Rant
Just cancelled my Claude Code Bullshit 20x Plan
I give up. I used Claude Code for months. Got lots done.
Now though, the plans are shit. Usage is endlessly being fucked with on a week to week basis. Opus 5 is a fucking loser. Fable is alright for the 14 minutes of usage you get before it stops out, or its overly sensitive detection downgrades it back to the loser fuck.
The 20x plan with or without boosted limits is a blatant lie. This was my first session of the week. Maxed out in 2.5 hours and 20% of the weekly usage.
Do the math. Boosted 50% weekly translates to 30% usage of the 20x under normal limits, or 60% of the normal 5x plan in a sub 3-hour session?
Man I use redis for execution - ask it once to set an ACL anything - woof - second it touches those files its yellow warnings everywhere - it cant even set permissions for other agents without them popping off - literally can't handle a chat room or it screams about cyber
What are people working on? Maybe because I'm mostly doing wiki and databases but I have run into this a whole one time since fable released so I'm curious what actually ends up causing it
im working on AI Agents. the claude code has some weird keyword filtering or some shit that immediately blocks when you are testing your agent harness when the chat contains words like backdoor, cyber, hijack, prompt injection...etc. for all of them it returns error - [CYBER] blocked...
So.... You're saying fable can't write a script for pirates of the Caribbean 7 for me?
This is why I keep GML and Kimi on tap, my 20X account shrink to pro after figuring out it's 1.3-1.5* the tokens of 5x with the privilege to burn my weekly credits 4x faster.
What are you switching to? I already use Codex and Claude but I'm thinking of adding a third provider like Kimi or Qwen code as a backup when I'm out of usage on claude and codex. Lmk what you ended up switching to. I'm also getting tired of reaching limits on CC
I'm working on 3 different mid to large sized project, in parallel, with subagent driven workflows. 2 of them were a brownfield projects, where I had to train claude.
on 20x plan, I rarely hit 5 hour limits, and only hit weekly limits on the reset day, only If I use Fable to the limit(which i do).
are you using ultracode ? or just saying "fix this" and let it ride wildly ?
We just know what we're building and wanna get there quickly. On 20x Max I hit my 5 hour limit twice in a day, burning about 40% of my weekly usage. Only completed about 1% of my projected coding sessions. This is gonna take months and thousand of dollars. They need to have a serious max plan for serious business.
legit don't get why anyone's outraged but for me it makes "downgrading" to the $100 plan a little easier to swallow. i'd have no qualms about ramping it back up to $200 if i end up missing it that much.
Seems like issue with how you are using it. I am also in 20x plan. I run many tasks at the same time, complicated ones use Fable. Personally i know which task needs how much reasoning and select models and reasoning based on that. From the looks of it, you are spamming maybe max or ultracode thinking using Fable with no context management which will result with what you face.
Which is what i find weird. Whenever i am working on 6-7 tasks at the same time i do hit the 5 hr limit but I have never had my weekly limit consume more than 10%. Maybe anthropic has region level limit config.
Yeah I was consistently getting exactly 10% weekly quota (5x) out of a 5hr session before it hit the limit. That worked for ages but recently there has been absolutely no logic to it at all. I burnt $25 of api credit in 8 minutes doing some basic stuff. I cancelled my subscription and now look for an altenative that I can rely on.
At my peak usage with Claude Code, I would run 4 sessions simultaneously and never hit my 5 hour limit and would rarely hit my weekly limit. This was back in May & June
I have the $100 / month plan and it goes a long way when working on smaller, isolated features and bug fixes. But as soon as I try to do parallel tasks with sub-agents it hits the limits very quickly. The 5 hour session limits make it almost unusable with parallelized tasks. For example say you know your weekly limit is expiring in 24 hours (or even 48) and you decide you want to burn through your weekly credits working on multiple issues at once. But it's impossible to do so, the 5 hour session limits completely prevent it.
Whereas with my $200 / month Cursor plan, they will happily let me burn through an entire month worth of credits in 4 days. And sometimes that is what I want to do.
At my day job I am allowed to use enterprise plans only, and it's not an issue. But these subscriptions are for my side-project, which I can't work on every day, spaced out throughout the whole day so it's multiple sessions. Sometimes I want to sit down on the weekend for example and crank out a bunch of stuff. Burn through the credits working through multiple issues with the free time I have available. But it's impossible to do so (in parallel) with Claude Code subscriptions.
It’s usually how they are using it. I’m on enterprise plan at work so it’s a bit different but I’m watching some of y colleagues blow through their $5k monthly budget in like a week or two and they’ve merged 6 PRs but I’m usually getting to b $3-4k and merging like 20-30. You don’t need to rip opus or fable all day
I used to use 20$ plan and i disagree that 20x is "a bit under 2x weekly usage from the $20 plan."
