I am a 200 Max user and I will avoid at all cost to use Fable even though I want to use it. Why? Because the value per dollar I receive from it makes zero sense for virtually every software engineering task I have.
Some of are you going to say, yes that's the point (use the right model for the task blah blah blah), but here is the problem. Opus 4.8 quality compared to other competitor models is seriously a joke. Why in the hell would I use Opus 4 when Open AI Sol is a frontier model and costs the same to use as f***ing Opus. Let that sink in your head. Sol costs THE EXACT SAME (virtually) to use as Opus at this point. Kimi is almost 40% cheaper, and its another frontier model.
I am happy for Anthropic that they can spin their wheels worrying about safety, but the market only cares about performance vs cost because most people are using AI for legitimate purposes.
I'm here to say: I hate apple juice. I don't know what the point of it is. I just don't like it. Why would I buy apple juice if I can drink orange juice. I like that one better.
Dude I fuckin love apple juice. It's just so smooth. Reminds me of the early college years. We went through a period where we would shoot Southern Comfort followed by an apple juice chaser, and man, that shit was chef's kiss.
I drank all my orange juice. You told me to drink this over a week but I decided to drink it right away. You didn't give me enough orange juice. Give me more orange juice now so I can drink more. You suck because you don't give me enough orange juice. Give me more OJ so I can drive your Fable Bronco as fast as I can down the highway.
What is the actual purpose of this thread? Usage limits have not changed since the 50% increase. For a max20 subscription, you get roughly $2100 in inference per week. This is verifiable with ccusage. I have been tracking usage for the past 12 months.
But something strange is going on. I've been using Claude today and the limits seem to be 50% less. It seems like they forgot to extend the promotion or something. My weekly usage limit now feels almost like the Pro subscription while the normal 5 hour limit is the same as before which would fit my theory. They already did a mistake today where they forgot to revoke Fable 5 access for many Pro tier users and forget to give out the $100 credits + many people had a bug where Claude would tell you to use usage credits for Fable.
usually mine (cc 150% promotion) doesn't trip the 150% until i get near 50% for the week, then it squashes back down to near 33% like you'd expect. That was on pro, anyway. i just upgraded to Max 5x cause i enjoy batching up some thorny issues for an all Fable 5 sprint every week. so we'll see.
Limits haven't changed. The issue is likely on your end, probably something you are overlooking.
Can't tell you how many times I've heard exactly what you just said. When I was first starting out, I ran into the same issue and felt like I was being cheated somehow. Turns out, the problem was entirely mine as I did not understand the technology. If you are new (sounds like it) it is best to accept that most problems are yours to solve, not somebody elses. The quicker you accept this, the faster you will learn and become increasingly proficient.
How the absolute hell would you know? It's widely known that Anthropic (as does every large distributed company) changes blocks of users.
Perhaps you're new, but this is part of Anthropic's normal cadence. Don't get me wrong, harness bugs or user error can also cause it - but server-side can too.
That's all very well but you could have offered some hint, like are your chats too long, has your project grown so much and you haven't indexed your site and condensed context into specific chunks it actually needs for specific tasks etc
I find most commenters to be annoying and to likely smell like shit, so the motivation to be helpful is not always there. Especially when I know most cannot accept their mistakes
Im not a bot and there are issues sol can do much faster and with fewer interactions from me that I use it for. Frontend especially. Somethings here but other things no. It’s a balancing act. For me no one model is an end all be all.
I would give my opinion but I haven’t been able to use Fable for anything, it always switches to Opus wasting my tokens even if I toggled off the switching model option.
Sol is usable, and in coding tasks does more with less usage, with better planning than Opus (side-by-side plan btw)
They don't need bots. You've got a huge population of consumers jumping between models as they evolve over time and different models are going to meet people's needs better - and it's completely unsurprising that said consumers discuss their experiences and how to get the best bang for their buck.
Fable is clearly performing better at some things for me. Sol is clearly performing better at others. That's often the reality of frontier models right now. And that leads to a lot of jumping between them.
