Claude Code weekly rate limits

609 points by thebestmoshe 294 days ago | 705 comments

Hi there,

Next month, we're introducing new weekly rate limits for Claude subscribers, affecting less than 5% of users based on current usage patterns.

Claude Code, especially as part of our subscription bundle, has seen unprecedented growth. At the same time, we’ve identified policy violations like account sharing and reselling access—and advanced usage patterns like running Claude 24/7 in the background—that are impacting system capacity for all. Our new rate limits address these issues and provide a more equitable experience for all users.

What’s changing: Starting August 28, we're introducing weekly usage limits alongside our existing 5-hour limits: Current: Usage limit that resets every 5 hours (no change) New: Overall weekly limit that resets every 7 days New: Claude Opus 4 weekly limit that resets every 7 days As we learn more about how developers use Claude Code, we may adjust usage limits to better serve our community. What this means for you: Most users won't notice any difference. The weekly limits are designed to support typical daily use across your projects. Most Max 5x users can expect 140-280 hours of Sonnet 4 and 15-35 hours of Opus 4 within their weekly rate limits. Heavy Opus users with large codebases or those running multiple Claude Code instances in parallel will hit their limits sooner. You can manage or cancel your subscription anytime in Settings. We take these decisions seriously. We're committed to supporting long-running use cases through other options in the future, but until then, weekly limits will help us maintain reliable service for everyone.

We also recognize that during this same period, users have encountered several reliability and performance issues. We've been working to fix these as quickly as possible, and will continue addressing any remaining issues over the coming days and weeks.

–The Anthropic Team

Wowfunhappy 294 days ago |

I'm probably not going to hit the weekly limit, but it makes me nervous that the limit is weekly as opposed to every 36 hours or something. If I do hit the limit, that's it for the entire week—a long time to be without a tool I've grown accustomed to!

I feel like someone is going to reply that I'm too reliant on Claude or something. Maybe that's true, but I'd feel the same about the prospect of loosing ripgrep for a week, or whatever. Loosing it for a couple of days is more palatable.

Also, I find it notable they said this will affect "less than 5% of users". I'm used to these types of announcements claiming they'll affect less than 1%. Anthropic is saying that one out of every 20 users will hit the new limit.

el_benhameen 294 days ago | |

This is how I feel about the 100 msg/wk limit on o3 for the ChatGPT plus plan. There’s no way to see how much I’ve used, and it’s an important enough resource that my lizard brain wants to hoard it. The result is that I way underutilize my plan and go for one of the o4-mini models instead. I would much prefer a lower daily limit, but maybe the underutilization is the point of the weekly limit.

*edited to change “pro” to “plus”

landl0rd 294 days ago | | |

You can tell how it’s intentional with both OpenAI and Anthropic by how they’re intentionally made opaque. I cant see a nice little bar with how much I’ve used versus have left on the given rate limits so it’s pressuring users to hoard. Because it prevents them from budgeting it out and saying “okay I’ve used 1/3 of my quota and it’s Wednesday, I can use more faster.”

hinkley 293 days ago | | |

> it’s an important enough resource that my lizard brain wants to hoard it.

I have zero doubt that this is working exactly as intended. We will keep all our users at 80% of what we sold them by keeping them anxious about how close they are to the limit.

oc1 294 days ago | | |

They know this psychology. This dark pattern is intentional so you will use their costly service less.

sitkack 294 days ago | | |

Working as Intended.

gfiorav 294 days ago | | |

I nervously hover over the VSCode Copilot icon, watching the premium requests slowly accumulate. It’s not an enjoyable experience (whether you know how much you've used or not :) )

littlestymaar 294 days ago | | |

> This is how I feel about the 100 msg/wk limit on o3 for the ChatGPT

Do I read this correctly? Only 100 messages per week, on the pro plan worth a few hundred buck a month?!

milankragujevic 293 days ago | | |

Where did you find this info? I am unable to find in on OpenAI's website. https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6950777-what-is-chatgpt-...

I haven't yet run into this limit...

wiseowise 293 days ago | | |

> There’s no way to see how much I’ve used

Hover on it on a desktop, it’ll show how many requests you have left.

_giorgio_ 293 days ago | | |

Not sure. But o3 seems to be 200/10 days, not weekly anymore in my opinion.

artursapek 293 days ago | | |

Just curious, what do people use these expensive reasoning models for?

jstummbillig 294 days ago | | |

If it behaves anything like the GPT-4.5 Limit, it will let you know when you near the limit.

forty 294 days ago | |

It makes me sad that devs start relying on proprietary online services to be able to work. We have been lucky enough to have FOSS tools to do everything and not to have to rely on any specific service or company to work and some of us are deciding to become like Monsanto-addicted farmers who forgot how to do their jobs without something they have to pay every month.

brookst 293 days ago | | |

I remember being beholden to commercial (cough, pirated, cough) compilers and assemblers back in the day. FOSS is awesome but often lags because capital sees a chance to make money and can move faster.

It will change. There will be FOSS models, once it no longer takes hundreds of millions of dollars to train them.

pythonguython 293 days ago | | |

Do you mind sharing what industry you’re in where you can fully rely on FOSS? In my industry we’re dependent on MATLAB, Xilinx tools, closed source embedded software and more. To name a few industries: game devs might be stuck with unity, finance quant devs might be stuck with Bloomberg terminals, iOS app devs are stuck with apple’s tooling etc… this isn’t just an LLM problem IMO.

epolanski 293 days ago | | |

It makes me sad that couriers start relying on third party wheeled machines like cars and motorbikes.

arvinsim 293 days ago | | |

I think it's less about reliance and more about competition.

Sure, devs can still work without AI.

But if the developer who uses AI has more output than the one that doesn't, it naturally incentives everyone to leverage AI more and more.

stingraycharles 293 days ago | | |

Devs have been doing this for years. If Github goes down, it has a huge impact on dev productivity.

danielbln 294 days ago | | |

The very recent agentic open weights models seem to be shaping up, so if all fails you can host one of these yourself (if you have the vram) or host it yourself somewhere.

sneak 293 days ago | | |

We can and did work without it. It just makes us many times faster.

Nothing about using an LLM removes skills and abilities you already had before it.

yunohn 293 days ago | | |

Huh? We’re discussing the equivalent of tradespeople who need a high quality drill to work instead of cheap knockoffs or worse, no tools.

blitzar 294 days ago | |

> Anthropic is saying that one out of every 20 users will hit the new limit.

I regularly hit the the Pro limits 3 times a day using sonnet. If I use claude code & claude its over in about 30 minutes. No multi 24/7 agent whatever, no multiple windows open (except using Claude to write a letter between claude code thoughts).

I highly doubt I am a top 5%er - but wont be shocked if my week ends on a wednessday. I was just starting to use Claude chat more as it is in my subscription but if I can not rely on it to be available for multiple days its functionally useless - I wont even bother.

Aurornis 294 days ago | | |

> If I use claude code & claude its over in about 30 minutes.

Can you share what you're doing? I've been experimenting with Claude Code and I feel like I have to be doing a lot with it before I even start seeing the usage warning limits on the $20/month plan.

When I see people claiming they're getting rate limited after 30 minutes on the $100/month plan I have a hard time understanding what they're doing so different.

For what it's worth I don't use it every day, so maybe there's a separate rate that applies to heavy and frequent users?

bogtog 294 days ago | | |

> I highly doubt I am a top 5%er - but wont be shocked if my week ends on a wednessday. I was just starting to use Claude chat more as it is in my subscription but if I can not rely on it to be available for multiple days its functionally useless - I wont even bother.

You very well might be a top 5%er among people only on the Pro rather than Max plan

ketzo 294 days ago | | |

What does your Claude code usage look like if you’re getting limited in 30 minutes without running multiple instances? Massive codebase or something?

rapind 293 days ago | | |

I think you'll want to specify your /model to not use opus. Strangely unintuitive, but I opted out of opus on the max plan myself and aren't really having any usage issues since.

_jab 294 days ago | |

> Anthropic is saying that one out of every 20 users will hit the new limit.

Very good point, I find it unlikely that 1/20 users is account sharing or running 24/7 agentic workflows.

Terretta 294 days ago | | |

Moreover, if you run a SaaS, generally somewhere from 1 in 5 to 1 in 20 users are using you for real, while the others are mostly not using you.

