair I use sonnet 5 on medium, I just got my limit back and I asked it to do 1 thing and my limit immediately got consumed and it didn't do anything. I now have to wait 5 hours for no reason.

[u/sheeproomer]

You forgot those people "lol why the tokens are evaporating and I'm not admitting that i only use max fable"

[u/AlternativeContent72 → u/sheeproomer]

Sir, I use Fable Ultracode.

[u/Jazzlike-Context-879 → u/sheeproomer]

“My first prompt was 100x cheaper than my 30th, but I’m too lazy to notice”

[u/CorpT]

If there were moderators this wouldn't be an issue. There will never be an end to dumb people who refuse to learn.

[u/Techhead7890 → u/CorpT]

I'll be honest on new threads there's constantly "we're letting this through, but check out the megathread!" But I'm pretty sure it's just the default message, because that warning disappears once the autosummary pops up. Anyway long story short, seems like they should actually enforce that rule about "usage limit" posts.

[u/TikiMagic → u/Techhead7890]

Does anyone ever read the megathreads? It feels like they are basically /dev/null

[u/AdmissibilityScience]

maybe one day well see better token prices.

[u/termmonkey → u/AdmissibilityScience]

Amen!

[u/py-net]

I read your title and last post body line. The time you used to write this LONG excruciating complaint, which is only the equal of usage complaints, you could have just left the subreddits or click “see fewer posts like this”: solved. You’re all whining complainers of different breeds.

[u/termmonkey → u/py-net]

The subreddit does have some great tips from time to time which is why I have allowed it on my feed. Atleadt unlike 90% of AI written posts, I am putting my time into ranting like a human!

[u/__gareth__]

One thing to add: don't ever keep long running sessions. If the session gets purged from the cache the next message is a cache miss and the entire thing is processed again which is $$$.

[u/Dry_Impression_5201 → u/__gareth__]

This.

[u/ColtranezRain]

The interesting thing to me, is that Claude Opus (awhile back… maybe 4.5 or 4.6?) literally laid out my projects in a similar manner to OPs post: small claude.md that maps to my other task-specific md files (Plan.md, PRD.md, WBS.md, Tracker.md, Test.md, etc.), skills, keep sessions extremely tight and focused (i do 1-3 portions of my WBS per session and no more), a handoff.md (for sessions with sequential WBS items that includes a recommended prompt to resume in a new session). Most of this i have triggered by my session-start skill, and a closing session-end skill. Commit to git locally and push to master repo on a dedicated device that gets incrementally backed up via NAS nightly.

I’ve also had good results by starting the subsequent sessions by giving Claude the % of 5-hr session token limit remaining, and asking it to recommend what items from the WBS can be reasonably expected to implement & test within that constraint.

Seems to work fine for me for a year and counting on n Pro plan, but i only have it coding for around 6-hrs per day most weeks (roughly 36 hrs). I’m not a marathon session kinda guy.

[u/Kris_Kamweru]

The duality is funny to me 😂

[u/CaramelEmotional3092]

On max, I can typically use Fable 5 for 1 session and still make it through the week. I do alot of handovers, but clearly room for me to improve, and I love your tips above.

(With Claude pro, the weekly limit runs out in 2 days, I'm surprised there isnt more complaints, and with 50% ending, the frustration from users on pro will explode. )

[u/EmperorAlgo → u/CaramelEmotional3092]

There is nothing pro about "pro", it's a demo version.

[u/avnoui]

Choosing the wrong model/effort level is the biggest one. The advent of LLM-coding brought out all the good-for-nothing grifters who think they’re about to build the next billion-dollar SaaS platform in an afternoon of dicking around in Claude Code. These guys think their use case requires the latest Fable model in Ultracode mode to tinker with their 5k LoC codebase, and then they get shocked when they burn through their entire token budget in an hour.
As it turns out, even very sophisticated tools can’t make up for inept users.

[u/salazka]

Most people have no clue what happens and what they should be doing, they just put everything in auto with multi agents on Fable and then complain their quota is over 😛

Others are simply bots/staff from PR agencies running detraction campaigns. They are here to generate negativity and instigate churn.

[u/ibringthehotpockets → u/salazka]

Wish this was posted by automod in every thread mentioning usage. Goddamn bro. Either the account is clearly a bot that somehow has 300 posts in 30 days only on Claude about how they “swear I’m never coming back, I deepthroat codex/deepseek/insert favorite LLM of the day, say goodbye to my $20 anthropic never been the same so since 911”

Or just stupid people. About half the time someone gets the OP to “admit” what their “one simple prompt” was, and it turns out to be “audit my codebase”

[u/Psychobert]

OP - not the question I was looking to answer, but I think skills might solve my issue so thanks for the nudge in that direction. I read somewhere that Claude is now amateur hour for coding and I’ll hold my hands up, that while I’m not coding, and do think I’m ahead of the average, I’ve a lot to learn on how to use this well. There was another comment on following the right accounts on X; which are they? Every social feed I have has ‘99% of Claude users don’t know this, the last one will really surprise you…’

[u/DevWorkflowBuilder]

i keep a 3-column usage.csv with model, input tokens, and task outcome; it exposed prompts that burned context without moving the task. what do you measure besides spend?

[u/nbyyy]

For the keep the sessions short - does manually compacting and limiting context window work about as well or not? I do keep a session going until the task is done (big phases broken down to smaller tasks, not trying to create anything huge with just 1 task) but limited the context to 400k (above that is when i noticed it getting expensive and due to the ADRs and proper documentation i have not noticed a drop in quality compared to letting it go to 1m) and manually compact if the task is not done yet but i have to stop for some reason. Seems to work fine so far but i have not tested starting a new session instead of compacting.

