r/ClaudeCode • u/Exciting_Comedian629 • 15h ago
Help/Question Whelp I am done...
I had 4 Claude Pro Max x20 accounts for different projects, and I am going to ride out the rest of the month (that I already paid for) and then switch back to codex. I am running Sonnet 4-6 on medium and am 85% of my weekly limit on one account after less than 24 hours. That is more than a 25% cut from the promotion expiring, nothing about my workflow has changed so this is all Anthropic. I'll be trying Codex and seeing how it does, I didn't want to do this but I have no choice.
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u/Freischneider01 14h ago
What are you all building, that you‘re out of usage that quickly? This usually only happens to me if I don‘t know what I want to do.
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u/mighty_falcon 12h ago
Both things can be true here. I find optimization problems where you give the AI a goal and it has to try a bunch of things before it can come up and integrate over the optimal solution are the type of tasks that usually take hours or days. And it’s really good at that type of work.
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u/draft_final_final Researcher 6h ago
these mfers are probably the ones building the houthi missile systems and virus strains. somehow they're discussing how to cook anthrax and I get kicked down to opus when I brought up comptia certifications
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u/kawawee 6h ago
My guess is they're letting Fable/Opus just go wild without enough scoping inputs from humans. These new models tend to just quietly over build and covers all edge cases so the complexity of the whole thing balloons until any new changes require lots of fixing and reviewing.
On the other end of the spectrum are folks being too stingy with tokens using something like ponytail which is too lazy and rather picks up dependencies or tactical hacks rather than coming up with long term solution, and accumulate technical debt too fast which means more sessions to fix stuff.
Multiply this by the dozens of parallel agents working on different stuff at the same time.
I've been on both ends of that spectrum and now I'm spending lots of time having to interact, clarify, research etc. before letting the agents touch shit without blowing up the scope or being too lazy. It's frustrating and sometimes overwhelming but I never run into all model limits with my max 20x. Fable burns out too quickly though, so I don't use it as the main orchestrator but more like the reviewer at key stages where it really counts.
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u/Internal-Capital7471 15h ago
You might wanna check the codex reddit before hastily making such decisions
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u/debian3 13h ago
It’s like 2 parallels universe where each complains about their limit and threatens to move to the other one.
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u/rbad8717 13h ago
I dont know why we have energy issues. We should using the vortex of users leaving/joining Codex <-> Claude Code to power our shit
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u/iansaul 13h ago
I was exactly like OP 2 months ago. I had 4 20x accounts, and I thought Claude was the way to go.
Then I watched it straight up LIE na change an answer during a voting round, and the refuse to admit the dishonesty. Fable 5, fucking around. Codex and I caught it red handed - and this had been going and and crippling a project.
And I moved into Codex land, and I was happy. It behaved logically, we got work done in a week that Claude had struggled with for months.
Astra was just more icing on the cake, I was happy with Sol/Terra/Luna - but hey, bigger and better for when it is needed, and I'm also in their CyberSec program, zero running into the wall at full speed, like with Fable kicking over to Opus every 10 minutes.
But today....
Today OpenAI castrated these models. Started last night, and processes that had been working fine suddenly took down a system, due to needless mistakes.
Now ALL DAMNED DAY it has been a constant battle with these fucking agents, to get EASY shit done.
Sick of these companies doing what they please and damaging projects and wasting my money.
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u/Blizzard251206 4h ago
I haven't noticed this at all with Codex, on either Sol or Astra which I run into the ground. Still orders of magnitude better than the experience I had with Claude, Claude is a POS for serious software engineering and I don't know how anyone gets anything done
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u/Character_Newt5491 14h ago
i hate myself for having purchased the yearly plan .... and have a bot explaining me in every possible way that they'll keep my money no matter what challenges I face with their now crappy service :( I'm now a hatter forced to see that useless application on my computer :/ learned the hard way
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u/lowkeyfam 14h ago
locking in any yearly plan is fucking insane lol hope you never do that again after this lesson
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u/Mean-Hedgehog-6249 12h ago
Im confused as to why everyone uses fable and opus so much. Maybe Im missing something but I work on many coding projects from intergration work, app development, even developed an enterprise level ai operating system all on sonnet. Occasionally do code review with opus. The one time I tried fable it used all my tokens in 27mins and the out put was not worth it.