The stat would be more interesting if instead of 1 in 20 users, they said x in y of users with at least one commit per business day, or with at least one coding question per day, or whatever.

I suspect this could be a significantly higher percentage of professional users they plan to throttle. Be careful of defining Pro like Apple does if you market to actual professionals who earn based on using your product. Your DAUs might be a different ratio than you expect.

rapind 293 days ago | | |

A decent chunk (more than 1/20) account shared netflix. Also there are probably some who are account sharing with more than one other person. I don't really doubt it.

arghwhat 294 days ago | |

> but I'd feel the same about the prospect of loosing ripgrep for a week, or whatever. Loosing it for a couple of days is more palatable.

Just to nitpick: When the limit is a week, going over it does not mean losing access for a week, but for the remaining time which would assuming the limits aren't overly aggressive mean losing access for at most a couple of days (which you say is more palatable).

I wouldn't say you're too reliant, but it's still good to stay sharp by coding manually every once in a while.

furyofantares 294 days ago | |

> I'm probably not going to hit the weekly limit, but it makes me nervous that the limit is weekly as opposed to every 36 hours or something. If I do hit the limit, that's it for the entire week—a long time to be without a tool I've grown accustomed to!

Well, not the entire week, however much of it is left. You said you probably won't hit it -- if you do, it's very likely to be in the last 36 hours (20% of a week) then, right? And you can pay for API usage anyway if you want.

arach 294 days ago | |

if it affects only a minority of accounts, why not figure out how to special case them without affecting everyone else is the primary question I would ask myself if I worked on this

the principle: let's protect against outliers without rocking the behavior of the majority, not at this stage of PMF and market discovery

i'd also project out just how much the compute would cost for the outlier cohort - are we talking $5M, $100M, $1B per year? And then what behaviors will simply be missed by putting these caps in now - is it worth missing out on success stories coming from elite and creative users?

I'm sure this debate was held internally but still...

vineyardmike 294 days ago | | |

Because the goal is to extract more money from the people who have significant usage. These users are the actual targets of the product. The idea that it’s a few bad actors is misdirection of blame to distract “power users”.

They undercharged for this product to collect usage data to build better coding agents in the future. It was a ploy for data.

Anecdotally, I use Claude Code with the $20/mo subscription. I just use it for personal projects, so I figured $20 was my limit on what I’d be willing to spend to play around with it. I historically hit my limits just a few times, after ~4hrs of usage (resets every 5hrs). They recently updated the system and I hit my limits consistently within an hour or two. I’m guessing this weekly limit will affect me.

I found a CLI tool (which I found in this thread today) that estimates I’m using ~$150/mo in usage if I paid through the API. Obviously this is very different from my payments. If this was a professional tool, maybe I’d pay, but not as a hobbyist.

Uehreka 294 days ago | | |

> why not figure out how to special case them without affecting everyone else

I’m guessing that they did, and that that’s what this policy is.

If you’re talking about detecting account sharing/reselling, I’m guessing they have some heuristics, but they really don’t want the bad press from falsely accusing people of that stuff.

data-ottawa 294 days ago | | |

They did have several outages last week, it would be good to find better plans for those huge users but I can also see them wanting to just stop the bleeding.

Aurornis 294 days ago | | |

> why not figure out how to special case them without affecting everyone else is the primary question I would ask myself if I worked on this

The announcement says that using historical data less than 5% of users would even be impacted.

That seems kind of clear: The majority of users will never notice.

bananapub 294 days ago | | |

> if it affects only a minority of accounts, why not figure out how to special case them without affecting everyone else

that's exactly what they have done - the minority of accounts that consume many standard deviations above the mean of resources will be limited, everyone else will be unaffected.

nharada 294 days ago | | |

What do you think they should have done instead?

thephyber 293 days ago | |

(1) I use Claude Code as a solo iOS developer and don’t hit the 5 hour limits much. I suspect the users hitting it more often are throwing way more tokens from much larger code repos and are probably asking for larger incremental changes.

(2) I interpret this change as targeting people who are abusing the single Pro account, but using it more like a multi-developer business would maximizing the number of tokens (multiple sessions running 24/7 always hitting the limits). Anthropic has a business interest in pushing those users to use the API (paying per token) or upgrade to the $200/mo subscription.

(3) While I fear they might regularly continue to push the top x% usage tier users into the higher subscription rate, I also realize this is the first adjustment for token rates of Claude Pro since Claude Code became available on that subscription.

(4) If you don’t want to wait for the next unthrottling, you can always switch to the API usage and pay per token until you are unblocked.

jonas21 294 days ago | |

You can use an API key to get more usage on a pay-as-you-go basis.

blitzar 294 days ago | | |

You can set cash on fire if you want to.

Wowfunhappy 294 days ago | | |

Yes, but that's so expensive I will never do it!

wahnfrieden 293 days ago | | |

Just buy several Max tier subscriptions...

swalsh 294 days ago | |

I used about $300 worth of credits based on ccusage ($20 pro plan). It's pretty easy to hit the limit once you get going.

blitzar 294 days ago | | |

I use about $20 a day - 6 days a week, on the $20 plan.

mrits 294 days ago | |

I imagine they will add some features soon where you have more control. It could get complicated quickly. Before they put this in I think they should have at least given you an easy way to buy more credits at a hugely discounted rate.

I know entire offices in Bangladesh share some of these accounts, so I can see how it is a problem.

fuzzzerd 294 days ago | | |

That is exactly the use case they're trying to stop. Sharing accounts.

matt3210 293 days ago | |

>If I do hit the limit, that's it for the entire week

Now your vibes can be at the beach.

Dilettante_ 293 days ago | | |

"The 4-hour vibe week"

jcims 294 days ago | |

Cursor sent me a note yesterday that at my current usage rate I was going to exceed whatever cap was in place at some date in the future. I thought that was very helpful.

gaws 290 days ago | |

> If I do hit the limit, that's it for the entire week—a long time to be without a tool I've grown accustomed to!

These limits will only get worse. Let this be a wake-up call for you to not put all your development eggs in the A.I. basket.

Teknomadix 293 days ago | |

Speaking of ripgrep, adding `rg`, `fzf` and a few other tools to my Claude config seems to have been helpful in reducing token consumption and improving agents capabilities. I'm curious what other tools people are giving their agents instructions to use and what the experience is like?

jimbo808 294 days ago |

I'm not sure how this will play out long term, but I really am not a fan of having to feel like I'm using a limited resource whenever I use an LLM. People like unlimited plans, we are used to them for internet, text messaging, etc. The current pricing models just feel bad.

serf 294 days ago |

200 bucks a month isn't enough. Fine. Make a plan that is enough so that I will be left alone about time limits and enforced breaks.

NOTHING breaks flow better than "Woops! Times up!"; it's worse than credit quotas -- at least then I can make a conscious decision to spend more money or not towards the project.

This whole 'twiddle your thumbs for 5 hours while the gpus cool off' concept isn't productive for me.

'35 hours' is absolutely nothing when you spawn lots of agents, and the damn thing is built to support that behavior.

Aurornis 294 days ago | |

> '35 hours' is absolutely nothing when you spawn lots of agents, and the damn thing is built to support that behavior.

I wouldn't call "spawning a lot of agents" to be a typical use case of the personal plan.

That was always in the domain of switching to a pay as you go API. It's nice that they allowed it on the fixed rate plans, but those plans were always advertised as higher limits, not unlimited.

nojs 294 days ago | | |

It’s literally recommended in “Best practices”: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-pract...

ankit219 294 days ago | |

API has fewer limits, and practically limitless. Claude is also on Aws and gcp, where you get more quotas (probably credits as well) and different rate limits.

ChadMoran 294 days ago | |

This. Optimize for the good actors, not the bad ones.

chomp 294 days ago | |

Just use the API

wahnfrieden 293 days ago | | |

Just buy multiple Max subscriptions.

strictnein 294 days ago |

Confused on the Max 5x vs Max 20x. I'm on the latter, and in my email it says:

> "Most Max 20x users can expect 240-480 hours of Sonnet 4 and 24-40 hours of Opus 4 within their weekly rate limits."

In this post it says:

> "Most Max 5x users can expect 140-280 hours of Sonnet 4 and 15-35 hours of Opus 4 within their weekly rate limits."

How is the "Max 20x" only an additional 5-9 hours of Opus 4, and not 4x that of "Max 5x"? At least I'd expect a doubling, since I'm paying twice as much.

social_quotient 293 days ago |

I love Claude Code, but Anthropic’s recent messaging is all over the map.

