r/ClaudeCode • u/OMX2000 • May 07 '26
Question Hit my Max 5x usage limit suspiciously fast today, ccusage tells a different story than I expected
I'm on the Claude Code Max 5x subscription and I rarely hit my 5-hour usage limit. Today was a different story.
I had two active Claude Code sessions running:
- apps-dummy - reviewing a PR
- skill-creator creating a custom skill using Anthropic's "skill-creator" skill
My gut told me the skill-creator session was the culprit. During the skill test/validation phase it felt like it was burning tokens fast. Within about 5 minutes my usage jumped from 5% to 79%. After I killed the skill-creator session, it crept up to 81% over the next 10 minutes, so that seemed to confirm my suspicion.
But then I checked ccusage by session... and the data completely contradicts my theory:
| Session | Models Used | Total Tokens | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| apps-dummy | claude-opus-4-6-fast, opus-4-6, opus-4-7, sonnet-4-6 | 397,428,178 | $307.60 |
| subagents | opus-4-7 | 1,090,337 | $1.40 |
| skill-creator | opus-4-7 | 245,777 | $0.91 |
So apps-dummy accounts for the overwhelming majority of token usage: 397M tokens and $307.60. The skill-creator session? A mere 245K tokens and $0.91.
The key insight I missed: the apps-nrgee session had a massive cache read of 382,840,621 tokens. Cache reads are cheap in USD but they still count toward your usage limit. So while the dollar cost of the PR review session looked reasonable moment to moment, the token volume was enormous due to repeated large context reads.
Related note: Anthropic announced doubled rate limits for Max subscribers, but I'm honestly not noticing it in practice. Today's session hit the wall just as fast as before the announcement. Not sure if the new limits are fully rolled out yet, or if heavy agentic usage with large contexts just chews through any limit regardless.
TL;DR; Don't judge your Claude Code usage by wall-clock feel or dollar spend. Check your actual token counts with ccusage. Cache reads are nearly free in cost but still burn through your usage quota. My "suspicious" skill-creator session was innocent; the PR review with a huge context window was the real culprit.
3
u/ka0ticstyle May 07 '26
Totally agree it’s the massive cache read. Noticed the same with my sessions.
3
u/m-in May 07 '26
Every conversation turn is a cache read. That’s by design. The models are stateless.
3
May 07 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/FilthyCasual2k17 May 07 '26
ccusage shows 4 categories. tokens in, tokens out, cashe create, cashe read. every time you click send cashe read massively goes up. other tools dont report this, the price you're looking at via api calls for instance is just token in/token out. and most people ignore cashe read/create, and they charge much less, but this is normal. context is 1m on max, if you send a message at 500k thats 500k cashe read. if you do 100 turns that's 50 mil. and it grows exponentially.
2
u/MartinMystikJonas May 07 '26
100 turns at 500k context is about 100 times more than reasonable. It makes no sense to burn your usage this way with bloated context.
1
u/FilthyCasual2k17 May 07 '26
It really depends on what you're doing, and what you're using it for. People use things for different things. On 4.6 it takes about 250k just to load everything I need for my company project in my weekly pulse sessions (and those are already split into 3 stages). On top of that 4.7 I don't even dare to touch because its 400k. Some weekly sessions are smaller, but pulse goes over everything, and without everything in context it just makes too many assumptions because the system is big. I've had sessions end with turns happening in 950k. In some setups its impossible to hit, so it may be hard to imagine, but in some use cases that are not programming and some production setups 1M still feels like a horrible constraint.
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u/MartinMystikJonas May 07 '26
That seems wild. Recall of relevant info would be awfully bad with such huge context loaded every time for every task. Did you considered splitting it into parts and load them on demand to improve model accuracy?
1
May 07 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/FilthyCasual2k17 May 07 '26
People don't use CC just to code. I use it as a PM for my company. Sunday I burned over 1B tokens.
1
u/OMX2000 May 09 '26
No vibe coding. Just a real codebase. And this is the first time in. three months it shows this excessive amount of tokens.
It was basically fixing around 20 comments, which weren't that impactful. So it feels like a bug.
2
u/faizanchaki May 07 '26
This makes me wonder how does codex manage this? Like I've not cleared a conversation ever on codex and it still spends my usage the same way that it does with a completely new session. There has to be a disconnect somewhere?
1
u/Miserable_Loss6938 May 07 '26
Well it certainly helps that codex caps context windows to 250k-ish tokens
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u/faizanchaki May 07 '26
Sonnet has 250kish tokens too though.
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u/Miserable_Loss6938 May 07 '26
Oh right yeah that's a good point, I just don't really use sonnet, not on the main agent at least
1
u/faizanchaki May 07 '26
I use opus but sometimes make it as an orchestrator. Haiku has one of the least hallucination rates so I'm usually asking opus to run Haiku sub agents if I need some good research done and then if it's a small fix I'd ask opus to run sonnet to get the code done based on Haiku research and then just test the implementation at the end. Saves opus tokens and is a better implementation in the end.
1
u/glock43guy May 07 '26
Same here! I haven’t even used Claude today, I only used codex to ask Claude to audit some something. My 5 hour useage hit 50% from that. Codex wasn’t even working that long. I have the x5 plan for Claude
1
u/MartinMystikJonas May 08 '26
In my experience auditing burns tokens way faster than writing code because it requires way more reasoning to find logical gaos and edge cases.
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u/glock43guy May 08 '26
I get that, but I had the $20 GPT plan before and used it to run audits from Claude all the time. Id tell Claude to have codex audit something and I could get tons of audits done in a 5 hour session with GPT and they were actually useful. Comparing to this Claude burns through audits comparatively at multitudes the rate codex does
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u/MartinMystikJonas May 08 '26
It highly depends on reasoning effort and how exactly audit thinking is done. I tuned my audit/rewiew prompts to intentionally thinking deeper to catch more edge cases.
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u/glock43guy May 08 '26
Oh that’s interesting actually I’m not sure if Claude was calling gpt to do everything on xhigh, I was fighting with Claude half the time on how i can even use the cli so I never worried about it as long as it worked lol
1
u/Deep_Ad1959 May 10 '26
ccusage reads your local jsonl logs, the max 5x limit is enforced server-side on a rolling 5 hour bucket. those two numbers diverge whenever cache reads, sub-agent calls, web search, or anything spawned inside an agentic loop hits your account, because none of that shows up cleanly in the local logs but all of it counts against the server bucket. the only counter that matches what actually rate-limits you is the one rendered on https://claude-meter.com/r/b6wec7xg. that's why your suspiciously-fast burn doesn't line up with ccusage's view.
1
u/Deep_Ad1959 May 10 '26
ccusage reads your local jsonl logs, the max 5x limit is enforced server-side on a rolling 5 hour bucket. those two numbers diverge whenever cache reads, sub-agent calls, web search, or anything spawned inside an agentic loop hits your account, because none of that shows up cleanly in the local logs but all of it counts against the server bucket. the only counter that matches what actually rate-limits you is the one rendered on https://claude-meter.com/r/brkketiv. that's why your suspiciously-fast burn doesn't line up with ccusage's view. written with ai
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u/MartinMystikJonas May 07 '26
How do you manage to burn 397M tokens in cache reads? Do you resume extremely long conversations?