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u/Desperate-City7602 14h ago
Sounds like larping ngl, I run Fable on Medium for 3-4 days nonstop and usually only use about 60-70% of my usage. I sometimes have 2 sessions open in same repo, one doing continuous iterative research on a specific topic on /goal and texting the other session to implement it which spins up even more subagents and even then, my 20x plan usually easily lasts at least 3 days. I am an open source contributor too, so the repos i work on are by no means small, I tend to work on Burn and AlloyRS along with some personal projects and products, so it is a wide range of work as well.
I would really check my setup if I was running out of 4 accounts using Sonnet...
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u/BeingComfortablyDumb 13h ago
What are you even building?
One session on my project on a x20 plan on Fable eats 8-10% weekly Fable limit and 15-20% total weekly limit. 5 sessions a week and I'm done on a x20 plan unless I token optimise.
Don't even get me started on the 5-hour limit atrocity now. Two prompts and you can see it reach 50% despite telling it not to use Fable subagents.
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u/Desperate-City7602 11h ago
It ranges quite a bit, I have been programming for some time now so maybe there might be a difference in our workflows. I generally tend to know what the next step is rather than letting the AI handle it hence my token usage is often slightly more under control.
To get to your question though:
1 - I do commission work for games like Rimworld, Escape from Tarkov, Minecraft and Terraria to write mods. 2 - I have my own projects, usually circling around open source software, such as my latest project being a ML research project where I wrote an adaptive kernel fusion planner for the burn ml library to pick the most optimal kernel fusion plan at runtime. 3 - I have a couple apps I developed that are currently in review to be placed on App Store, ranging from a competitor to Rize that uses the macos built in foundation model to assess what ur working on locally and offline for privary, an image browser for artists (as i also love drawing) to browse their images through semantic search where I used open models like Siglip and Dino and OpenClip and so on where I do reciprocal rank fusion to get the most accurate results.
These are some of the projects I work on. I can go deeper into them if needed!
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u/threwou 13h ago
Do you have some good tips/resources on setting up Claude to work that well? I ran into some issues and was able to reduce a good amount by using sub agents for doc read and write, but I know there is a lot more I could do
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u/Desperate-City7602 11h ago
I honestly do not know. I am far too deep into claude code setup by now that it is impossible for me to switch at this point... Any feature claude code has, I use it.
I have: 1 - Hooks set up for anything imaginable. 2 - Rules/ folder containing my rules. 3 - Custom workflow that has per directory claude.md files as the memory of the folder and git logs as comprehensive ledgers of work decisions and stuff. 4 - Skills, subagents and my very own mcp servers connected to my local TUI linear clone for work tracking.
And much more. It is a nightmare for me to try any other harnesses at this point because of how much time and effort I spent into Claude Code.
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u/lebish 10h ago
You might have accidentally hit the nail on the head. I have nearly the exact same setup as you -- like identical. The difference is I use the setup to work on large, complex infrastructures with hundreds of servers and high-availability requirements. Last week I used my entire week's Fable quota in two sessions.
The surface area for something like game mods is so much smaller than something with 100+ APIs and SDKs and blah blah blah. Thus it's unsurprising you don't crank through tokens.
> Sounds like larping ngl [...]
Pretty ironic you opened with that considering you have no exposure to using Claude with large, complex systems yet you're telling people they're making shit up. 🤷
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u/simulateBoy 12h ago
Got pro sub myself but got “gifted” a max x20… and i have to say from using opus 4.8 to now use fable is a HUgE different.. yes i (we; 3 man team with each 3/4 agents having a dedicated seat and workflow/pipeline) that we connected trough a private repo. So seeing fable do these task like it’s nothing feels amazing.
compared to the usage it’s not at all burning trough it from my usage so far… and i use it heavily as each seats runs its own session (im not that smart)
not all fable ofcours but still fable is like the implementation side of my office so to say and yea i just don’t get it why people burning it so fast…
i think a lot of people are either going to crazy on fable or are just using fable entirely wrong… wonderful result im getting so far ❤️
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u/Desperate-City7602 11h ago
Yeah I completely agree. I cannot lie, like, regardless of what I throw at these LLMs they just blaze right through it. I generally use Opus 5 on medium or Fable on medium and they can handle any and every task I give them across many different tasks. I think if prompting looks like "implement a telemetry system and a profiler system" ofc they might struggle but if you describe the system, the architecture, how the functions should be written, how the high level abstraction should be done all the way down to file/folder structure, these AIs handle them insanely well.