1- “More throughput” on the API, but stealth caps in the UI - On Jun 19 Anthropic told devs the API now supports higher per-minute throughput and larger batch sizes, touting this as proof the underlying infra is scaling. Yay!?? - A week later they roll out weekly hard stops on the $100/$200 “Max” plans — affecting up to 5 % of all users by their own admission.

Those two signals don’t reconcile. If capacity really went up, why the new choke point? I keep getting this odd visceral reaction/anticipation that each time they announce something good, we are gonna get whacked on an existing use case.

2- Sub-agents encourage 24x7 workflows, then get punished… The Sub-agent feature docs literally showcase spawning parallel tasks that run unattended. Now the same behavior is cited as “advanced usage … impacting system capacity.”

You can’t market “let Claude handle everything in the background” and then blame users who do exactly that. You’re holding it wrong?

3 Opaqueness forces rationing (the other poster comments re: rationing vs hoarding, I can’t reconcile it being hoarding since its use it or lose it.)

There’s still no real-time meter inside Claude/CC, only a vague icon that turns red near 50%. Power users end up rationing queries because hitting the weekly wall means a seven day timeout. Thats a dark dark pattern if I’ve seen one, id think not appropriate for developer tooling. (CCusage is a helpful tool that shouldn’t be needed!)

The, you’re holding it wrong, seems so bizarre to me meanwhile all of the other signaling is about more usage, more use cases, more dependency.

alwillis 294 days ago |

From Anthropic’s Reddit account:

One user consumed tens of thousands in model usage on a $200 plan. Though we're developing solutions for these advanced use cases, our new rate limits will ensure a more equitable experience for all users while also preventing policy violations like account sharing and reselling access.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

jjcm 294 days ago |

They need metered billing for their plans.

All AI companies are hitting the same thing and dealing with the same play - they don't want users to think about cost when they're prompting, so they offer high cost flat fee plans.

The reality is though there will always be a cohort of absolute power users who will push the limits of those flat fee plans to the logical extremes. Startups like Terragon are specifically engineered to help you optimize your plan usage. This causes a cat and mouse game where they have to keep lowering limits as people work around them, which often results in people thinking about price more, not less.

Cursor has adjusted their limits several times, now Anthropic is, others will soon follow as they decide to stop subsidizing the 10% of extreme power users.

Just offer metered plans that let me use the web interface.

paxys 294 days ago | |

The API exists. You can generate a token and use Claude Code with it directly, no plan needed.

tough 294 days ago | | |

then why sell fake -unlimited- plans to hook people up

It lasted less than a week -unlimited- been a shit show cutting down since then

richwater 294 days ago | |

> Just offer metered plans that let me use the web interface.

The problem is this would reveal how expensive it _actually_ is to service interference right now at the scale that people use it for productive things.

throwdbaaway 293 days ago | | |

Another problem is that it works like a slot machine -- sometimes the code is good, most of the time the code is mediocre and full of bugs.

Last Friday I spent about $15 in 1 hour using claude code with API key, and the code doesn't really work, even though all the unit tests passed. I am not going to touch it for weeks, while the loss is fresh in my mind.

With a subscription though, you can keep on gambling, until you get a hit.

bravesoul2 294 days ago | |

It's 1990s shared hosting again!

OtherShrezzing 294 days ago |

This email could have been a lot more helpful if it read “in the following months, your account entered one of these rate limits: Aug 2024, Jan 2025, May 2025” or similar.

I have no idea if I’m in the top 5% of users. Top 1% seems sensible to rate limit, but top 5% at most SaaS businesses is the entire daily-active-users pool.

127 293 days ago |

It's strange that everywhere I see people just believing everything they say and blaming the users. It's not as if a big corp has ever lied before...? People are just so gullible.

Using the $20 Pro sub and for anything above Hello World project size, it's easy to hit the 5 hour window limit in just 2 hours. Most of the tokens are spent on Claude Code own stupidity and its mistakes quickly snowballing.

matltc 293 days ago | |

"You're just prompting it wrong. Did you:

1. set up your dozens of /\.?claude.*\.(json|md)/i dotfiles? 2. give insanely detailed prompts that took longer to write than the code itself? 3. Turn on auto-accept so that you can only review code in one giant chunk in diff, therefore disallowing you to halt any bad design/errors during the first shot?"

> ...easy to hit the 5 hour window limit in just 2 hours

I've had this experience. Sucks especially when you're working in a monorepo because you have client/server that both need to stay in context.

am17an 293 days ago | | |

Asymptotically, prompting is a programming language.

swalsh 294 days ago |

That's fine, please make it VERY CLEAR how much of my limit is left, and how much i've used.

kaztal 293 days ago | |

I just can’t believe how people are fine with spending $200 per month for such an unclear product. Like, what am I buying here? It’s less concrete than a frying pan, less renting a movie, even less than a monthly subscription of Adobe programs. Is easily the most confusing high value product discussed on this site.

loufe 294 days ago | |

Seriously. I still find it ridiculous that even after they upped Opus' limit from 60% to 80% they don't show usage % below that. It's sapping my ability to use it quickly on the 5x plan.

shard972 293 days ago | | |

https://github.com/ryoppippi/ccusage

rstupek 294 days ago |

"... and advanced usage patterns like running Claude 24/7 in the background" this is why we can't have nice things

serial_dev 294 days ago | |

All of these AI services tell everyone how amazing AI is, it can run things, solve things on its own, while the developers are drinking coffee or sleeping. Some developers could actually do that with the service they paid for, fully in agreement with the terms and now it is their fault?

OtherShrezzing 294 days ago | | |

Anthropic put out a press release over the weekend describing the internal team’s hints and tips to make CC useful. The 2nd tip was “run it in a bunch of different features at once”.

furyofantares 294 days ago | | |

Many such people have been in HN threads bragging about having servers running 24/7 and how they're getting $10,000 worth of compute (based on API pricing) for $200 per month. If anyone doing that is surprised that it wasn't going to last, then lmfao.

ohdeargodno 294 days ago | | |

"they paid for"

$100 doesn't even cover the electricity of running the servers every night, they were abusing a service and now everyone suffers because of them.

Modified3019 294 days ago | |

Yeah that part made me laugh. Clearly the work of Benevolent World Exploders trying to hasten the heat death of the universe.

taylorbuley 294 days ago | |

I imagine this was not surprising. This had to have been well-considered by the teams in the first round of pricing. I'm guessing they just didn't want it to be a blocker for release and the implementation is now catching up.

bad_haircut72 294 days ago | |

They set the pricing how is this even wrong - I will run my claude subscription non stop until they cut me off, I paid for it they should honor what they sold. And yes Im a max subscriber who still frequently hits limits

volkk 294 days ago | |

i mean, this is exactly how price discovery works. if you give loose usage requirements, you'll have actors who take full advantage of it. not on the people using it but ultimately on the company that pretends they can sustain something like this, and then claw back the niceties

404mm 294 days ago | |

I got the same email (for my Pro account). And all the limits they set have nothing to do with their reason for setting them. Pro is so limited already that people “running 24/7” is a total nonsense.

lucb1e 294 days ago |

> affecting less than 5% of users

Probably phrased to sound like little but as someone used to seeing like 99% (or, conversely, 1% down) as a bad uptime affecting lots and lots of users, this feels massive. If you have half a million users (I have no idea, just a ballpark guess), then you're saying this will affect just shy of the 25 thousand people that use your product the most. Oof!

_boffin_ 294 days ago | |

Reminds me of gym membership utilization rates. You have something like 50% not even going. A large % left only go a few times a month…. Yada yada

lucb1e 294 days ago | | |

Exactly! And then you alienate the top 10% fans among the members that ever go (since 10% of those 50% is 5%). They must know this is terrible for the brand so I guess there is a real good financial reason for doing this

(Congrats on 777 karma btw :). No matter the absolute number on sites like these, I always still love hitting palindromes or round numbers or such myself)

0xbadcafebee 293 days ago |

Possibly dumb suggestion, but what about adaptive limits?

Option 1: You start out bursting requests, and then slow them down gradually, and after a "cool-down period" they can burst again. This way users can still be productive for a short time without churning your servers, then take a break and come back.