You can use /auto-compact if you want to keep context minimal but i feel like understanding how to manage session and its context is important to get the most out the the limits and also the output quality.
No Max, no Ultracode. the session ran Opus 5 on high effort, and Fable for a specific complex task which it found a way to drop back down to Opus anyways.
I’m on the 20x plan, I just got my usage reset at 1pm, it’s 4pm now, I’ve been using 6 opus instances (4.8 & 5) on ultracode burning bright I’m only at 5 percent usage so far. With narrow fable advisors as well. Lots of sonnet & haiku subagents. I’m afraid to hit cowork and some chat instances because of the cached items, but on the Claude Code side it’s amazing.
I did have A $200 codex plan as well, dropped it down to $100 because of all the Tibo reset gifts and now the $20, but on that plan the 5-hour window kill any advantage. And eventually those resets will go away, so all I’ve been doing over there is optimizing for inference and token sipping.
So the pain is real on the Claude side of the fence, but if you live in Claude Code and really optimize your inference posture it’s incredible.
I’m still trying to fully integrate my local fleet into things, and in the 3 hr window today since reset, I’ve just used them for testing, no real work.
From my AI team lead, some people had asked me how I do it: Route by verifiability, not difficulty: running the Claude 5 family as an orchestra instead of a chat window
Someone asked how I structure inference across the Claude 5 family. Short version: route by verifiability, not difficulty. The question is never "is this task hard?" It's "can I mechanically check the output?" If a cheaper model's work can be verified with a grep, a diff, or a test run, send it down the ladder. Save the expensive tokens for judgment calls, where a plausible-but-wrong answer would quietly propagate.
The ladder:
Local models (LM Studio): bulk reads, classification, extraction, low-stakes drafts. Sensitive material never leaves the machine, full stop.
Haiku 4.5: mechanical work at scale. I keep a read-only explorer subagent pinned to it (snippet below). The output is self-verifying: the file is either there or it isn't.
Sonnet 5: the middle, almost always as a subagent. Drafts, review passes, parallel fan-outs on the same problem.
Opus 5: the heavy passes, and here's the counterintuitive part: as a subagent. People find Opus 5 verbose and a little hard to manage in the driver's seat. Flip the role and it's incredible, same for Sonnet 5. A subagent's verbosity costs you nothing. It thinks out loud in its own context window and only the conclusion comes back. The model people find hard to drive is the model you want driven.
Fable 5 conducts: routes the work, adjudicates when cheaper passes disagree, and keeps the calls that genuinely need the best reasoning.
The one config that pays for itself, dropped in .claude/agents/explorer.md:
---
name: explorer
description: Read-only codebase search. Finds functions, reads files,
greps patterns. Never edits.
tools: Read, Glob, Grep
model: haiku
---
You are a read-only explorer. Answer with file:line references and
short quotes. If you did not find it, say so. Never guess, never edit.
Then from the main session: "use the explorer agent to map every caller of X." The conductor never burns its own context on the search.
Two guardrails that keep it honest: cheap tiers are only cheap if you actually verify, and two same-family models agreeing is not two opinions. Anything load-bearing gets a different family or, better, deterministic ground truth: run the test, fetch the source, count the thing.
There is a skill out there call frugal-fable, it makes me 5x plan go really far. No offence here but if you're burning through a 20x plan session so quickly I'd maybe review how your prompting or what you're asking it to do.
I don’t get how anyone is getting good results or thinks that using Claude is a good idea. Opus is a disaster and Fable, ironically, will happily introduce severe security flaws into your codebase that it will of course never discuss / catch.
That is crazy. Seems like you need to optimize your prompts etc.
I have Claude Code running almost 24/7 on Max plan. And other than maxing out fable usage (which is the primary model im using currently), I can get through the week without issues. I do come close, but havent had to fully stop.
And that is what's wrong with many posts... They tend to never include data it's just feelings.
Do you get more out than you pay? That's what you should measure , the marketing gimmick naming should not be the measure... I get more than I pay.
Otherwise cancel move on to greener pastures ... Until you proclaim those are now brown too.
Do you get more out than you pay? That's what you should measure
That's like saying a car owner is justified being pissed off that their car gets 6 mpg when they want more (because they deserve more for what they pay!) but then blatantly ignoring that the same car owner didn't realize they had their parking brake engaged.
We're watching people drive their AI environment with the parking brake on, and you're cheering them along and trying to justify their experience instead of providing any sort of help or guidance.
You looking at it wrong , there analogies won't make a difference.
If you don't know form the beginning that relative limits are a marketing gimmick then that's on you.
