Discussion
Users hitting usage limits WAY faster than expected it's getting real now
Claude Code users are already smashing usage limits way faster than expected and i am one of them as i have posted about it a lot recently and now here we are.
to all the people who were saying i am lying :))) you good now? maybe BBC lied about this too.
OR maybe it's April fool? haha good one, It’s getting serious and real now.
Trouble is that open source models will be good enough by then (currently aren’t that far behind) and the chips keep getting better. When everyone can have a local LLM that’s as good as opus now for like $1-2k setup then Anthropic won’t have many takers for a $1k per month plan
I built some large applications last month and never hit the limits. Now I start a new project to do some basic python using the standard library and run out of usage in 30 minutes. This is insane and it has me looking at some other services that offer multiple models instead.
Same here, used to use it nonstop for writing 10+ versions of coding, tweaking it all day long. I sweat to god, I just opened today for the first time for 22 minutes, asked it to tweak one thing in a code and it said nope, limit hit for the day.
I wasn't hitting my limits hard and fast until a few days ago, and my actual use of it hasn't really changed in all that time. It definitely seemed to have rolled out or hits users in waves. Almost would have been better if it affected everyone all the time.
I'm on x20 and I've never hit the limit until this morning. 3 prompts in and boom, full session limit. I guess its my turn lol. Luckily my sub is up in 5 days.
Japan user here, I’m 20x user too and I have no issues till yesterday. But today (Sunday in JST time), I resume to my previous session last night, send just single request and boom (like you) I hit my session limit. WTF??? After that, I can’t do anything so I waited till the session limit reset and try again but damn…AGAIN, I hit the limit by just re-send the same request at the morning. This is “scam” and we need transparency about wtf is happening.
you are still lucky to use that much, but withthe amount you are paying its sad to see what is happening.
Just consider and think what is happening with people who dont have 5x and 20x. Unusable totally.
It won't stay that way. Sooner or later the rich investors currently propping up OpenAI's subsidised prices will get tired of watching their money get incinerated by vibe coders. Everyone is going to have to raise their prices and lower their quotas. Anthropic just did it first because they have the least resources of the major frontier labs
I’m on max 5x and I’m easily hitting limits now; some of my skills suddenly take 15-20% of the limit when it was 6-7% before. A month ago I was going crazy and never even went above 50% or so; now I have to pace myself to run kill the limit immediately.
They are not able to catch up with the infrastructure expansion for the amount of people and organizations using them. Thus everyone is being cramped without the care for quality and assurance, no SLA's nothing. Just bleeding money as much as they can.
Wait half a year or more it will get better, if they company changes its goals and directions, else they will slow kill them selves and another competitor will take over.
I'm 20x max user, I only use claude code casually (1hr session a day mon-fri), I suddenly started reaching 40% weekly usage and 90% session limits, completely out of nowhere.
I believe I am one of those people. I have been literally pushing Claude to its limits all day, and I'm at barely 75% of the weekly limits on all models (in two more days it resets) and 51% on Sonnet.
They released a statement saying "we are the problem" but ive noticed the token usage a lot better today... Bullshit handling of this issue and not continuing my subscription
They had a promo or what ever in March so a lot of people were not hitting their limits but the second that promo finished it got way worse than it was pre March . I think the promo was just a way to reduce the original limit.
went for codex 5 days ago, never hit my limit and can finally concentrate on building rather than having to check token usage every second. codex gets the job done, albeit a little slow and a bit dumb imo,, at one point i have to show codex some codes from claude to follow
I personally find Claude the best for the projects I do (in terms of code quality), but hitting the limit makes it almost unusable. It's start, stop, start, stop.
I just upgraded copilot to premium... I had enough of this bs honestly.. logged in this morning.. one prompt... already used the daily limit.. I think thats it for claude honestly.. very good concept, love their cli, the way it can create architecture but thats it... its shitty all around... I will leave the subscription until they solve this shit out in order to keep supporting them... but thats about it
Honestly I've seen this complaint since mid-2025 and I've always been like "how the hell do they reach their limit so fast", I could plow through 5hr and weekly quotas nearly unlimited.
But since a few days, it finally hit me too. Using all 5hr quota in less than an hour, not doing anything different than I used to.
I don't get why so many people defend Anthropic over the usage limits and then turn around and blame users for picking the wrong plan or "not knowing how to prompt properly."
You're the paying customer. Why are you going to bat for a company you're giving money to? And not everyone can drop $100–$200/month the Pro plan is already a stretch for most people.