Option 2: "Data cap": like mobile providers, a certain number of high requests, and after that you're capped to a very slow rate, unless you pay for more. (this one makes you more money)

Option 3: Infrastructure and network level adaptive limits. You can throttle process priority to de-prioritize certain non-GPU tasks (though I imagine the bulk of your processing is GPU?), and you can apply adaptive QoS rules to throttle network requests for certain streams. Another one might be different pools of servers (assuming you're using k8s or similar), and based on incoming request criteria, schedule the high-usage jobs to slower servers and prioritize faster shorter jobs to the faster servers.

And aside from limits, it's worth spending a day tracing the most taxing requests to find whatever the least efficient code paths are and see if you can squash them with a small code or infra change. It's not unusual for there to be inefficient code that gives you tons of extra headroom once patched.

low_tech_punk 293 days ago | |

Definitely something telecom is doing. People seems to be ok with their “unlimited” plans that throttle after a usage cap. Actually curious how the economics of those plans work out.

manveerc 294 days ago |

For most people, this is a tool we use daily. What’s the reasoning behind choosing a weekly usage limit instead of a daily one? Is it because the top 5 percent of users tend to have spiky usage on certain days, such as weekends? If that’s the case, has there been any consideration of offering different usage tiers for weekdays and weekends?

I’m just curious how this decision came about. In most cases, I’ve seen either daily or monthly limits, so the weekly model stood out.

globular-toast 293 days ago | |

It's to make you use it less on Monday for fear of losing it by Friday.

data-ottawa 294 days ago |

The 5% being ‘abusive’ limit seems high (1/20 users — that feels like an arbitrary cost cut based on customer numbers rather than objective based on costs/profit). I would have much preferred to see a scalpel applied to the abusive accounts than this — and from what I’ve seen those users should be very obvious (I’ve seen posts on Reddit with people running dozens of CC instances 24/7).

I also have to wonder how much Sub Agents and MCP are adding to the use, sub agents are brand new and won’t even be in that 95% statistic.

At the end of this email there a lot of unknowns for me (am I in the 5%, will I get cut off, am I about to see my usage increase now that I added a few sub agents?). That’s not a good place to be as a customer.

steve_adams_86 294 days ago |

I'm well within the 95%. I might lack an imagination here, but... What are you guys doing that you hit or exceed limits so easily, and if you do... Why does it matter? Sometimes I'd like to continue exploring ideas with Claude, but once I hit the limit I make a mental note of the time it'll come back and carry on planning and speccing without it. That's fine. If anything, some time away from the slot machine often helps with ensuring I stay on course.

flashgordon 294 days ago |

Ok I really really have to figure out how to have a local setup of the open-source LLMs. I know i know - the "fixed costs" are high. But I have a strong feeling being able to setup local LLMs (and the rig for it) is the next build-your-own-PC phase. All I want is a coding agent and the grunt power to run it locally. Everything else Il build (generate) with it.

I see so many folks claiming crazy hardware rigs and performance numbers so no idea where to begin. Any good starting points on this?

(Ok budget is TBD - but seeing a you get X for $Y would atleast help make an informed decision).

knowsuchagency 294 days ago |

One feature I would love to have is the ability to switch the model used for a message using a shorthand like #sonnet. Often, I don't want or need opus but I don't want to engage in a 3 step process where I need to:

1. switch models using /model 2. message 3. switch back to opus using /model

Help me help you (manage usage) by allowing me to submit something like "let's commit and push our changes to github #sonnet". Tasks like these rarely need opus-level intelligence and it comes up all the time.

vunderba 294 days ago | |

Agreed. I was hoping that they would add this (model selection) to the template for defining subagents.

https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/sub-agents

gardnr 294 days ago | |

That would be great! I want to plan and analyze with opus but happy to use sonnet for code gen. Sonnet is faster and just as good at codegen. Opus is better at planning a change.

sea-gold 294 days ago |

Official Anthropic post on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1mbo1sb/updating_...

codethief 294 days ago | |

Thanks, I had been wondering what the source was.

globular-toast 293 days ago | | |

This had also been sent in email form to subscribers.

submeta 294 days ago |

This explanation is so vague that it’s hard to take seriously. Anthropic has full access to usage data—they could easily identify abusive users and throttle them specifically. But they don’t. Why? Because it was never really about stopping abuse. The truth is: Anthropic can’t handle the traffic and growth, and now they’re looking for a convenient excuse to limit access and point fingers at so-called “heavy users.”

The problem is, we have no visibility into how much we’ve actually used or how much quota we have left. So we’ll just get throttled without warning—regularly. And not because we’re truly heavy users, but because that’s the easiest lever to pull.

And I suspect many of us paying $200 a month will be left wondering, “Did I use it too much? Is this my fault?” when in reality, it never was.

bananapub 294 days ago | |

> they could easily identify abusive users and throttle them specifically.

that's exactly what they've done? they've even put rough numbers in the email indicating what they consider to be "abusive"?

submeta 294 days ago | | |

That’s bs. I just switched from 100 EUR a month to 200 EUR plan. Why? Because two days ago Anthropic decided that I had to wait until noon. And I just started my workday and used CC for half an hour.

I use CC 1-3h a day. Three days a week. Am I a heavy user now? Will I be in the 5% group? If I am, who will I argue with? Anthropic says in its mail that I can cancel my subscription.

raytopia 294 days ago |

I was wondering when the free lunch for these tools was going to end. All the AI stuff has been incredibly subsidized by investors and it'll be interesting to see whay the real cost is going to be when companies like Anthropic and OpenAI need to make money.

lucb1e 294 days ago | |

Wasn't it like 2$ in electricity for every 1$ they take in revenue at OpenAI? I think it was a Flemish podcast where they mentioned that such numbers had leaked (episode was recorded a month ago), hard to find back among a 2-hour podcast episode but as a ballpark figure

QuadmasterXLII 294 days ago |

Their business model with the pro plan is to sell a dollar for 80 cents for a while to gain market share. Once they have spent the money allocated to this plan and bring it to a close, don’t expect them to resume it in response to righteous indignation: the money will be gone. See also Uber, MoviePass etc

reasonableklout 293 days ago | |

Inference costs have been in freefall since ChatGPT[1], so this is different than Uber/MoviePass. The primary cost is a technology which is getting cheaper as more investment is put into algorithm + hardware R&D.

[1]: https://epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends

pluto_modadic 293 days ago | | |

future hardware costs do not erase losses on existing capex expenditures, if they bought an (overpriced) nvidia GPU and then it turns out local LLMs or a Chinese competitor can do it for much cheaper investors effectively notice the mortgage is underwater. Tech getting cheaper is only handy if your company (e.g. ChatGPT) didn't already make a big gamble they can't sell off (for fear of hurting the cost of the asset they're trying to sell) see also coin "reserves".

what 293 days ago | | |

Just because they’re slashing they’re prices while they compete for users doesn’t mean the cost of inference came down at the same rate or at all.

bravesoul2 294 days ago | |

That elusive free lunch.

ed_elliott_asc 293 days ago |

Well I’m ecstatic about this, purely because we can tell the “ai will kill all programming jobs by 2026” people that yes ai will remove all programming jobs but you can’t afford to pay for ai for more than two days a week and the rest of the week the ai bots will be idle and refuse to program

tough 294 days ago |

I cancelled my subscription

I'll keep openAI and they dont even let me use CLI's with it, but they're at least Honest about their offerings.

Also their app doesnt tell you to go fuck off ever, if you're Pro

baggachipz 293 days ago |

It turns out that maybe "sell at a loss and make up for it in volume" may not be a solid business strategy. The bait-and-switch continues in the AI bubble.

catigula 294 days ago |

Some equivocation here between legitimate 'heavy use', which is obviously relative and actually referenced in this document, and 'policy violations', which are used at the rationale/justification for it.

mkl 294 days ago |

Other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44713837

sauwan 294 days ago |

Would be great to see how our previous months usage stacked up and when, if at all, we would have been rate limited.

I'd be pretty surprised if I were to get rate limited, but I do use it a fair amount and really have no feel for where I stand relative to other users. Am I in the top 5%? How should I know?

HenriNext 293 days ago |

Having 4 separate limits that all are opaque and can suddenly interrupt work is not ok.

We don't know what the limits are, what conditions change the limits dynamically, and we cannot monitor our usage towards the limits.