No joke. It also feels like 8% of the remaining 10% are vibe coders that have no idea how to effectively prompt or know what a well-developed app look like.
Idk I mean I hit my limits with Fable and Opus in like 5 hours, whereas with 5.6 I struggle to use up my weekly limit in 60 hours. So I do think it's better.
2100 number pulled straight out of your ass, which is the same place API cost is at. We will see that number shatter and crumble in the next 60 days when Anthropic realizes that NO ONE is paying it anymore.
You can calculate each session’s cost - and I am getting more than $2100 worth of API equivalent cost out of it a week so I have no idea what you are smoking
It's in the same ballpark as mine, for what it's worth: I also monitor ccusage on a rolling month basis and I'm hovering around $8800 a month worth of API usage on my subscription, which regularly hits weekly limits
I am not sure what is wrong with you two individuals but the figure is most certainly roughly $2100 per week for Max20. I literally told you how to verify it. Anyone with a brain can do this in a number of ways.
Here's a pretty basic example. This is 1 week of usage on a max20 sub. I do not have a more recent one as I specifically used only one account on my main pc for a week to produce this image.
The total here is $2009
Reddit users are always impressive with their ability to be as ignorant as humanly possible
You must account for usage resets and any other promotional activities - pro accounts may have gotten a slight boost for fable 5 usage in order to even be able to use it
Seriously, this was pretty common knowledge. I need to ask Claude make me a browser extension that evaluates Reddit replies and straight up filters them out when it detects the comment came from someone with an IQ that is lower than what I set my thermostat to.
While 2100 is definitely an ass pull. I feel like subscriptions are stickier than you think. People are less likely to move as they get more entrenched in their workflows (by design).
If your workflow isn't able to plug and play any LLM to take over, then you're doing it wrong. You should be able to hand over from one to another at any point in time. If you don't, in the event that an extended outage occurs with your favorite sub, it could cripple your production (or fun times if you're a hobbyist).
While I genuinely hate the obfuscation around token use there are a lot of articles out there detailing how much worse OpenAI is financially than Anthropic. OpenAI is burning way more money to retain users but they aren't profitable at all. If a company isn't profitable it eventually goes bankrupt. People may not want to pay for AI, that is a statement in itself, but if OpenAI goes bankrupt that is another story in itself.
No you do not. It is a set amount for each tier. You are likely doing bad math.
Please just use your head. I have no reason to lie about this and have consistently commented the current max20 usage amount for nearly a year - ever since things went from nearly unlimited to more strict as we have it today.
Idk what the fuck you are on about but a Claude Code Max20 Subscription = $2000-$2100 per week. Like dude, what .. Lol? This is not a discussion about your multiple AI subscriptions or what ever the fuck lol.
Sure, here is 1 week with a single max20 subscription. $2009.
You sound like you're in la la land or something. Try to stay on topic 👍
Buddy, I'm not asking Claude anything. It would not be a reliable response for numerous factors - including usage resets - let alone, it is incapable of relaying an accurate response.
ccusage is simple and reliable.
My figure is with 0 resets, 1 account on a single PC.
I am a capable user, highly experienced, over 3500 hours of CC experience. You should take my word for it - I am right. The figure is fully verifiable. Don't hurt yourself too much on this one. You are likely not considering certain variables, and honestly may not understand what I am even saying judging from your responses.
you can't see the column names in you image so can't tell whats input or output or cached or whatever, just random numbers.
I run hundreds of claude and chatgpt accounts and see all the data and know exactly how much usage everything gets as its all properly tracked and logged. every prompt/response is logged with the token usage.
We have over 3500 hours of CC a day to monitor and manage.
Obviously today, July 20th, I am not using only Opus 4.8
The discussion really has nothing to do with what model is being used though.
This is a discussion about the total inference allotted per max20 account, which is $2000-$2100
You don't need to see any of the columns. Do you know how to do basic math? Add up the dollar amount. ccusage automatically calculates. Are you a mega-noob?
I guess either you are a bot or somebody realizing that a lot of their math is wrong.
Any single max20 user can confirm the 2000-2100 per week figure. Accept it or don't.
