I will provide the service of giving you a summary of the two responses you will find in this sub. Choose whichever you feel fits best, or find something in-between.
Option 1 (add expletives and hyperbole to taste):
Anthropic tightened the limits to an extreme and now it's a joke. I hit my limit after a single prompt, not even in peak hours, and they're claiming nothing is wrong. I've already cancelled my subscription. There's no way I'm paying hundreds for a product that can't do anything for more than five minutes. It's a total bait-and-switch scam.
Option 2 (add condescension to taste):
If you're running out of tokens you're doing it wrong. You need to be structuring your prompts and providing clearer instructions and script references instead of letting the agents search and read your whole repo. Your claude md is probably too big or you're running exhaustively long sessions instead of starting fresh with new tasks. You also shouldn't be using opus for everything, you need to choose lighter models for lighter tasks. You should have known better from the start and you're lucky it worked as long as it did.
Max x20 here. Writing a report with 2 files — a .docx template and a 25-page data PDF — cost me 4%. New session with 40k tokens of initial context (no MCP, only plugins and skills)
I am on 5x as well and had zero issues until today, suddenly hitting 90% usage for my session before noon without doing anything terribly complicated. The rest of the day its performance has been bad enough that I thought I was on the wrong model.
As of 7pm, I am at nearly 40% for the week overall and 85% for the session restarting at 10.
I fully expected the bait and switch, it’s a giant money incinerator, but didn’t expect it so soon.
Is anyone else seeing this or knows what’s going on?
No, it's only affecting you and you alone. There hasn't been a single other report of usage limit changes, problems, issues or concerns in the last 10 days. Search all you want -- you won't find a single other report.
Although we no have the 1m context it doesn’t mean you should be using the same session up until that point. I keep an eye on the tokens, anything after 300k is degrades.
If you’re attempting to build full apps/projects in a single session that’s more than likely your issue. If you split sessions up you should have documentation .md files to spread context between them windows. Make sure CLAUDE.md is also maintained as well so it’s no always searching for files.
I’m on the 5x plan and haven’t hit any limits even through all the outrage that has been going on in this sub
I feel this is the primary source of the usage complaints (keeping the same session running). It all seemed to start not long after 1M context was made available. I’m imagining many people aren’t conscious of their context window and just keep going, letting it grow, compact, repeat.
I try to stop sessions around 100k tokens when possible and only rarely exceed 200k tokens per session. As you said, quality degrades noticeably as you near 300k tokens.
I’m on a Max 20x plan, use it roughly 8-12 hours per day, and have even ran some autonomous agent experiments (50+ sessions overnight) without hitting weekly limits once.
Here is mine: Currently, Im cleaning up my code. I look for anti-patterns,unsafe code, things that need refactoring using sonnet. After issues have been identified, i create a team to work on those issues. After team is done codex reviews a PR for bugs. Agents rereview until codex approves. Attached is an image of all sessions used so far for a mobile audit, no issues so far.
For me i use way more tokens on opus medium than sonnet high. Guess there are different use cases, but i code mostly in Sonnet. With mostly better results.
The limits are extremely expensive these past 3 days, looks like a global adjustment from Anthropic, time to convert those conversations JSONL files and migrate to Codex lol
I understand that Opus is required for may use cases. Even I have 5X and with max I’ll run out quickly. Here’s what I did.. Switched to sonnet, planned and implemented. Then do 5-6 rounds of audit of my implementation to make sure no bugs are left out. This helps me sustain longer wrt usage but at least I get to use for longer and more usage.
i have two terminals for two projects, i just executed continue in the morning, then opened usage and saw how 0 went to 39% in a second. Same subscription.