1. 5 hour limit

2. Overall weekly limit

3. Opus weekly limit

4. Monthly limit on number of 5 hour sessions

bluelightning2k 293 days ago |

Counter-take: this is a good thing.

Seems like some people are account-sharing or scripting/repackaging to such an extent that they were able to "max out" the rate limit windows.

Ultimately - this all gets priced in over time; whether that's in a subscription change or overall rate limit change, etc.

So if you want to simply use it as intended, over time stopping this kind of pattern is better for us?

Finbarr 293 days ago |

We're all going to end up with free open source/weight models, running locally, with no usage limits. This is temporary.

aniviacat 293 days ago | |

Perhaps integrating new information into models will at some point be so efficient that models offered by online services will always know about all new APIs, about every small library, and about every license change. That would give such models a significant advantage over local models, even if at some point good local models would become runnable by anyone.

3cats-in-a-coat 293 days ago |

If you wanted a more equitable experience for all you wouldn't just limit the high-end users, but return the money to low-end users.

Charging a low flat fee per use and still warning when certain limits hit is possible. But it's market segmentation not to do it. Just charge a flat fee, then lop off the high-end, and you maximize profit.

wg0 294 days ago |

To be fair - abuse is real. This also shows that "AI" is on "VC ventilators" of greed.

Waiting for higher valuations till someone pulls the trigger for acquisition.

IPOs I don't see to be successful because not everyone gets a conman like Elon as their frontman that can consistently inflate the balloon with unrealistic claims for years.

neom 294 days ago |

I'm working on a coding agent for typescript teams and I'm curious how people would like to consume these things generallyin terms of price a predictability. I've thought through a bunch of stuff, not sure what is best... Right now I have a base fee and then a concept of credits, the base fee ($500) includes 10k credits, and the credits are tied to PRs, it works out to 100 "credits" per simple PR and 200 "credits" for a complex PR, Commit is 20 credits. 20 credits are $5. PR reviews are free.

Is this way too complicated? It feels complicated to me and I worked on it, so I presume it is?

I don't want to end up in some "you can work for X number of hours" situation that seems... not useful to engineers?

How do real world devs wanna consume this stuff and pay for it so there is some predictability and it's useful still?

Thank you. :)

OtherShrezzing 294 days ago | |

That suggested pricing structure is too complicated - especially when it boils down to $5 for a simple PR, and $10 for a big one.

mattnewton 294 days ago |

Can I have an option to easily "fall back" to metered spend when hitting these hard limits? I wouldn't mind spending $5-10 on api credits to not interrupt my flow one day, and right now that means switching to another tool or logging out and re-logging in when the rate limit switches back.

eigenvalue 294 days ago |

They need to come up with a better way of detecting people who are actively breaking the ToS by using the Max plans as a kind of backdoor API key, because those users are obviously not using it in the way it was intended and abusing the system. Not sure how they would do that, but I'm guessing you could fingerprint the pattern of requests and see that some of the requests don't fit the expected pattern of genuine requests made by the Claude Code client.

Anyway, I've been resigned to this for a while now (see https://x.com/doodlestein/status/1949519979629469930 ) and ready to pay more to support my usage. It was really nice while it lasted. Hopefully, it's not 5x or 10x more.

koolba 294 days ago |

This is like when the all-you-can-eat buffet tells you you're only allowed to go the buffet line once.

gingersnap 294 days ago | |

No, it's not. It's the all you can eat buffet saying that 95% can eat all they want, but the 5% that keep sneaking food in their backpack to eat when they get can't do that anymore.

koolba 294 days ago | | |

There's no lobster rolls stuffed into a backpack here. It's using the service as it was pitched, an all-you-can-eat buffer of API calls. Anything that limits what that means is scaling back access to that buffet.

If the new limits are anything less than 24 * 7 / 5 times the previous limits then power users are getting shafted (which understandably is the point of this).

What's worse with this model is that a runaway process could chew through your weekly API allotment on a wild goose chase. Whereas before the 5-hour quantization was both a limiter and guard rails.

volkk 294 days ago | | |

No it's not. It's like an all you can eat buffet stating you can eat as much as you want and feed your friends and the homeless outside for a one time fee, and then realizing that the economic model made 0 sense to begin with and need to either state that you're only allowed to eat what you personally can, or increase the price to something that can sustain the amount of food being removed from the buffet.

Eggpants 294 days ago | | |

The fact you believe the 5% number is pretty interesting.

j45 293 days ago |

Sincerely enjoy and appreciate Claude, feedback based on that:

- It would be nice to know if there was a way to know or infer percentage wise the amount of capacity a user is currently using (rate of usage) and has left, compared to available capacity. Being scared to use something is different than mindful.

- Since usage it can feel a little subjective/relative (simple things might use more tokens, or less, etc) to things beyond a user's usage alone, it would be nice to know how much capacity is left both on the current model and in 1 month now to learn.

- If there is lower "capacity" usage rates available at night vs the day, or just slower times, it might be worth knowing. It would help users who would like to, plan around it, compared to people who might be just making the most of it.

kelnos 293 days ago |

I don't have a problem with companies adding usage limits and whatnot, but it's shady to do for existing customers who have pre-paid for some amount of time. If I pay the yearly up-front amount, I expect my terms of use to stay the same for that entire year.

shreezus 294 days ago |

I wonder if this is related to the capacity/uptime issues Anthropic has had lately. I got quite a lot of errors last week!

Hopefully they sort it out and increase limits soon. Claude Code has been a game-changer for me and has quickly become a staple of my daily workflows.

dsrtslnd23 294 days ago |

the rate limits already were very low - and now they are getting even lower, wow. On a max plan I can use Opus for only a few minutes per day.

westonplatter0 294 days ago |

To make it easier for users to know what to expect, can you release a monitor for users to run locally?

I can understand setting limits, and I'd like to be aware of them as I'm using the service rather than get hit with a week long rate limit / lockout.

geor9e 294 days ago |

>affecting less than 5% of users

Notice they didn't say 5% of Max users. Or 5% of paid users. To take it to the extreme - if the free:paid:max ratio were 400:20:1 then 5% of users would mean 100% of a tier. I can't tell what they're saying.

mkbelieve 294 days ago |

I understand, but I also will not pay a subscription fee for limited service. I canceled as soon as I got this e-mail. Too bad I signed up for an annual subscription last month.

This is also exactly why I feel this industry is sitting atop a massive bubble.

bananapub 293 days ago | |

> I also will not pay a subscription fee for limited service.

you...already were? it already had a variety of limits, they've just added one new one (total weekly use to discourage highly efficient 24/7 use of their discounted subscriptions).

OtherShrezzing 294 days ago | |

As far as the email says, this change is triggered at your next billing cycle. So your account is grandfathered in until next year.

slimebot80 293 days ago |

Overall I think this is as positive - protecting the system from being hit heavily 24/7 and with multiple agents from some users might make the system more sustainable for a wider population of users.

This one thing that bugs me is the visibility of how far through your usage you are. Being told when you're close to the end means I cannot plan. I'm not expecting an exact %, but a few notices at intervals (eg: halfway through) would help a lot. Not providing this kinda makes me worry they don't want us to measure. (I don't want to closely measure, but I do want to have a sense of where I am at)

esskay 294 days ago |

Starting to realise the business model of LLM's has some serious flaws I see.

wdb 294 days ago |

Guess the reason why they recently introduced agents? ;) This is not a great change if you ask me. I will have to figure out how badly this affects and if needed just cancel the subscription and find an alternative.

rybosworld 293 days ago |

I've gotten some very good use out of LLM's outside of standard U.S. work hours, but I often find that they are quite awful at being helpful coding assistants during my work day. I assume this is due to users competing for resources.

My issue is: a request made during peak usage is treated the same as a request made during low usage times even though I might not be able to get anything useful/helpful out of the LLM during those busy hours.

I've talked with coworkers and friends who say the same.

This isn't a problem with Claude specifically - seems to happen with all the coding assistants.

sam_goody 293 days ago |

Anthropic has plans such as $150/user and $150/5-users-but-less-hours-per-user. I could not work out what 2 users or heavy-usage-5-users are intended to do.

There are people that will always try to steal, but there may also be those that just don't understand their pricing.