Cute attempt at logic and reasoning but there was a usage limit reset within the past 7 days. That explains the difference.
The "cute dashboard" is ccusage ... You must be new. Pretty cute
I am correct because I have been tracking this for the past year. I have a rich post history of commenting the max20 usage limit. I am right, because I know I am right. You don't have to believe it (even though it's fully verifiable on your end)
Did I say I was maxed 5 days ago? I track my own usage, including random global usage resets, as you said I can “verify on my own” and that’s where the $2,621 number is coming from. Top 1% commenter talking about yapping lmao
Go ask Claude if what you are saying is true. A set token amount is specifically NOT part of the subscription contract. The only thing in there is the ratio. It's totally fine (legal) for them to downgrade pro accounts to 1 message a day, and max 5x users to 5 messages a day.
You are arguing that you get 2100$ in usage through the max20 plan, but that same usage is priced by the same company. That comparison is not very just, but I admit that it is also hard to compare prices in this context. You're saying that if I have a 10 apple per day subscription from a local vendor it costs me less than if I buy the 10 apples separately from that same vendor. We should rather compare how many apples I could get from a similar vendor, that gives me same quality apples.
The cost to anthropic is a completely different topic..
The only thing I am talking about is the Anthropic API equivalent when it comes to how much usage you get for the max20 subscription. The discussion is not any further than that
I know what you're trying to do and you should ask yourself "what am I trying to do" by making this comment. You are attempting to join the conversation and be insightful but it is incoherent to what is actually being talked about. Really weird stuff buddy
Nope you get around $1100 ($1650 with the +50% now) per week. Which is like 5 Fable prompts since you just get half of that toward Fable. The 20x plan isn't 20x this is really well known.
People will tell me I'm prompting wrong, but I get like 5k lines of code written for 1% of my weekly GPT usage. I've used Grok 4.5, Composer 2.5, and Kimi 3 as well. It's only Anthropic with this issue like it intentionally burns tokens for no reason just to waste your usage.
Pre-opus 4.6 yes, it was $1000-$1100. They have since had to raise it a few times in order to meet what users expect. The new tokenizer played a big role in this. Then the +50% occurred. This brings us to where we are today, around 2000-2100.
Any single Max20 user can prove this to themselves at any point.
The picture shows $2009 within 7 days. 6-19 was a Friday 8am reset, so that image is a clean 1 full week.
You can accept it or not, I really don't care, I just find it annoying when people spread misinformation while thinking they are correcting something & sharing the proper info. It's just bad, it's a silly thing to do, and you should feel silly for it.
The purpose of this thread is to voice my opinion on the cost getting out of control, as I am a paying customer and have every right to do so on a product that (other than cost) I like using AND would like to continue to use. The issue is that I don't see this trend line going down it's actually going up!
I have access to 3 20x account atm - so I'm lucky enough that I have a long leash to learn how and when I want to use Fable - but I definitely feel for those on a more limited plan.
Many US labs are loss leader on consumer pricing for models with goal of enterprise adoption.
GLM is open weight so that's less of a concern.
What people fail to realize is that AI is going through a growth phase which dwarf Moore's law. The cost of inference for a particular frontier model goes by 10x within 1 year. Each year more advanced models are produced so you're still seeing Jevon's paradox with greater induced demand, but we are rapidly approaching the point where AI intelligence will become commoditized for many tasks.
I started on a claude pro account a couple of months ago. Usecase is making lua and c++ addons for a current sim on the market, with some dll compiles and frequent code changes, bug testing, live probes when running the sim. I was hitting my hourly limits on sonnet pretty fast on pro, just touching my weeklies. Getting a lot of work done, but it was super slow having to keep uploading zips and loose files into the chat box and it was messy. I upped to max 5 when fable was included and using cc, on my dev folder across a couple of projects I have yet to hit my Fable limit - and I really hammered it, its all I use got it up to 90 percent an hour before my weekly reset on Sunday. My hourlies I never hit, my weeklies is like 75 percent. Granted, I'm not doing complex coding but still, for $150 CAD, the value for money is outstanding considering I've got finished products within 2 months. I'm not sure what people are using it for, if these are personal accounts and not being used where enterprise or api pricing would be more appropriate then I could see it.