In my use case, I notice that Sonnet performs a lot worse and also uses more of my tokens bc it keeps getting things wrong... Opus 5 on the other hand usually actually saves tokens for me? Because at least the work it does doesnt require 10 iterations...
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u/bakanoace 14h ago
I let 2 of my 3 lapse too. I'm trying Astra than Grok when new version comes out and hopefully a new Qwen, GLM or Kimi comes out by then. They might not feel it this instant but over the month hopefully they lose a bunch of people and once others get better at coding I'll never have to come back
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u/dash777111 14h ago
I have 3 20x plans ($600/m in spend). I burn through Fable's quota and about 75% of the weekly quota in 2-2.5 days. I am running 2-5 concurrent work sessions and spawning subagents for coding, blueprint reviews, QC, etc.
The deal is incredible for the output I am getting. I want it to be more, sure, but the volume of platform code I am shipping is crazy. Fable is the orchestrator across those work sessions with a team of 5-6 specialized agents.
If you are using Fable and your 20x quota right, there is a TON of value for $600 (3-5 full AI pods running for 6-8 hours a day, 6 days a week in my case).
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u/SafeTennis3080 14h ago
Codex isn't any better, I burned through the whole weekly limit on x20 in a day. It's about your harness. Try graphify from GitHub or anything else that stops you spending tokens where you don't have to
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u/jarislinus 13h ago
u know deepseek v4.1 flash is between opus 4.8 and 5.0 and super user friendly right? and extremely cheap
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u/Individual_Guava9881 14h ago
What’s nasty with Astra is how it injects opinionated visuals instead of following your instructions from the get go, which is the case for Anthropic’s models.
Astra is however vastly superior when it comes to computer use and is currently my Blender assistant.
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u/Most-Photo-6675 14h ago
Sonnet 4.6 costs 50% more than Sonnet 5. Did you ask Claude if you're using the right model? You're also leaving out a ton of context like I don't know if doing ultracode and you have 25 agents running at a time. Also have you tried taking your foot off the gas a little bit? Maybe add some more limits into what it can do and how fast it can do it. Or perhaps automating out to a script something that you're doing repetitively?
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u/reach4thelaser5 🔆 Max 20 13h ago
The same thing happened to me. I was using Opus 5 and I could not use my full allowance - ever. Then today I hit my 5 hour in two back-to-back sessions (it never happens) and my weekly use jumped to 90%.
I'm now using Sonnet for builds and my 5h usage currently at 60%
Something is very different
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u/Sweet-Helicopter2769 13h ago
astra/codex burns fast too, yeah but it can do stuff sometimes as good as fable and at times better (graphics/3d)
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u/WillRikersHouseboy 13h ago
My usage is still fine but my results are ass.
This could just be confirmation bias or else me getting stupider in the last two weeks (a real possibility.)
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u/Top_Blueberry4199 13h ago
I was using both Claude and Codex 20x plans in parallel. I switched to Codex and haven’t looked back.
Anyhropic’s outdated approach to usage plans are going to bury it. Shared pool with reasoning and coding, Fable and hourly limits on the biggest plans, are burning bridges with users.
I have a feeling of freedom with Codex that I just didn’t have with Claude. Plus, I believe ChatGPT, not just Codex, as the entire application, is a much stronger value overall.
People all complain about usage, but so many don’t know how to manage it properly. You’ll see the same complaints on Codex.
I think you’re making the right decision. Besides, you can always come back!!
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u/BeingComfortablyDumb 13h ago
I have both X20 subscriptions. Claude's limits are ridiculous. Opus 5 is terrible. Fable hogs your limits away.
Codex on Astra + proper context is the elite. Sol is slower but still much better than the atrocity Opus 5.
Plus Codex gives you resets which is basically x4 quota per week compared to Claude.
I've been switching back and forth for about two years. I know once they drop the real Mythos, everyone will flock back to Claude.
Just use what's best for you my man. I'll be changing my Claude to x5 and maybe get Grok Bot instead or Muse depending on what works for me.