Also some people keep going forever in the same session, causing it to max out - since the whole history is sent in every request. Some prompting about things like that (your thread has gotten long..) would probably save quite a bit of usage and prevent innocent users from getting locked out for a week.

nurettin 293 days ago |

I feel rug pull after rug pull ($10->$20, hourly quotas, weekly quotas) because they can't scale and they aggressively focus on the $200+ customers and limit the lower tier to maximize profits.

jacquesm 294 days ago |

I hope that this communication is not typical of the output of Claude, but if it is it should get a prize of sorts for vagueness and poor style. No way for users to find out if they are affected or not, lots of statements that carry zero information. Not impressed, to put it mildly, besides, they should have enforced their limits from day #1 as they were, not allow people to spend 10K worth of resources on a $200 plan. Now they risk those that are not even affected from re-thinking their relationship with the company.

yumraj 294 days ago |

> These changes will not be applied until the start of your next billing cycle.

If I’m on annual Pro, does it mean these won’t apply to me till my annual plan renews which is several months away.

mkbelieve 294 days ago | |

Same boat. Feels like a nice, big bait & switch.

LTL_FTC 294 days ago |

I have been using Gemini for some time now. I switched away from Claude because I was frustrated with the rate limits and how quickly I seemed to reach them. Last week I decided to give it Claude another try so I resigned up. I linked a personal repository I am working on, prompted it for suggestions on potential refactoring recommendations and hit send. It immediately stopped and said this prompt would reach my limits. Immediately reconsidered my subscription.

tiku 293 days ago |

I hit some limits in Claude Desktop fairly quick and that made it unusable. Paid for the whole year but you can't get your money back if you cancel. Such a bummer.

pxc 294 days ago |

Could this be in part because many of the recent Chinese models (which seem great, tbh) show signs of having been distilled from one or another Claude models?

Or is that a silly idea, because distillation is unlikely to be stopped by rate limits (i.e., if distillation is a worthwhile tactic, companies that want to distill from Anthropic models will gladly spend a lot more money to do it, use many, many accounts to generate syntheitc data, etc.)?

aliljet 294 days ago |

Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but it seems like Anthropic has quietly 4x'd the real cost of the Pro plan. There are 168 hours in a week, and if I'm able to (safely) bet on 40 hours of use, realistically, I just lost 75% of the value of the plan.

What are the reasonable local alternatives? 128 GB of ram, reasonably-newish-proc, 12 GB of vram? I'm okay waitign for my machine to burn away on LLM experiments I'm running, but I don't want to simply stop my work and wake up at 3 AM to start working again..

kmac_ 294 days ago | |

Pro is just a paid demo. I hit the limit all the time on a small project, and I'm not even doing anything weird. The product is still great, though. At work, we checked out a bunch of options, and almost everyone chose something different, so the competition is though.

bananapub 294 days ago | |

> Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but it seems like Anthropic has quietly 4x'd the real cost of the Pro plan. There are 168 hours in a week, and if I'm able to (safely) bet on 40 hours of use, realistically, I just lost 75% of the value of the plan.

I think you're just confused about what the Pro plan was, it never included being used for 168 hours/week, and was extremely clear that it was limited.

> What are the reasonable local alternatives? 128 GB of ram, reasonably-newish-proc, 12 GB of vram? I'm okay waitign for my machine to burn away on LLM experiments I'm running, but I don't want to simply stop my work and wake up at 3 AM to start working again..

a $10k mac mini with 192GB of vram with any model you can download still isn't close to Claude Sonnet.

lavezzi 293 days ago | | |

not really true per https://artificialanalysis.ai/?intelligence-tab=coding

vessenes 293 days ago |

Do not love. I used opus on api billing for some time before the new larger plans came out, so I switched. I routinely hit the opus limits in an hour or two ($100 plan). There are some tasks sonnet is good with but for many it’s worse, and sometimes subtly so.

Upshot - I will probably go back to api billing and cancel. For my use cases (once or twice a week coding binges) it’s probably cheaper and definitely less frustrating.

clbrmbr 293 days ago |

Anthropic has been incredibly generous. I use regularly ~750 USD worth of opus tokens per month, which is a great deal for 200 USD. I’ve never hit a limit on the Max 20x plan, but the Max 5x plan was laughably limited. The impression I got was that there was basically no limiting at all, and Anthropic was just watching the usage patterns.

It’s an all you can eat buffet, you’re just not allowed takeout!

christophilus 294 days ago |

Hm. I run Claude Code in several containers, though generally only one is active at a time. I wonder if they’ll see that as account sharing?

andix 294 days ago | |

This is a very common usage pattern, I don't think they will restrict that.

The daily limits are probably there to fix the account sharing issue. For example I wanted to ask a friend who uses the most expensive subscription for work, if I could borrow the account at night and on weekends. I guess that's the kid of pattern they want to stop.

itsalotoffun 294 days ago | | |

No. They're just desperately trying to limit the number of tokens burned per $200/mo account. It's trivial to burn 1-3x that dollar amount per DAY even before you're loaning your account out to friends in different timezones. And as ccusage will show, if you were paying API pricing rates your $200/mo plan would consume closer to $3-5k/mo in "credits".

Somehow you're "not allowed" to run your account 24/7. Why the hell not? Well because then they're losing money. So it's "against their ToS". Wtf? Basically this whole Claude Code "plan" nonsense is Anthropic lighting VC on fire to aggressively capture developer market share, but enough "power users" (and don't buy the bullshit that it's "less than 5%") are inverting that cost:revenue equation enough to make even the highly capitalized Anthropic take pause.

They could have just emailed the 4.8% of users doing the dirty, saying "hey, bad news". But instead EVERYONE gets an email saying "your access to Claude Code's heavily subsidized 'plans' has been nerfed".

It's the bait and switch that just sucks the most here, even if it was obviously and clearly coming a mile away. This won't be the last cost/fee balancing that happens. This game has only gotten started. 24/7 agents are coming.

jdboyd 294 days ago | |

I think that is a common use case. If you run the containers at the same time, it sounds to me like you will just run into the usage limits more quickly.

discordance 293 days ago | |

When you ship the container, do you also ship Claude Code and its config with it?

mushufasa 294 days ago |

I think they should totally do this but I think they should call it "rate-limiting" instead of "weekly limit". Seems pretty clear to me that the purpose is to avoid situations where people are running 5 background agents 24/7, not the person working during business hours normally. Reframing this makes it more clear this is about bots not users.

polarbear67 294 days ago |

I think we'll see a lot more contextual engineering efforts soon. It is really inefficient to be uploading your entire codebase pretty much every request, which is what a lot of people are doing. When in reality, very few parts need the full context when programming. Although, big token doesn't seem to care, and often encourages this (including the editors).

cheschire 294 days ago | |

I could see a front-end / back-end split in the future where a completely on-client LLM is used to trim down the request and context before shoving the request off to the back-end.

brenm 293 days ago |

This is bad.

I switched to Claude Code because of Cursor’s monthly limits.

If I run out of my ability to use Claude Code, I’m going to just switch back to Cursor and stay there. I’m sick of these games.

If you think it’s ok, then make Anthropic dog food it by putting every employee in the pro plan and continue to tell them they must use it for their work but they can’t upgrade and see how they like it.

yieldcrv 293 days ago |

I only began using Claude because OpenAI was fumbling in my use cases. Whenever their public facing offering was rate limiting, or experiencing congestion, or having UX issues like their persistent "network error" in the middle of delivering a response, then I would go to Claude.

You having the same issue kills the point of using you.

anonzzzies 294 days ago |

We will see but I hit the limit multiple times a day so I am a bit scared that this would mean looking for alternatives.

garciasn 294 days ago | |

Using Claude Code or the web UI? If when using Claude Code, you may need to break your codebase up into smaller chunks to help.

That said, there's no fucking way I am getting what they claim w/Opus in hours. I may get two to three queries answered w/Opus before it switches to Sonnet in CC.

anonzzzies 294 days ago | | |

Claude Code cli. Yeah, I gave up on Opus as I deed it switches really fast (200 sub). I made my own flow tooling and prompting which uses way less than it does on its own, but I still hit the limits.

ComplexSystems 294 days ago |

These are limits for the $200/mo plan?

Disposal8433 294 days ago | |

There are limits for $200 per month?

CSMastermind 294 days ago | |

That's the subscription I have and this looks like the email that I got.

steveklabnik 294 days ago | |

"Max" is the name for both the $100 and $200 plan.

jongjong 293 days ago |

For the sake of saying something positive on HN, Claude Code is great. I haven't run into any limits yet. My code is quite minimalist and the output of Claude Code is also minimalist, maybe that's why.