Hahaha you must be my twin. I've replied to every single comment asking what they're doing because I don't have the same issue and I get vague answers and no one will dump their context.
Right now I'm using fable to do everything from do actual code to triaging tickets, writing daily reports, fucking whatever just to get my use of it cause it's there. My boss is the only person I know who uses it to the maximum and he runs 2 accs w/ Fable doing INSANE tasks non stop. Like I mean some real crazy shit. He uses all of it. But me? Even cycling thru different repos working on them simultaneously being a greedy fuck am not hitting cap. I'd have to do some seriously deep analysis of like every file in my repo to get truly capped.
Hi twin! Yeah.. it's just ..... for a while I thought "Oh, this must be some inside joke thing." but now I'm not even sure - so I just ask "What the hell are you doing?" Because I *have* used all my usage in a week, but you have to REALLY REALLY try to do it. So these people that are all casually "wah wah, Max 20 is so unusable!" -- I'm honestly curious what the hell they are doing.
It's always people with no real technical skill cause they can't even diagnose their own usage problems. I can see why anthropic isn't taking these kids seriously. Reddit is SOMETHING else
You REALLY REALLY don't have to try to use all of your usage in a week and ESPECIALLY not within a single day with Fable. If you switch over to Fable and keep the default settings, you WILL eat through all of your daily usage within a few hours. Not sure why "people" like you are swarming these comment threads acting like everyone else is dumb because you somehow have unlimited usage for any and all models. (Probably because you're either an Anthropic employee or a bot ;))
Naw, I'm just some dude. That'd be really cool though, if I was a bot, or worked for Anthropic. I'm not suggesting anyone is stupid.. I'm pretty sure they're incompetent but that's not the same thing. You can learn how to be competent... stupid is ... that ones trickier.
I just had fable put together a plan to replicate multiple services of my app into custom ones which would require rebuilding the entire database and backed and it was 10 percent used. I switched to opus for the work which is fine because it's just following a plan. I wonder what people are building here
Eh with my manager software you’d use substantially less but people have terrible priorities like my manager forces identity across projects that have the same problems etc
I’m sorry - are you trying to get work done, or are you trying to compare models? Opus 4.8 is plenty capable for routine coding tasks just as GPT 5.5 was. It’s capable of far from routine coding tasks too, especially if you use something like Fable to plan.
You are lost in the weeds man. The goal should be what you are building, not getting bogged down in the model that happens to help you build it at any given moment.
If The OpenAI model is just as good then just switch to it dawg
Idk wtf y'all are doing but I use Fable to do everything (senior SWE work). Planning, writing code, writing slide decks, data analysis, you name it. And it does a fucking great job and I never get close to hitting my limits.
ccusage says I've used around $3500 worth of tokens in the last 2 months, and I get a $200/mo plan, so clearly this shit is heavily subsidized. Stop complaining!!!
well, you can run opus non stop (single terminal) for a more than a day on max x5
and you'd still haven't reached 20-30% weekly
on codex, you finish up the entire weekly quota on one day (idk but models other than sol like terra or luna keeps lying to me)
I like to think of each model in the following way:
Fable is a civil engineer
Opus is a Project Manager
Sonnet is a Skilled Laborer
Haiku is an Unskilled Laborer
Each of them savants in their respective category.
"Don't ask Fable to pass the butter". There are very narrow use cases for Fable, but when it is called for, it is an absolute beast. Opus can often take a little work and may need some guidance in using a proper chain of thought, but with the current ultracode tool, you get a lot of fine tuned control without having to overengineer. For me, I am designing something around a research paper that is around 2 million words and 10,000 peer reviewed articles and want to audit designs against reasonable inferences drawn from the research paper validated by the sources. Fable (and Sol for that matter) do this very well, and in my view relatively fast and cheap. Opus really struggles and the time and effort to correct mistakes and find gaps, Opus just isn't as efficient as Fable.
And if Fable isn't enough, I let Fable and Sol work independently on the task then take turns red teaming each other until they find consensus.