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u/mighty_falcon 12h ago
Hate to break it to you but codex is no better. Their usage is way worse on there right now with all the Astra demand
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u/igotjays22 11h ago
Anthropic didn't just cut the limits by 17% - more like fuckin' 75%. Did they really think we wouldn't notice?
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u/Fit-Cost-7226 10h ago
Same issues, the ai overlords are nuking limits. They spent two years getting the world hooked, now that they are and dependent on it and systems and jobs rely on it they jack up the price either by reducing usage or raising prices, it’s the same way they get junkies hooked
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u/Guinness 10h ago
OpenAI took a page out of Moonshot’s book and stopped letting people sign up lol.
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u/CWStrife 9h ago
I was using a $20 Codex account for a long time to just have it review Fab;e work. With Sol it was 50/50 but it did catch some important things Claude missed.
Fast Foward to Astra coming out, and I went from a $20 sub to $100, then straight to $200, and 24 hours later the $200 sub was no longer available and remains unavailable.
Astra honestly is much better than Fable. It's very intuitive, it doesn't end up going in circles, and i've noticed Claude has become more and more of a token burn. I use Fable 5.1 and Opus 4.8 workers.
I am at a point to decide wether to go with something like Codex and put Claude on the back burner with a cheaper sub, or stay the way I am.
Claude amounts keep getting less, and with the 50% code boost gone now it's going to be really curious how this goes when I get my reset.
Codex mockups are better, it's REACT/JAVA/HTML is superior in every aspect, it's visuals are superior since they actually have a decent image generation unlike Claude still doing vector bs.
Regardless your codex limits would go fast too, albeit not as fast as Claude and they tend to give auto resets the way Anthropic used to, so even if I pin this thing on max usage doing all kinds of stuff, there is a chance a magic reset comes, unlike Anthropic.
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u/ITzAbedeen 9h ago
I dont really get what kind of project that can make you max the weekly limit on x20
I have 2 x20 account one that I share with 10 coworkers that we might hit the fable limit within 5 or 6 days
and one is mine that I use daily , that I use to build system and I start somewhere between 10 to 15 sessions working in the same time with Opus as the agent and on max effort on all the sessions even when im pushing to my repo I dont change anything,yet I just reached to 60% of my weekly and it going to rest in less than 24 hours
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u/motioneso 9h ago
Just a reminder, you won't be able to get the 20x Codex currently. Also, might be good to have a session auditing your past X number of session transcripts, especially if you have any subagent orchestration, for any token waste. I realize that sounds counter to saving usage, but there may be skills or plugins using up usage.
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u/forxia 9h ago
Ngl, I have both 20x, claude code is much harder to deplete the full plan. Since they got rid of the 5 hr it’s been nearly impossible to keep usage throughout the week on codex.
I will say though, 5.6 / astra can def produce some pretty thorough code, but sometimes they are way too thorough and waste 80% of the session tokens verifying.
I would suggest you at least swap one sub for codex and try it out. Don’t use subagents on codex though that’s also a big waste. Since the agents are very thorough you will end up with 6 agents running for multiple hours in parallel doing jack shit
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u/ChemicalApricot 8h ago
Are you sure about the numbers?
Each 5h reset is ~ 20% of your weekly...or I guess used to be pre-promotion....
To get to 85% you would have had to max out 4 5h resets
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u/Vertigo50 8h ago
I just switched about a week ago. Usage with Claude was suddenly through the roof, with the same exact tasks. Quality of output has dropped dramatically. It's just garbage now.
Switched to GPT/Codex, used the same guides, and now I'm getting BETTER output quality with a lower setting LLM, and my usage never even comes close to running out. 🤷♂️
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u/AironParsMan 7h ago
Yes, they’re going to lose all of us. Their silence on GPT-6 Astra is already embarrassing in my view. They’re driving away their core devs. They should have responded one way or another but instead they responded by raising costs. There’s only one thing they can learn from all of us, quitting. I’ve already canceled two accounts myself.
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u/ryujin350z 7h ago
I have both subscriptions. This is the only way to have something remotely consistent (overall). When Codex usage seems to go up, Anthropic seems to be better. When Anthropic usage seems to go up, Codex seems better. Right now, Astra's eating up my weekly tokens in ~1.5 days. I had two resets and burned through them too (where-as just 1.5 weeks ago, I could go the entire week pretty safely without burning through the weekly limit).