If you work on some overengineered codebase, it will produce overengineered code; this requires more tokens.

matt_cogito 293 days ago |

Let's start with stating, that Opus 4 + Sonnet 4 are a gift to humanity. Or at least to developers.

The two models are not just the best models for coding at this point (in areas like UX/UI and following instructions they are unmatched); they come package with possibly the best command line tool today.

The invite developers to use them a lot. Yet for the first time ever, I can feel how I cannot 100% fully rely on the tool and feel a lot of pressure, when using it. Not because I don't want to pay, but because the options are either:

> A) Pay $200 and be constantly warned by the system that you are close to hitting your quota (very bad UX) > B) Pay $$$??? via the API and see how your bill grows to +$2k per month (this is me this month via Cursor)

I guess Anthropic has the great dilemma now: should they make the models more efficient to use and lower the prices to increase limits and boost usage OR should they cash in their cash cows while they can?

I am pretty sure no other models comes even close in terms of developer-hours at this point. Gemini would be my 2nd best guess, but Gemini is still lagging behind Claude, and not that good at agentic workloads.

brainless 294 days ago |

Tools that generate code will have a lot of competition. It's good that Athropic is refining it's pricing but would have been better if users got to know their exact usage and apply own controls.

Frustrated users, who are probably using the tools the most will try other code generation tools.

closewith 294 days ago |

It was always too good to last. I assume this is the end of the viability of the fixed price options.

blu_jobs 293 days ago |

It is natural for the gate to be closing. It sucks, but they are not going to give us access forever. You really need to start looking for long term service that is reliable and dependable. I hope Anthropic can provide that utility for the bootstrapped.

sngltoon 293 days ago |

Darth Viber: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."

ehnto 293 days ago |

I am pretty interested in what the person letting it run 24/7 is achieving. Is it a continuously processing workload of some kind that pipes into the model? Maybe a 24/7 chat support with high throughput? Very curious.

debian3 293 days ago | |

Share your account with people on different timezone

sneak 293 days ago |

Why not just have a usage-based pricing system that people can opt in to so that they just pay-as-they-go once they hit these plan limits?

It makes no sense to me that you would tell customers “no”. Make it easy for them to give you more money.

bananapub 293 days ago | |

they already do, you can give claude code an API key and it charges per token.

this entire thread is people whinging about the "you get some reasonable use for a flat fee" product having the "reasonable use" level capped a bit at the extreme edge.

sneak 293 days ago | | |

No, I mean, a one-click (or no-click) upgrade path. Having to hit a wall and then go get your API key and stuff sounds like a pain. It should just ask you if you want to switch to usage-based pricing when you hit the limit.

latchkey 294 days ago |

A bunch of words to just say:

We're going to punish the 5% that are using our service too much.

famahar 294 days ago | |

What is the use case for that much usage? Are people mass running vibe code agents? Genuinely curious.

taormina 294 days ago | | |

I have been hitting the 5 hour mark just using Claude Code at all on a very reasonably sized Flutter codebase. I’m relatively concerned but it’s very non-critical but I’m more likely to quit using the tool outright instead of paying them more. I hate how black box it is and this is making that worse.

mohsen1 293 days ago |

You can use GLM 4.5 instead. It is matching Claude 4

https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-4.5

It's even possible to point Claude Code CLI to it

PeterStuer 293 days ago |

Does this mean they will force heavy users to have multiple accounts rather than being able to extend an account with extra subscriptions?

Who does that benefit? Does number of accounts beat revenue in their investor reports?

TheServitor 293 days ago |

Zero surprise. Some of you were really going nuts out there.

Then again, to scale is human

Oras 294 days ago |

> affecting less than 5% of users based on current usage patterns.

How about adding ToS clause to prevent abuse? wouldn't that be better than having a statement with negative effect on the rest of 95%?

jononor 294 days ago | |

That just gives your team another thing to do, trying to police a ToS clause. And one would have to define abuse somehow, which is quite tricky. There are a lot of guite legitimate but expensive ways to use such a general thing as LLM compute.

ChadMoran 294 days ago |

Okay but when will we get visibility into this other than we're at the 50% of the limit? If you're going to introduce week long limits, transparency into use is critical.

natch 294 days ago |

I wish you could allow some concept of rollover of credits, even if only fractional, for cases where someone has to be away for a few days and the clock is ticking with no usage.

dionian 294 days ago |

afraid im in the 5%. not doing anything nefarious, just lots of parallel usage, no scripting or overnight or anything.

i just found ccusage, which is very helpful. i wish i could get it straight from the source, i dont know if i can trust it... according to this ive spent more my 200$ monthly subscription basically daily in token value.. 30x supposed cost

ive been trying to learn how to make ccode use opus for planning and sonnet for execution automatically, if anyone has a good example of this please share

jjice 294 days ago |

As part of the 95% here, I'm totally cool with this. I'm just a Pro plan user, but holy shit I hit problems with their service constantly. Claude is my preferred LLM currently, but sometimes during a normal 9-5, I can't use it at all due to outages, which really gets in the way while developing an MCP server.

Anthropic seems like they need to boost up their infra as well (glad they called this out), but the insane over-use can only be hurting this.

I just can't cosign on the waves of hate that all hinges on them adding additional limits to stop people from doing things like running up $1k bills on a $100 plan or similar. Can we not agree that that's abuse? If we're harping on the term "unlimited", I get the sentiment, but it's absolutely abuse and getting to the point where you're part of the 5% likely indicates that your usage is abusive. I'm sure some innocent usage will be caught in this, but it's nonsense to get mad at a business for not taking the bath on the chunk of users that are annihilating the service.

low_tech_punk 293 days ago |

Why not do tiered pricing like OpenAI api? The more you consume, the more discount, but it’s never unlimited or free, so you can prevent abuse without punishing true demand.

vonneumannstan 294 days ago |

Apparently people are consistently getting thousands of dollars worth of tokens for their $200/mo sub so this was just obviously unsustainable for Anthropic.

lyu07282 293 days ago | |

The 95% of users are subsidizing the 5% power users, in theory they could adjust the usage cap dynamically depending on usage vs. total number of subscribers. But of course with a complete lack of transparency it doesn't matter, there is no reason to ever give the benefit of the doubt to a for-profit company.

vonneumannstan 293 days ago | | |

>But of course with a complete lack of transparency it doesn't matter, there is no reason to ever give the benefit of the doubt to a for-profit company

We know inference is very expensive so it's not reasonable to expect unlimited usage in general...

taormina 294 days ago |

I feel like I am constantly hitting the 5 hour limits not doing very much. I feel like I will quit using Claude Code outright if my usage is gone by Tuesday.

jeswin 293 days ago |

I am a Max 20x subscriber, and I'm not unhappy that Anthropic is putting this in place.

Claude is vital to me and I want it to be a sustainable business. I won't hit these limits myself, and I'm saving many times what I would have spent in API costs - easily among the best money I've ever spent.

I'm middle aged, spending significant time on a hobby project which may or may not have commercial goals (undecided). It required long hours even with AI, but with Claude Code I am spending more time with family and in sports. If anyone from Anthropic is reading this, I wanted to say thanks.

kvthweatt 293 days ago |

Fix the web interface to not be so slow. On older laptops other AI models run fine. Claude seems to be running locally, and I see no discussion of this.

bravesoul2 294 days ago |

I'm the other way around. Below my rate floor for bothering to renew! Work provides AI and don't have too much time to play at the weekend.

nobodywillobsrv 293 days ago |

A related question: has anyone looked into secondary markets for services like this and rate limit "sharing"? Legals, technicals etc.

submeta 294 days ago |

Tangential: Is there a similar service we can use in the cli, a replacement for CC? I like Cursor, I pay both for Cursor and CC, but. I live in the terminal (tmux, nvim, claude code, lazygit, yazi), and I prefer to have an agentic coding experience in the terminal. But CC has deteriorated so much in the past weeks that I constantly use repomix to compress whole projects and ask o3 for help because CC just can’t solve tasks that it previously would solve in a single shot.

lavezzi 293 days ago | |

use a proxy and use Claude Code with other models.

lvl155 294 days ago | |

There are many but none are as polished as CC.

itsalotoffun 294 days ago |

Vibe pricing. That's all this is. "Pay us $200/mo and get... access". There's no way to get a real usage meter (ccusage doesn't count). I want an Anthropic dashboard showing "you've used x% of your paid quota". Instead we get vibe usage. Vibe pricing. "Hey pay us money and we'll give you some level of access but like you won't know what, but don't worry only 5% of our users will trip the switches" bullshit. Someone else in this thread nailed it:

> sounds like it affects pretty much everyone who got some value out of the tool

Feels that way.