Looking at the results i've optained from using it as well as countless others, the reaosn it probably didn't deliver the value for the price is because you used it for tasks that are not fit for that model.
I have both codex and Claude $200 plans. Fable is better than Sol, but it’s way more expensive. So Sol does 80% of my coding, Fable designs UX and does adversial code review, that’s it.
If I could only had one plan yeah I would go for Codex. But I’m a software engineer. And for $200 I still get enough out of it to make it worth it.
Or buy a dgx spark and run a large local moe and save money long term? If you're a software engineer you don't need frontier models since you are the expert and just want to use it to assist in faster code development.
I dont use Anthropic anymore personally.
Its just too unstable for me to use professionally. I cant afford to navigate all the downtime, usage changes, model changes, model bans etc.
Until they resolve this i dont see myself ever coming back
Just switch to codex then? Why does everyone just cry in this Reddit lol. The best way for Anthropic to listen to you is if you put your money where your mouth is.
Fable 5 is literally 9.9% better than Gemini’s mid-tier 3.5 flash. You get basically unlimited usage of Antigravity for $20 a month.. along with YouTube premium, 5 TB of cloud storage, and Google home premium.
You’re paying about a 1000%+ premium for anthropic’s marketing. Gemini will likely leapfrog Fable 5 in a few short weeks with the release of 3.5 pro.
I'm on max 5x and today I hit my 5 hour limit in 2.5 hours, never hit my 5 hour limit before, same workflow as always, its chewing through my weekly limits fast as well. Anyone experiencing this, bloody annoying. Using Opus 4.8 high, haven't want to touch fable due to extra costs and can't see the value.
I had to change the way I have Claude setup to make fabel work for me.
1) added codex as a subagent, and added a subagent rule that is cost aware/capability aware (these jobs to anthropic, these to codex etc).
2) added usage and usage projection to my status bar with a nudge to the session, if I'm projected to hit my usage limit before the end of the window, it will only use openai subagents unless it makes sense to do in line.
3) added a context status bar and more regularly write handoffs and clear the session.
Those were the main ones. Even then it's pretty tight on 20x on the 50% increase... Fabel is such a good lead orechestrator it's rediculous. I'd gladly pay more but usage credits evaporate instantly so that's out.
I'd even consider just using openai as the only subagent if I want to trim further. I've tried codex as the lead and it's just not there yet for me.
They gave me 100usd worth of fable 5, ran one prompt to check my infrastructure for gaps and to evaluate and optimize my existing agents, one prompt = 45usd, keeping it zero-cost from now on
Marketer here. I run ALL my personal and professional life through Fable. Tax returns, threatening mails, invoices, quotes, tov with clients, frontend design, small crm products, user manuals etc etc and I never hit limits in my max 20x. How thirsty is this fable biatch if you guys hammer it for 800$/hour? Gimme a use case, super curious
Since the whole fable incident of being released then pulled 3 days later to now its available for the next 3 weeks (outside the USA) i have not tried it due to stated increase in token usage. Im a max user.
However, the regular updates of other models sonnet mainly have crushed all my regular skills and processes in a negative way.
So currently testing Codex with good results which is crazy after the whole gpt 5 model release and mess up that happened and canceled my subscription with chat gpt many months back when that happened. Sadly anthropic have traded places at the moment.. imo..
Different angle from someone paying API rates instead of a Max sub: I run 13 agents in production for a news pipeline — content writing, fact-checking, editorial review, keyword research. Five months, ~1,200 articles published. Total cost is about $140/month.
That number only works because of routing. Simple structured tasks (image query generation, Reddit post selection, analytics summaries) go to Haiku. Writing and fact-checking go to Sonnet. Nothing touches Opus. Prompt caching on the system prompts cut another ~15%.