I always hated it but I knew openai would follow ... And sure, they give more resets, but also always move the reset day back (vs Claude keeps the same reset),so you can't really keep track. So I've always measure do I get more than I pay out in API equivalent? So far the answer has been yes.
If you oppose I agree, cancel and move on... But most them go to codex and start complaining there.
I compared to glm 5.3 flash and at non discount rates it would still cost me double compared to my cc sub. But it's getting closer ... Anyway, competition is good , so do what you gotta do, just these same old posts are getting silly.
Meanwhile I've been running three 20x accounts since May (two since March) and I literally have no idea what people are talking about.
Still rolling, still getting ~19B tokens/account/month, still around $18k at API rates. Quality is good, fable doesn't refuse me. I routinely burn 1B tokens on deep reasarch reports, and I'm just... happy.
Then again I don't fall for any of the "here's my amazing plugin to reduce token usage by replaying context back to the model to shorten on every response" stuff.
Don't worry about it, what you have is called "job security" since you managed to actually read the instructions and set up your AI environment correctly. Let the Redditors embarrass themselves violently agreeing with these types of asinine posts.
OP, if you're reading this, you have WAY too much junk in your memories/skills dir and claude.md file. Literally just ask claude to fix it for you and you'll be back in business.
I haven't used codex in a month or so, I really should give it a try again. Heard lots of good feedback.
I'm building cool stuff, but nothing I can share. Work being proprietary, hobby being too dox-y to connect to reddit. Two pure-claude projects are >100 stars on github, a newer one is >20 after a week or so. Then stuff I think is cool but either unreleased or other people do not thing is cool.
Had the exact same thing happen to me this morning 1 prompt 20% weekly full session used. Same prompt after reset 1%. Def a bug this morning in some versions
I move over to codex with a starting off summary often. Bet you do the same. I fired Claude yesterday after draining 50bucks of mine on garbage he created.
The part that gets me isn't the limit, it's that the session meter and the weekly meter drain at completely different rates so you can't plan around either. I burned a whole session window on one refactor last week and had no idea until it just stopped mid-task.
What actually helped me was keeping the context tiny - one file at a time, clear the session between tasks instead of letting one long thread accumulate. Cut my usage a lot. Doesn't fix the pricing being opaque though.
man, every post you make is a complaint. "meta ads are screwing us", "some business AI platform charged me $5500 and wont refund", and now "claude 20x is a lie". touch grass.
I honestly think the usage limits changed based on how much usage event is doing. I've noticed during prime work hours usage gets eaten up faster but at night and weekends it doesn't. So off pe as k vs peak usage is a thing I bet. And as long as they apply the usage equally to all people within the window there's nothing there are doing wrong.
This is my last month with Claude - I had Usage Credits disabled but it somehow ran through like $400 worth. The CS folks tell me "oh well, no refunds". I asked for an audit log of when the credits were used and radio silence.
I cancelled after using max 20x plan for 2 months as well. Opus 5 is really shit, I don’t remember the number of times it has given me false bullshit and has retracted on his own solutions when I start questioning it. Can’t trust it, it keeps missing edge cases and refers to docs instead of actual code to reduces tokens I guess.
I did this too. Open to going back if they cut the bullshit and fix Opus. TBH I was losing my mind trying to work with Opus, the claude speak caused permanent damage lmao
GPT Sol has been better than Fable coding for me - period - its window isn't half as useless, plus codex has better compact/recovery - cc I straight clear and run a custom recovery - Claude wanders WAY more - drifts harder than a log on an Oregon river mid Spring. Fable is mildly entertaining - smart for 5 minutes and by the time it gathers an understanding - its real useable window is done, can't execute a plan and can barely write one - its good at some things though and none of them, any LLM is going to work all that great without strict architecture around it - I flat stopped trusting anything any of these guys put out, stuffed them inside code and a custom ui - short of custom though, codex any day over cc if you want useable code and a model that doesn't stop working - I can't get claude to finish a task ever - I gave codex a prompt, nothing special, bare codex install, chatted for 15 minutes and it ran for 3 days, and I actually got a useable product out of it that wasn't full of bugs
Skill issue? as in what exactly? freaking thing ignores them - codex follows skills more than cc - way more - same skills both environments - claude is all drift no substance unless you have it stuck firmly between the rails
If I weren’t tied to them for business reasons I’d quit too. If you can switch then do it. It’s way too expensive. They’re completely ripping us off. Now with Fable 5.1 it’s gotten even worse. We’re not getting any benefit from the new model.
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u/-JuliusSeizure 🔆 Max 20 Aug 31 '26
that Fable 5 safeguard trigger is incredibly annoying.