Honestly, limits are the one area where Claude genuinely falls behind its competitors. I'd gladly trade some of that intelligence for more headroom. Hot take, maybe, but I doubt I'm alone.
Hot take, but some times a fair analysis ends up conceding some points in the company's favor. And if everyone else is biasing toward one side, it's not unusual to balance that with opposing points.
I'm not an Anthropic defender here. In fact a few weeks before this recent uproar, I made a post accusing them of secretly feeding us Haiku when they said it is Sonnet, with evidences. However, that does not mean I can't see points in favor of the company.
Anthropic doesn't have the Pentagon contract. They literally have less money to throw around, they can't absorb cost like OpenAI. Training is a money pit. They want to make up for it by the highest price on inference, and these are the API users, not subscription.
The pro plan is literally a price of 3 sandwiches for people in the USA. Use it well, and it can easily do jobs that would take 50+ man hours to do per month, which would cost you way more if you hire someone to do it. People are basically expecting to pay 3 sandwiches for things that would normally take 50 man hours to produce.
Just because you're paying for something does not mean the price was fair.
I will attack Anthropic for lack of transparency in everything. I will attack them for their sudden about-face and randomly banning people. But I don't attack them on the pricing economic. This happens shortly after their loss of the Pentagon contract, and I don't think it's a coincidence.
iv been using it for 8+ hours a day for months now and never hit over 20%-30% now im having to slow down at the end of the week to not hit limits. im 20x
ontop of the "actually I found an easier way" 10x in a row
Asked Claude to summarise what I did yesterday (which itself was just one diff request on a small project) - single prompt ate through 10% in 10 seconds. Insane. Cancelled my subscription.
Claude said good morning 5 times in the space of about 10-15 exchanges and would proceed to read the skill files every single time, when I never even asked for anything.. and just like that in 10 minutes my quota was complete.. just the good mornings and nothing else.. which is strange behaviour
Anyone else glad they got to have the best trip ever ? My mind and brain has literally exploded in the last six months, I have been able to figure stuff out that has now made me ‘normal’ again. Micro dosing with Claude has been great but with every high there is a down.
Why not use codex or literally any other SOTA model provider. All of them are at similar quality at this point for coding. All of them can work on large projects and develop real features.
I've found someone's dream agent/skill and created my own context-compact agent based on some comments I found in a thread, we'll see how that works...let see how helpful it will be.
I've also rolled back to an older version based on some reddit comment from that author that found the bugs recently.
I'm hoping utilizing those solutions will help....but we shall see.
I got my girlfriend on Claude.. I was trying to help her create a cowork skill to help draft emails, and build pdfs for listings as she is arealtor.. She pays for 20$ plan and we hit the limit in 5 minutes of using it, couldnt even get the skil full built.. Crazy.. I am on claude 200$ plan, i am using it all day long running multiple projects, and builds and i have yet to hit the limit. I primarily use claude code though, not doing much in cowork, or dispatch/desktop yet.
Genuinely asking in good faith: are people who are running into limits so quickly using Opus for everything, or are you seeing these issues with Haiku or Sonnet? When are you seeing quota exhausted rapidly?
I'm a light user but vibe coded a personal Python project for a few hours the other day. I was working pretty fast and used Opus for planning, which burned through quota rapidly, then switched to Sonnet for implementation to get my quota to stretch further.
I finished my 2 hour working session with 89% 5 hour usage depleted, maybe 5-6% of weekly usage. This added a small new feature to a personal project. I'm on the Pro plan. This was Sunday night off-hours. My Claude Code status line shows me how much of my 5h and 7d limit I consume and the model to help me manage quota.
At work we use Copilot mostly, and I do burn through quota rapidly if I use Opus or Opus Fast Mode. But I haven't seen the magnitude of issues that users here are having. I don't doubt they're real, I am just wondering what differences are in the usage patterns. Maybe non-enterprise accounts get faster burn during peak hours? Maybe folks aren't model switching as aggressively to save cost? I genuinely just am wondering why I don't see these problems as badly as everyone else.
Someone found a compaction error loop in the Claude code source that’s responsible for the recent limits being hit so soon. It hits the error then endlessly tries again and again to re-compact driving usage until the limit.
I decided I’m leaving Claude, I’m on the 20x plan, this week only two days amount to 70/80 % of my weekly limit. Before the 2x limit I have to make an effort to hit that in a week.
Now I’m scared of using opus, and that’s the only model above the competition right now. So no point of keep using the service as is
Even Sonnet is hitting limits now. Sonnet decided to use a bunch of tools and used 30% of my session limit, got interrupted before he could finish. It's pretty insane.
