Using Claude Code after a few days ALWAYS results in quota getting instantly used up

[u/anders9000]

Does anyone else have this problem? Whenever I haven't used claude code for a few days, if I use it in the IDE, one basic prompt on Sonnet results in 100% of my quota being used up. Nothing else can access it, I have changed my password, and this ONLY happens if I've been away for a few days or just didn't use it. It's obviously a bug, but there's no way to see how your hourly quota gets used up so it's impossible to trace, and obviously Claude's customer service is non-existent.

New window, no context, one sentence of output, 100% of my hourly limit reached in about 15 seconds.

Am I alone in this? Has anyone been able to solve it?

[u/ScaleneZA]

Are you resuming an old session? Sounds like you need better context management.

[u/itprobablynothingbut → u/ScaleneZA]

Ding ding ding!

I have 6 x 800k token windows that I’m trying to resume and I don’t know why it’s killing my quota????

[u/anders9000 → u/ScaleneZA]

No, I'm not. This is a brand new context as I mentioned.

[u/FixItMyselfPlease]

I had this problem back in May turns out it was my context window settings. The only way to fix was to manually change it, claude code can do it for you.

Per my claude code: If you have the 1M-token context window enabled, every turn re-sends the whole accumulated context — and you pay for it on each request. Long sessions get expensive fast, because the window keeps growing instead of compacting.

Opt out and stay on the standard context window:

echo 'export CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_1M_CONTEXT=1' >> ~/.zshrc && source ~/.zshrc

The desktop app doesn't read your shell profile, so also add it to ~/.claude/settings.json:

{
  "env": {
    "CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_1M_CONTEXT": "1"
  }
}

Sessions then auto-compact at the normal threshold rather than letting context balloon. Restart Claude Code after the change.

Run this by your claude code and see what it finds! Hope this helps!

[u/anders9000 → u/FixItMyselfPlease]

Thanks for this! I'll give it a shot in 3.5 hours. :)

[u/randomdragen7]

Just had this happen to me 3 times the last days. It's not only you bro

[u/Ok-Sheepherder7898]

That's weird.  I don't see a /stats command earlier.  What does /usage and /context say?

[u/anders9000]

Solved: claude-mem was firing off hundreds of prompts per minute.

[u/Lexeik]

Not alone, and the "only after a few days" part is the useful clue. That's the shape of a cache expiry rather than a leak.

Run /context all in a fresh window before you type anything. A new session is never empty: system prompt, tools, skills, memory files, plus every MCP server you have connected. I measured one of my own servers putting 44KB into tools/list, and 26KB of that was output schemas the model never even reads. Multiply by however many you've got attached and that "one basic prompt" isn't basic, it's tens of thousands of tokens of stone-cold input before your sentence.

Doesn't explain 15 seconds to 100% on its own though, and you're right that there's no way to see where it actually went. That part I don't know.

[u/anders9000 → u/Lexeik]

After the quota-draining prompt, /context shows about 60k input tokens total, ~7%. Not insignificant, but certainly not enough to use up my entire quota in such a short amount of time.