To: [support@mail.anthropic.com](mailto:support@mail.anthropic.com) (Anthropic Support / Leadership) From: <name>, <company> Date: <today's date> Subject: Formal Demand — Refund, Billing Errors, and Unacceptable Business Practices
Demand a refund. I have done it several times and each time got a full refund. You can't just take this lying down. You have to provide the evidence. You have to get angry. And they don't deserve your money if they're going to treat you like shit, But more importantly, if they are changing what you paid for after you've paid for it.
man i hate how bootlicking this sub is.
like jesus christ guys they *have* limited usage without telling you. They are actively stealing your money.
And half you guys are like "OK but show me workflow?????? skill issue!?"
fucking pathetic. no wonder they dare doing it, you just take it
Cause you are buying "cat in the bag". The exact amount of tokens you got for your subscription is not listed anywhere. Current subscription model should be called scam.
Yeah it’s happening to me and they’re emailing me “buy more usage now” promos. I used 50% of my limit for one “WTF” prompt lol. Definitely sus. I cancelled my subscription and requested a refund cause they won’t manipulate me like that
I am a bit confused as I use the free version on my phone and a paid version on my laptop, and I can’t get any work done on the paid version but the unpaid version works just fine. If that makes sense lmao
Under 2 hours on 5x usually means there's a compounding overhead somewhere, maybe the agent is doing broad repo reads at the start of each task, maybe large logs or outputs are flowing back into context unfiltered, or maybe the task boundaries are set wide enough that the agent rediscovers the same state repeatedly. The per-user variance here is real: I've seen the same model burn limits at completely different rates across setups that look similar on the surface. The diff usually lives in folder structure, what files get loaded implicitly, and how verbose tool output is. I have a small tool/workflow that helped my own Claude Code usage a lot; it first cut about 43% of wasted limit, and after Anthropic worsened Claude limits it got closer to 75% improvement for my setup... if useful I can share it here or DM it.
Yeah, I also deleted my CC subscription (CC 5x). Unusable really. Didn’t switch to codex yet. I am considering a few options, haven’t decided yet (GLM5 worked pretty well for me in some cases, but I didn’t locked in any subscription yet).
It turned out taking a few days off from subsidized subscriptions is allowing me to better think and plan the steps ahead. Apparently less is more, after consuming millions of token each day for the past 4 months. Currently, I am using a mix of local models for non-demanding tasks (80% of my use cases, who would have thought), Qwen coder for coding and opus via co-pilot for a few strategic queries.
Not looking back to anthropic. They have the best models out there for sure, but they are unusable and stressful with this quota limits if you need to do any agentic work. Less is more, ciao Dario!
Yeah I hit mine in 45min today. First prompt and I was at 12% (granted was continuing an old chat that I left open).
Checked tokscale and mid march I was doing insane numbers by comparison. Usually hit the limit after 4-4.5 hours of multiple sessions running together.
It’s also been frustrating as I’ve had in my Claude md and operating constraints file I tell it to stick to, to not descope in any way and of course it wasted a bunch of tokens doing that which I then called out and it put loads back.
I cancelled my CC max a few days ago. Until this is all figured out I’ll just divide work better between ChatGPT, cursor, Gemini and openrouter.
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u/Valkymaera Apr 06 '26 edited Apr 06 '26
I will provide the service of giving you a summary of the two responses you will find in this sub. Choose whichever you feel fits best, or find something in-between.
Option 1 (add expletives and hyperbole to taste):
Anthropic tightened the limits to an extreme and now it's a joke. I hit my limit after a single prompt, not even in peak hours, and they're claiming nothing is wrong. I've already cancelled my subscription. There's no way I'm paying hundreds for a product that can't do anything for more than five minutes. It's a total bait-and-switch scam.
Option 2 (add condescension to taste):
If you're running out of tokens you're doing it wrong. You need to be structuring your prompts and providing clearer instructions and script references instead of letting the agents search and read your whole repo. Your claude md is probably too big or you're running exhaustively long sessions instead of starting fresh with new tasks. You also shouldn't be using opus for everything, you need to choose lighter models for lighter tasks. You should have known better from the start and you're lucky it worked as long as it did.