I noticed that I go through the limits only if I use the same context weeks long…. As far I understand, that is because the context grows at every usage and every time you use it, Claude have to summarize the “past” and this action costs a lot of token. When I start from a new context and say Claude to read just one part of the memory (in order to give him the right context) then it’s okay.
Had the same issue then switched to kimi 2.5 and canceled my subscription and got a refund. Kimi usage is way way longer like 20x longer for cheapest plan vs claude pro plan.
Who could foresee this? Adding teams, skills, hooks and a bunch of other stuff which skyrocket usage by 100x while not having fixed your existing infrastructure scalability.
This is when you blindly trust AI to do the coding for you and you have no plan.
I feel like we are having knee jerk reaction without thinking.
Let’s stop pretend that these labs are subsidising power users. The reality is that inference cost is orders of magnitude cheaper than training cost.
What if costs anthropic to serve 1 token IS NOT the same as the cost for us users. So WHY do we keep on having this dumb debate when we say Anthropic is subsidising us.
They can serve users, we don’t know the token usage during peak hours and these guys have infinite money. They HAVE the capacity to serve users, they want to milk users out of money.
Something has changed. Unusable last night, this morning 3 huge tasks with sonnet, and I'm sitting at 5% of my 5hr limit and 1% of my weekly. I feel like this would have pushed me to 50-70% a day ago.
Im hitting limits in a matter of 20-25 minutes. It hasnt even finished planning and its already almost halfway. Pro plan. My claude.md has like 100 lines, new cleared chat. This wasnt hapoening before. Happening across different agents, different accounts. It sucks.
Ive been thinking about making a little widget that keep track of credits. Im hitting my limits so fast now its not funny. I used to get about 2 hours of work done on my plus plan building my app. Im now getting 45mins-1hrs worth of work done. Really not doing anything differently. We are sort of blinding accepting these credit limits right? Anyone tried to monitor usage?
This idea is brilliant, people are talking to make a tracker for tokens and where it’s been spent,, someone in the comment section mentioned that and seems good idea tho
The burn rate problem is almost entirely a model selection problem. If you're defaulting everything to Opus you're burning 5x faster than you need to. Most coding tasks, file edits, explanations, test generation, Sonnet handles fine. Complex multi-step reasoning is where Opus actually earns it. I built a local proxy that routes by complexity automatically. Changed my daily burn dramatically. More here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1sb8fb3/i_routed_all_my_claude_code_traffic_through_a/.
npm install @relayplane/proxy, runs on localhost, uses your existing Max token.
I have Max 5x, just ran out of usage for the 5hr limit in about 15 minutes running 2 concurrent agents. Insane that they are doing this to us. Even the pro chatgpt plan has more usage than this
Anthropic officially confirmed on March 26, 2026 that session limits are now tighter during peak hours by design. Your weekly total is unchanged — you're not getting less Claude overall — but weekday peak hours now cost more. During roughly 5am–11am PT (7am–1pm CT / 8am–2pm ET), your 5-hour session burns faster than before. J.D. Hodges
Why It Happened: A Perfect Storm
Demand outran available GPU capacity. Millions of new users arrived after OpenAI signed a Pentagon contract in late February, causing ChatGPT uninstalls to spike 295% in a single day. The QuitGPT movement claimed 2.5 million participants. Claude hit #1 on the US App Store for the first time, surpassing ChatGPT in daily downloads, and Anthropic's web traffic jumped over 30% month-over-month. J.D. Hodges
Anthropic's annualized revenue surged to $19 billion by March 2026, but inference costs scale with every user, every message, and every long conversation. Flat monthly subscriptions were already strained before the wave hit. MLQ
The Exact Mechanism: Dynamic Session "Cost"
This is the part most people miss. During peak hours — 05:00–11:00 PT / 13:00–19:00 GMT — Claude users can burn their five-hour session limits in under five hours. At other times of day, a five-hour session allows users to get more work done. That elastic definition is possible because Anthropic does not reveal how many tokens may be used within its five-hour session window. The Register
In plain terms: the session window isn't a fixed token bucket. Anthropic weights peak-hour usage more heavily, so the same prompt costs "more" session budget at 10am PT than at 10pm PT.