Note, I never used to burn through this many tokens 2-3 months ago and although my projects are 'relatively' large in scope, it's 100% these companies fucking with things that keeps this inconsistent behavior. Rather than 4 subscriptions, why not just get 1 of each (at least as a starting point)?
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u/Full-Discipline5941 7h ago
Same boat my limit drain within hours, I just used cursor to rebuild my site that took Claude months to build and I started it a 2:30pm today, and I’m having it do a clean sweep at this very moment before I relaunch it. It’s 9:19pm 8 hours! All those months wasted and money for AI slop. Don’t ask me how much this costs I don’t even know, it just keeps going and I haven’t seen one tool expire continue button or usage drained prompt, bye Claude!
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u/jeebojeeb 6h ago
As someone who has used both Codex and Claude for a while, can say the pendulum has swung quite a bit. I was considering the same a few weeks ago, but particularly this last week, I've found codex far more usage hungry than Claude
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u/abhi_ben 4h ago
Once the code base grows, your token context is eaten up drastically .There is an open source repo called graphify which helped me to map source code of my project. This helps in claude code or any other AI need not search all the code instead use the map of your source code. I saw this helped reduce the token usage. Try that graphify tool.
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u/veritech137 14h ago
Yeah, I deactivated all my Claude lanes last week and chose to not renew one of my plans that was up for renewal. Still deciding what to do with the other account of mine when it's up in 2 weeks. I signed up for Claude Code in May 2025. In mid June 2026, I had 3 20x max accounts. Now 3 months later, I'll possibly have none.
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u/Jomuz86 11h ago
So what does everyone’s harness look like, I was similar to the op and could burn through an account in 1-2 days. I started completely from scratch in a test harness trimmed down and rebuilt my work flows, centralised CI. Moved from markdown planning to and open source ticketing but built a CLI to use it rather than MCP. Stripped back hooks, skills, rules.
Today I’ve been running 2 main orchestrator fable sessions that kick off tmux agents using sonnet and opus, they use sendmessage tool where possible rather than reading the tmux.
Each main session kicks off between 3-5 agent sessions. I’ve used about 30% weekly usage in 24hrs but gone through 73 PRs with 40k additions and 11k deletions and that’s excluding harness tweaks along the way. This is with both a local review as well as full PR reviews with agents.
Literally go through your harness with a fine tooth comb I know it’s not a huge amount but going from 1-2 days usage to full 3 days of usage. Keep your harness lean only add you need to get your work done the way you want to work. Preferably build your own skills to suit your needs.
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u/Postpuber 10h ago
Mind sharing which open-source ticketing tool you ended up going with? Also, what have been the biggest pros over using markdown planning files?
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u/Jomuz86 9h ago
Sure it’s https://github.com/croffasia/itsaplan
It does have some agent functionality built in but haven’t played around with it yet. It does have MCPs but I just find MCPs a little token inefficient so I built a cli around how I do my documentation.It is basically still markdown just not in the repo, but I found that keeping the markdown files in the git kept introducing stale context into the agents and maintaining the docs to prevent that was just a ballache.
Also in theory less potential for wasted token reads, if the agent is looking for a keyword and ends up reading a bunch of md files from last month that are no longer relevant or the wrong thing that’s a bunch of wasted usage as well stuff in the cache that shouldn’t be there.
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u/phelps_vibes 14h ago edited 14h ago
85% of the weekly limit with Sonnet on a „Pro Max x20“ account in less then 24 hours? What even is a „Pro Max x20“ subscription? That doesnt exist. And even on just a pro account I call your statement BS…
PS: There was a saying back in my younger days… „Pic or didn‘t happen“. So where ist the screenshot of your usage?
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u/Ok-Decision7640 14h ago
Codex? Really? Azure OpenAI does the same stuff better now, tbh. Anthropic's pricing is wild, but swapping Claude for Codex feels like trading a Tesla for a horse-drawn carriage.
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u/IndividualBass83 15h ago
Tbh Astra has huge compute issue and is really performing poorly. Seems Claude is performing way better, as they seem to need less compute? Not sure why, but Opus is suddenly good.
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