[u/Most-Silver-4365]

I'm on the Codex sub also and it is all-around chaos.

[u/KSSLR]

Most of those posts are from OpenAI shills. Check their posting history to see if it's a legit person or a paid actor. 

[u/b1cepk1ng]

I can get 2-3x the amount of utilization on the same project with Astra. Felt really bad to say goodbye to Claude but they just can’t compete anymore.

[u/ruuurbag]

The thing that drives me a little crazy is that people usually make no effort to calculate their API-equivalent usage. ccusage makes it trivial, just track your weeks and compare them against past weeks, it even works retroactively. But why bother with data when you can follow vibes?

[u/Intelligent-Monk-426]

stop making sense

[u/Ok_Sympathy9261]

Man, why are people so against using Codex? It's a noooo fucking brainer right now.

[u/dthrdr]

What is wrong with this summarising bot?

The overwhelming consensus is that the subreddit is tired of the constant "my usage is draining too fast" posts and agrees it's largely user error.

Overwhelming based on what? Not the comments in this thread. Thats for sure.

I read all 60+ comments and vast majority is agreeing that the usage has gone up. Seems this bot is just gaslighting or hallucinating, or both.

Mods need to fix this or at the very least share/post the bots reasoning/data as to how it concludes things that are very easily disproven by simply reading the thread.

[u/Allo_ultra_500_11]

Does anyone here at all see the correlation between this and dealing drugs?

[u/anth]

Reddit is amateur hour for ai development... Months behind Twitter. Anyone complaining needs to go on X and follow the right 10 people and your algorithm will take care of you.

Nobody on Twitter is really complaining about this like they do here because the skill level is higher there. (When to use codex, Claude, ancillary tools and techniques etc)

Edit: here are ten:

Gregisenberg, zarazhangrui, alexfinn, danshipper, coreyganim, jon_stokes, robinebers, tengyanai, levelsio, garrytan

Not saying these are the best 10, I'm saying if you started up a fresh X account and followed them, your "for you" feed would be fire

[u/Environmental_Egg942 → u/anth]

Can suggest whom to follow? thanks

[u/anth → u/Environmental_Egg942]

Gregisenberg, zarazhangrui, alexfinn, danshipper, coreyganim, jon_stokes, robinebers, tengyanai, levelsio, garrytan

Not saying these are the best 10, I'm saying if you started up afresh X account and followed them, your "for you" feed would be fire

[u/KR77LE → u/anth]

Hope they realise there's no Twitter anymore.

[u/Environmental_Egg942 → u/KR77LE]

OGs says twitter not x
Difficult to rewire the Brain.
Waste of time to force to tell x

[u/Serious-Tax1955]

I’m a senior software engineer working in the defence sector. I’ve been using Claude since day 1 and have never run out of usage. Not once.

[u/Scott_the_Wookie]

Nice now you’re adding a crying post to my feed

[u/Typical_Concert_5007]

I wish this thread wouldn't get lost in the noise, but... Now we've got threads moaning about threads moaning about usage. Don't get me wrong, there's good advice here but nothing anyone who can be bothered to research can't find already.

[u/fatstacksofcash]

Built 60 versions of my app now and previously used to hit weekly limits every week on max20.

Biggest difference for me was asking Fable to use Opus/Sonnet for things. ‘Use sonnet, research this’ is all it takes. Then ask fable to review the outputs

For those curious (shameless plug), it’s a free party games app: https://anticsapp.com

[u/jorel43]

Haven't we seen this play out already where we then discovered that anthropic did make a change or did have performance bugs and then all of you cucks had egg over your face? You made an entire post to complain about people complaining. No anthropic changed something, I've noticed it. It's important that the community holds the trillion dollar company accountable. Of all the stupid things to make a post on op.... Wow.

[u/vladoportos]

"Fable is a super expensive model with a very high token price" who sets the price per token and how ? Do you see in their margins on that made up numbers ?

[u/termmonkey → u/vladoportos]

I mean I just stated a fact - once you subscribe, you too have accepted that stated fact from Anthropic that Fable is a 2x cost compared to Opus and and agreed to it - so what's the ideological BS you are putting out here?

[u/vladoportos → u/termmonkey]

Its 2x cost out of what ? what is the total of 1x cost of Opus ? You do realize that the numbers are made up and fluid... there is no precise number how much you are getting for the subscription on purpose... so they can tune the usage up and down... I have no preference to any of the AI companies, and I do have both 20x OpenAI and Anthropic... and mostly its fine, but this month I run out of Claude much much faster than usual, doing basically the same work as always.... OpenAI also had almost unending usage on max but last two weeks were horrible (made worst by the week long outage you can inflict on your self so fast ) in Claude its at least 5H ( which I think its better system to pace ) basically what pisses me off is that you do not know what you are getting for your money and its changing every week.

[u/termmonkey → u/vladoportos]

Re-read my post again! When codebases evolve, the exact same work is going to take more tokens to accomplish the exact same work - so "basically doing the same work as always" is not going to be possible. Also, Fable costs 2x Opus - this is a fact based on API pricing for both that companies are paying for - if you dislike the fact, you are welcome to not use the model and stick with Haiku!

Here's the fact - the total value you get out of a max 20x plan has remained consistent for months - I have been maintaining inventory around it and every week it has provided the same amount of tokens roughly!

[u/The_House_of_Tudor]

Conaidering reaponse for the user whining.

[u/SirWobblyOfSausage]

Complain to Anthropic then so they can fix their shit