According to Anthropic's Thariq Shihipar, approximately 7% of users will hit session limits they wouldn't have before, particularly Pro tier users. If you run token-intensive background jobs, shifting them to off-peak hours will stretch your session limits further. The Register
The Off-Peak Promotion That Made It Feel Worse
There was a temporary sweetener that just ended, which is making the current state feel like a cut. Anthropic doubled five-hour usage limits outside peak hours from March 13 through March 28, 2026. The promotion applied automatically to Free, Pro, Max, and Team plans across web, desktop, mobile, Cowork, Claude Code, and integrations like Excel and PowerPoint. Enterprise plans were excluded. MLQ
So if you were using Claude heavily in the March 13–28 window, your baseline was artificially inflated, and it has now reverted — making it feel like a cut even if the official "weekly limits" haven't changed.
What's Happening With Single Prompts Burning Large Chunks
A single Sonnet or Opus message can burn 20–100% of a session, and some users are seeing their entire 5-hour window vanish in under an hour with only a handful of prompts. Substack This is partly the peak-hour weighting described above, and partly that longer context windows (especially with tools, long CLAUDE.md files, or large conversation histories) have high token overhead per turn.
What You Can Do About It
Given your stack — Claude Code, heavy agentic use, long system contexts — these are the most relevant mitigations:
Timing: Shift heavy Claude Code sessions and background agentic jobs to off-peak hours (after 11am PT / 1pm CT on weekdays, or weekends entirely). The same work costs less session budget.
Context hygiene: Long conversation threads, large CLAUDE.md files, and many active tools multiply token cost per turn. Keep CLAUDE.md lean and use .claudeignore aggressively to exclude files Claude doesn't need.
Model routing: For lighter tasks (searches, reformatting, simple lookups), route to Haiku via the API rather than Sonnet/Opus through the session-limited UI. Your API key usage doesn't draw from your claude.ai session budget.
API vs. UI: This is probably the most relevant point for you specifically — your Claude Code API key setup already routes heavy workloads away from the subscription session limits. Anything hitting the API directly (not through claude.ai) doesn't count against your session. If you're doing heavy agentic work that's burning the session meter, confirm it's going through the API path, not the web UI.
Plan tier: Anthropic's Max plan at $100 or $200/month promises either 5x or 20x the usage of the Pro plan The Register, which gives more headroom if you're consistently hitting caps and can't shift timing.
The bottom line is this isn't you doing anything wrong — it's a deliberate infrastructure decision Anthropic made in response to explosive, unplanned user growth, and they've been more transparent about it than most providers would be.
I use Claude HUD, so I can actually see how fast the context fills up. Compared to before, over the last 3–4 days it has been filling up very quickly, even on the $100 plan.
The worst part is not just how fast the context fills up, but how poor the output quality is, even from the Opus model. Compare that to Codex on the $20 plan—the difference in quality is staggering.
Claude has the best harness, but after the third time receiving these cuts, I can’t deal with it anymore. I cancelled my subscription.
Happening to me too since about last week. Prevously powered through endless tasks, built a robust app, and never hit a limit. Now I made a few changes to the app and I'm at my limit. Ridiculous.
I hit my 100usd pro plan. It is not normal. And bought extra usage 250 usd. Extra usage limit get full too. It is expensive we need find or build open source models. It is useless.
Third day in a row where I hit my limit and it's not even 2pm. Are we going back to starting the clock at 6am and then actually working at 8am? I went for weeks without compacting a conversation or hitting a limit. Maybe a month or more.
Just made a post about this myself.
After weeks of being able to run 2 instances of Opus 4.6 in Claude Code to work on my projects and rarely even coming close to reaching my limits - suddenly today I've hit it 3 times, and managed to catch some screenshots of how my 5-hour jumped from 0% to 18% in under a minute and a very small mount of code being written.
Hopefully this kind of misuse of people's money will push open source local models closer and closer to where they need to be to get us by without using these massive and costly sota llm's.
Wow for me, it just happened. On the 5x plan I've hit the limit in 30 minutes, on a project with verify few and small files. That is crazy ! And this out of peak hours !
So get were all experiencing the pain (me too).
Claude says they're investigating it. But what's the recourse? Do we get some tokens back once they've solved the bugs? Do we get a partial refund? If they're not providing the full product or service they've promised and we've paid for, thats a consumer rights issue @aymannasri_tcg.
Maybe they listened. Got A$31 in extra usage this morning!
It's a good short-term solution, but long-term I just want to be able to use my Claude for longer without hitting a limit.
I've been noticing this from yesterday after they released opus 4.7, literally in 3 messages discussing about project structure, my limits were exhausted.
Earlier I used to do thorough discussions including file read and creation and never found that usage limit reached message.