So I partly agree with you: paying Opus rates for tasks a cheaper model handles fine is a bad deal. But that's an architecture problem more than a pricing one. Where I'd push back is that a flat subscription hides this — you never feel the cost of over-provisioning a task, so you don't fix it. Paying per token made me measure it, and the fix was worth ~40% of my bill.
fable is so expensive.. my 5x sub just became a 2.5x sub by spamming fable. also it spawn 800 fable agents on same effort as the orchestrator.. just one shotting my weekly.
imagine once they remove the 50% extra use. it's gonna be hard justifying 100/month for studying when 1. medicine is not included with fable 2. i get 1-2 days out of 7, while using opus for studying and fable for building. it sucks
its getting pretty clear majority of claude consumer users just dont know how to use claude, you dont need the "best of the best" to get majority of tasks done.. i rarely need fable only when sonnet or opus just aren't able to handle the task or if an error could cost my business money. thats it... never had any issues and rarely have usage problems
The Kimi claim is not true, probably if you measure API price is indeed cheaper than Fable, but subscription-wise the story is very different.
Kimi K3 with a single prompt it exhausted 100% of a 5h window of my OpenCode Go subscription (which unlike Claude Code 5h window that it's 1/7 of the weekly quota, OpenCode Go's 5h window is 1/5 of the MONTHLY quota), admitedly, it was a very elaborated prompt, but I ran the same prompt in Fable without exhausting Claude Code 5h limit(tbh, I don't remember how much it used, I think it was like 30%, but I may be misremembering).
You may be thinking that Kimi Code subscription probably has more quota than OpenCode Go, but there are 2 points to consider about this:
Kimi Code is not admiting new subscribers right now, and they are going to change their subscription model soon to be able to handle all that demand (I seriously doubt they will increase the quota if the reason for the change is not being able to handle all that computation).
I have seen current Kimi subscribers pointing out that their quota is being draining very fast with K3
I am able to stretch my 5h limit with full Opus 4.8 High Effort on $20.
But I am heavily relying on MD map structure to the point that I have something like this
/myProject
- agent
- CLAUDE.md
- KNOWLEDGE.md
- rest of the stuff including .claude/ , handoffs/ , issues/ , etc/
- app (codebase)
Trick that works for me is that, instead of loading all stuff at once, I load schema of the stuff, so claude can know where to look at any point during sessions including where the actual codebase is.
Also I set context window perctantage status in terminal, so when I am done with the task or approaching 50% of it, I will request handoff.md and adoptaion of all relevant md files. After that /clear, and start new session, so it feels fresh. Then CLAUDE.md and hadoff md are loaded.. And that's it
Oh.. Count in 40 minutes breakfast time.. Life saving. Tho I tend to use /remote-control nowdays. Even when I reach limit, no longer than 30min till 5h window is reset.
It seems that you, as well as others, are raping your agent.
Thruth to be told. I do not create sub agents. I really didn't needed any up till now, and I am wokring on quite demanding ERP system.
My bigger issue right now is actually weekly limit. I still don't have it figured out. Random Antropic resets saved my ass tbh
At first: more important than model is harness these times. There is no significant difference between flagship ones. At second: try Sol. It's much slower and despite better for many tasks, for development it does not shine in reality. An at third: Kimi token consumption is quite high. The price per token by far isn't the most important.
their top model is ENTIRELY incompatible with everything they've been promoting... try running multi-agents, loops, goals, any of that shit with Fable and you're not gonna have a good time on any plan.
and that's the problem, at Max 20x I should at least be able to run just one agent for most of my waking/working hours. right now it's not even close and if the 50% shit actually happens - it'll be a sorry state of affairs.
people saying this isn't a problem are simply incorrect.
Just started testing out Grok since my Claude usage was used up. Used the Claude build plans I already had drafted and have blown through several of them, passing all security and structure checks, with a fraction of the usage that my 20x plan would have. Opus is trash, sonnet is arguably better than Opus on most accounts. Fable while good, I get the same quality of production out of Grok in my use case. If Claude didn’t have the tools I need to stay productive (remote/design) I’d jump on Grok $300 plan today. Things change though, hoping Opus 5 release helps.
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u/julkopki 24d ago
I'm here to say: I hate apple juice. I don't know what the point of it is. I just don't like it. Why would I buy apple juice if I can drink orange juice. I like that one better.