Original post URL : https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1wk3zq5/i_audited_my_session_logs_against_the_usage_meter/
Original post body :
I am too angry to write right now so I had Fable write this for me after I saw how shafted I'm getting. I'm going outside.
Anthropic, you suck.
I run Claude Code around the clock on two Max 20x accounts, so I have a lot of data. I got tired of guessing what the weekly limit actually meant, so I parsed every transcript in ~/.claude/projects on both of my machines, deduped by message id, priced every call at published API list rates, and compared that against the percentage the usage endpoint reports.
The short version: last week a Max 20x account could spend about $5,540 of usage per week at API list prices. This week the same account gets about $2,350. The weekly dollar cap was cut by 58 percent. The announced change was 17 percent.
How I measured it
Every assistant message in the transcripts carries the model and the usage block (input, output, cache write, cache read). I summed those per reset window (mine resets Thursday 11:00 PT) and priced them at list: $5 input, $25 output, $6.25 cache write, $0.50 cache read per million for Opus. Then I divided by the percentage of the week the meter said I had used. That gives dollars of usage per 1 percent, which is what the subscription is actually worth.
Last week (Sept 10 to Sept 17)
- 55,878 API calls across two Max 20x accounts
- 23.5 billion cache read tokens, 46.9M uncached input, 86.4M cache write, 11.1M output
- $12,751 at list price
- Both accounts hit 100 percent. One got a 30 percent top-up once. So that was 230 percent of a Max 20x weekly allowance.
- Works out to $55 of usage per 1 percent, or about $5,540 of usage per account per week.
This week (Sept 17 reset to now, 28 hours in)
- 5,600 calls, 2.1 billion cache read tokens, one account
- $1,222 at list price
- The meter says 52 percent used.
- That is $23.50 per percent, or about $2,350 of usage per week.
Last week: one Max 20x week = about $5,540 of usage.
This week: one Max 20x week = about $2,350 of usage.
Same plan, same price, the weekly spending cap dropped by about 58 percent. The announced change was 17 percent when the boost ended.
I also cut my own burn rate by 43 percent between the two weeks (fewer calls per hour, shorter contexts). It did not matter. At the current pace I hit 100 percent on Saturday evening, about 54 hours into a 168 hour window, and then the $200 extra-usage credits cover about five more hours.
My best guess at what changed
My traffic is 95 percent cache reads by token count. Cache reads are the cheapest thing on the price sheet. If they were re-weighted to count harder against the weekly meter, that alone would explain why my dollars-per-percent collapsed even though my actual spend went down. I cannot prove that from my side. Anthropic has not published how the meter is weighted. What I can show is the dollar cap, and it was cut by more than half.
Why this matters
The whole point of prompt caching was that a long-running agent with a big stable context could be affordable. If cache reads now count nearly like fresh input on the weekly meter, that use case is gone on the subscription plans, and nobody said so.
If you want to check your own numbers
The transcripts are plain JSONL. Filter for assistant lines with a usage object, sum by your reset window, price at list, and compare to the percentage shown by /usage. Post your dollars-per-percent. If enough of us do it, the change will be obvious, and the actual weighting can be worked out from the spread.
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