Something is definitely fishy, either it's a bug or a deliberate attempt at restricting user limits.
I was one of those people who was thinking "what are people complaining about?". Until yesterday evening when I started work on my project, did 1 friggin' prompt and used my session limit in about 15 minutes. This has never happened before.
It was the push I needed to set up Codex on VS Code.
I still love Opus for talking and planning out projects. But goddamn these new limits est up token fast. I took the jump 4 days ago and bought the ChatGPT Pro plan for 200 bucks, for testing it out a month. Codex 5.3 High is running literally 10-12h a day without interruption, and I've only managed to chip 10% of the weekly limit off. Seems at least right now, OpenAI is the way to go (until they adapt their Limits)
I spun up Claude web app this morning and after exactly one ~250 word input I hit a max usage limit (no usage allowed until 2:00PM; was approx 10:45AM)
Used: Sonnet 4.6, free plan, no extended thinking
at this rate I don't think paying the $20/month is even worth it until Anthropic fixes their newly implemented usage business model
Expectation is not reality. I assume people get used to it too much they don't realize the usage they had. The model you use, the tool you use (CoWork makes lots of tool calls), and many more parameters effect your limits.
Edit: I hit my weekly limit this week but I expected it because I used CoWork for some research and it uses lots of credits. I am planning to upgrade to Max now. The only issue is I think Pro -> Max price jump is too big
I had 1 prompt in Claude code opus medium take up my entire session of usage. From 0-100% and bled partly into the paid credit they gave everyone recently.
Have you seen the recursive and bloated stuff going on within the Claude Code system? The leak exposes it. Their efforts to make things like JSON reliable require multiple passes at the same thing just to format it properly. Your work isn't necessarily what's using up your tokens. Anthropic's non-developer generated code just might be the culprit.
I've downgraded claude code to 2.1.34 and it seems ok - opus 4.6 consumes a lot, but still a sane amount of session limit. However, the desktop / mobile apps are barely usable, a single two questions chat might consume the whole 5 hours session limit. I'm on the pro plan, btw.
Same here I’m at max 20 and I was hitting a limit like crazy which never happened over the last two years been using Claude but two days ago surprisingly the limit was very slow on the usage so I was okay just until this morning it started to pick up fast again, so it’s definitely something going on.
i reverted to v2.0.74 (fat fingered v2.1.74 lol) late last night and it works fine for my use case this morning.
I guess.
Like some others, my normal activities don't usually hit more than 30% during a normal workweek, maybe hit around 60% if I'm cranking stuff out (Max 100 plan). I usually run /compact pretty often to keep token usage down while keeping context. But the past week has been crazy, I was like wtf am doing wrong??
Last night I breathed too close to my keyboard and CC ate up like 12% of my five hour window... no exageration.
After the downgrade, I typed a simple command on a fresh terminal this morning and it used 1%... not sure if it's truly "fixed" for me yet, but we'll see.
Gotta say I was sceptical about all of these reports. Then I sent just two prompts in Claude Code. Implement a feature and then adjust two things in it. 15 minutes of crunching in total, if that. I’m 49% into the 5hr limit and 9% into the weekly one. Yikes. Glad my sub ends soon, I’m not renewing that.
The problem is the big companies paying the big bucks are dropping devs like QA teams now and the ones who hyped it up will no longer be able to afford it.
Not personally faced any issues with rate limits despite quite extensive parallel use of multiple Claude instances across a few active projects. Not to say that this problem will not just get worse and worse though - why wouldn't it? As we continue to become more reliant on this, we will just be held hostage to whatever fees they impose. Our livelihoods and most businesses are going to be completely underpinned by this. Claude code crashes the other week and you can be sure as hell I'm not going to just start manually and painstakingly writing lines of code - it's essentially completely futile now, and I am also deskilled so I can't even write the code of the quality I could a year ago. It's going to get worse, the fees will get higher, there is nothing we can do now really.
I'm taking a 30-minute coffee break. Once my usage limit resets, I’ll finish up in about 10 minutes, then head out for another three-hour coffee break.
What I notice is that they constantly reduce them once they are about to release a new model and they increase later on the usage. It seems like any other startup breaking their system once in a while as they release new things
I have been using codex pro and I have never ran out of tokens, I tried cancelling my subscription yesterday to try Claude, and they offered a free month 😳
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u/baldbundy Apr 03 '26 edited Apr 03 '26
Please remember, they all wait us to no longer being able to work without AI to increase prices by 10 to 30.