But compared to paying the so-called API pricing (hello ccusage) Claude Code Max is still a steal. I'm expecting to have to run two CC Max plans from August onwards.

$400/mo here we come. To the moon yo.

Wowfunhappy 294 days ago | |

> I'm expecting to have to run two CC Max plans from August onwards.

...are you allowed to do that? I guess if they don't stop you, you can do whatever you want, but I'd be nervous about an account ban.

p5v 289 days ago |

Has anyone figured out getting Claude Code to work with a locally installed (e.g via ollama) or a self-hosted LLM already?

acaloiar 294 days ago |

LLM Token and usage limit anxiety aught to pair nicely with battery and range anxiety. All part of a head-healthy diet.

verelo 293 days ago |

Am i missing something? Why don’t people just add an api key to Claude…are the subscription models that much better?

resonious 293 days ago | |

The subscription models are more cost effective.

verelo 290 days ago | | |

Are you sure? I found that the subscriptions were hitting limits real fast.

usernamed7 294 days ago |

I'm sure it's way more than 5%, ISP's pulled the same thing with bandwidth caps to shame people.

Part of the reason there is so much usage is because using claude code is like slot machine, where SOMETIMES it's right, most times it needs to rework what it did, which is convenient for them. Plus their pricing is anything but transparent as for how much usage you actually get.

I'll just go back to ChatGPT. This is not worth the headache.

nbbaier 294 days ago |

Will there be a native way to track in Claude Code how close we are to hitting those weekly rate limits?

0xDEAFBEAD 293 days ago |

Why is there no link to an official blogpost? I have no way to verify that this HN post is authentic.

browningstreet 293 days ago |

I was actually going to $ign up this week. Now I have to study everything before committing.

Bluestein 294 days ago |

Gosh, maybe there's something I am not understandinng, but 24/7? Wow.-

PS. Ah! Of course. Agents ...

oidar 294 days ago |

How do we know when we are close to hitting these limits? Will there be a way to check that?

neutrinobro 293 days ago |

This was bound to happen at some point, but probably net-on-net won't affect most users. I think it's pretty useful for a variety of tasks, but those tend to fall into a rather narrow category (boilerplate, simple UI change requests, simple doc-strings/summaries), and there is only so much of that work which is required in a month. I certainly won't be cancelling my plan over this change, but so far I also haven't seen a reason to increase it over the hobbyist-style $20/mo plan. When I do run into usage limits, its usually already at the end of the day, or I just pivot to another task where it isn't helpful.

jbrooks84 293 days ago |

I bounce off the daily limit and have to take breaks. This is no bueno for me

dcchambers 293 days ago |

How long until Anthropic, OpenAI, etc introduce surge pricing for LLM usage?

lvl155 294 days ago |

I think it’s hilarious they roll this out right after subagent introduction.

GiorgioG 294 days ago |

This is fantastic news. They're burning through too much cash too fast. They're going to have to sooner or later charge more money at which point businesses will balk at the price and the AI hype cycle will come to an end. I can't wait.

incomingpain 294 days ago |

Claude's vague limits is literally why im not a subscriber.

Workaccount2 293 days ago |

The pitfalls of being beholden to 3rd parties for hardware.

aeternum 294 days ago |

If you're paying per-month why are the limits weekly?

mekpro 293 days ago |

Is this limit will also count together with Claude Chat ?

wdb 294 days ago |

Guess they ran into the usage limits themselves when they worked on the messaging in Claude Code: "Claude usage limit reached. Your limit will reset at 8pm (UTC)"

Why not use the user's timezone?

serial_dev 294 days ago | |

Are you crazy, considering time zones would have burned through their allotted tokens for the week.

SatvikBeri 294 days ago | |

Plenty of people using CC from multiple timezones, e.g. I use it from my laptop and from EC2 servers.

bravesoul2 294 days ago | |

Leaky bucket. No time zone needed.

bananapub 294 days ago | |

this is a super-american thing, not a AI company thing

thenaturalist 294 days ago |

Ah, the beauty of price discovery.

Economists are having a field day.

pembrook 293 days ago |

These resource constraints create an extremely strong incentive for customers to try all competitors…this is what makes for the best products/services. When there’s no network effects it’s a fight over algorithms and compute and fundraising ability and we actually get real competition instead of natural monopolies.

This is the most exciting business fight of our time and I’m chomping popcorn with glee.

I think Anthropic is grossly overestimating the addressable market of a CLI tool, while also falsely believing they have a durable lead right now in their model, which I’m not so sure of. Also their treatment of their partners has been…shall we say…questionable. These are huge missteps at a time they should be instead hitting the gas harder imo.

They’re getting cocky. Would love to see a competitor to swoop in and eat their lunch.

mtkd 293 days ago | |

They need to max valuation before hardware catches up and qwen3-coder can be run locally for free

It's easy to forget the product Anthropic are selling here, and throttling, is based on data they mostly pay little or no content fee for

lerchmo 293 days ago |

Why don’t they just offer a $500/m plan?

epolanski 293 days ago |

You can always create a second account, no?

sea-gold 294 days ago |

"Most Pro users can expect 40-80 hours of Sonnet 4 within their weekly rate limits."

JyB 293 days ago |

I thought Claude code was pay as you go!?

octernion 293 days ago |

wow, a team that has one nine of availability and trending downwards fast is relieving pressure. big surprise!

krisworld11 293 days ago |

I think this is set to happpen. Welp

bouyaveman6 294 days ago |

Play it fair, and it will be fine

ScammedMaxUser 292 days ago |

Hey Anthropic - You're a bunch of incompetent greedy bastards who can't run a business without screwing over your own paying customers. Your "less than 5%" bullshit fooled nobody, your infrastructure is garbage (7 outages in a month?), and your CEO is probably too busy counting money to notice you're about to get sued into oblivion. Maybe next time don't bite the hand that feeds you, dipshits. We're $200/month customers, not your beta testers for your shitty capacity planning.

muzani 293 days ago |

I hit the 5 hour limit almost every work day (pro, not max).

It has become a kind of goal to hit it twice a day. It means I've had a productive day and can go on and eat food, touch grass, troll HN, read books.

I'm on Claude Code after hitting Cursor Pro for the month. It makes more sense to subscribe to a bunch of different tools at $20/month than $100/month on one tool that throws overloaded errors. We'll probably get more uptime with the weekly restriction.

naze 294 days ago |

Cancelled my subscription.

cheema33 294 days ago | |

It is unclear how Anthropic will survive now that you have canceled. Have you moved to a better model that is even cheaper? If so, please do share.

dboreham 294 days ago |

Whenever a marketing person uses the word "unlimited", they mean: "limited".

bitdeep 293 days ago |

deserved for this 5%, people get out of mind and abuse the service.

closewith 294 days ago |

It was always too good to last.

I assume this is the end of the viability of the fixed price options.

steveklabnik 294 days ago | |

> affecting less than 5% of users based on current usage patterns.

serial_dev 294 days ago | | |

Affecting 5% of users to me sounds like it affects pretty much everyone who got some value out of the tool and is not a casual coder.

i_am_proteus 294 days ago | | |

We do not know if that is less than 5% of users or less than 5% of paid users?

We do know that PR teams enjoy framing things in the most favorable light possible.

andix 294 days ago | | |

Let's hope that's true, and not some statistics trick.

jstummbillig 294 days ago | |

This seems to be the exact opposite?

serial_dev 294 days ago | | |

The writing is on the wall, we just need to read it. Fixed price offerings will be either gone or neutered.

ripped_britches 293 days ago |

Everybody freaking out about this should just pay for API access like an adult

blinded 294 days ago |

Dial back the vibe :)

maCDzP 293 days ago |

Who was it that used it 24/7? THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS!

Xmd5a 293 days ago |

We are the 95%!!

bachittle 294 days ago |

I'm guessing less than 5% of the users are just letting Claude Code run in an autonomous loop making slop. I tried this too: and Opus 4 isn't good enough to run autonomously yet. The Rube Goldberg machine needs to be carefully calibrated.