18 ms·

Claude Code weekly rate limits

• TheServitor 1y ago
  Zero surprise. Some of you were really going nuts out there. Then again, to scale is human
• jbrooks84 1y ago
  I bounce off the daily limit and have to take breaks. This is no bueno for me
• koolba 1y ago
  This is like when the all-you-can-eat buffet tells you you're only allowed to go the buffet line once.
  • gingersnap 1y 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.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • koolba 1y 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.
      • jononor 1y ago
        It was never unlimited. The 5 hourly limit was there from before.
    • Eggpants 1y ago
      The fact you believe the 5% number is pretty interesting.
    • volkk 1y 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.
• sea-gold 1y ago
  "Most Pro users can expect 40-80 hours of Sonnet 4 within their weekly rate limits."
• sea-gold 1y ago
  Official Anthropic post on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1mbo1sb/updating_rate_limits_for_claude_subscription/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1mbo1sb/updating_...
  • codethief 1y ago
    Thanks, I had been wondering what the source was.
    • globular-toast 1y ago
      This had also been sent in email form to subscribers.
• wdb 1y 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.
• closewith 1y ago
  It was always too good to last. I assume this is the end of the viability of the fixed price options.
  • jstummbillig 1y ago
    This seems to be the exact opposite?
    • serial_dev 1y ago
      The writing is on the wall, we just need to read it. Fixed price offerings will be either gone or neutered.
      • jstummbillig 1y ago
        Why? There are a lot of products where fixed price offerings can exist, like internet access in many parts of the world. The way that Anthropic implemented this change and how they explain it, hints that this could work very much the same: There is be a level of borderline abusers that need to be reigned in. The rest are a few power users that are subsidized by a lot of normal users. I am not saying this is what must happen here, but I see no effort to substantiate why it could not.
  • steveklabnik 1y ago
    > affecting less than 5% of users based on current usage patterns.
    • andix 1y ago
      Let's hope that's true, and not some statistics trick.
      • steveklabnik 1y ago
        I certainly am!
    • 1y ago
• closewith 1y ago
  It was always too good to last. I assume this is the end of the viability of the fixed price options.
• rstupek 1y ago
  "... and advanced usage patterns like running Claude 24/7 in the background" this is why we can't have nice things
  • volkk 1y 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
  • Modified3019 1y ago
    Yeah that part made me laugh. Clearly the work of Benevolent World Exploders trying to hasten the heat death of the universe.
  • taylorbuley 1y 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.
  • serial_dev 1y 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?
    • ohdeargodno 1y 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.
      • serial_dev 1y ago
        It is still not the users fault, pricing is not their responsibility. As a user, I check the price and what the service offers, then I subscribe and I use it. If these users did something illegal or breaking some conditions, any service would be free to block them. But they didn’t, meaning the AI tools promised too much for the price so they update their conditions, they are basically figuring out the pricing. I don’t know what is there to be mad about, and using dramatic language like “everyone suffers because of them”
• vFunct 1y ago
  Seems like their business plan is unsustainable. What's a sustainable cost model? Say an 8xB200 server costs $500,000, with 3 years depreciation, so $166k/year costs for a server. Say 10 people share that server full time per year, so that's going to need $16k/year/person to break even, so ~$1,388/month subscription to break even at 10x users per server. If they get it down to 100 users per server (doubt it), then they can break even at $138/month. And all of this is just server costs... Seems AI coding agents should be a lot more expensive going forward. I'm personally using 3-4 agents in parallel as well.. Still, it's a great problem for Anthropic to have. "Stop using our products so much or we'll raise prices!"
  • Fade_Dance 1y ago
    It seems to me that the business model simply won't be making money until a time when jobs are running on new, more efficient hardware a generation or two from now. Like you said, the numbers just don't work currently. I'm under the impression they want to potentially get to break-even for now.
  • jononor 1y ago
    I do not think they are aiming to be cashflow positive now. That might not be possible. Though if it is within range they might want to go for it. Because the stamina needed to win this race is going to be immense. Especially since OpenAI is going hard for scaling up via investor funding, and Google can afford to loose/invest a couple billions annually by diverting from their main revenue sources. A realistic business plan would be to burn cash for many years (potentially more than a decade), and bank on being able to decrease costs and increase revenue over that time. Investors will be funding that journey. So it is way too early to tell whether the business plan is unsustainable. For sure the unit economics are going to be different in 5 and 10 years. Right now is very tough though- since it is basically all early adopter power user types, which spend a lot of compute. Later one probably can expect more casuals, maybe even a significant amount of "gym users" that pay but basically never uses the service. Though OpenAI is currently stronger for casuals, I suspect. Over the next decade, hardware costs will go down a lot. But they have go find a way to stay alive (and competitive) until then.
• catigula 1y 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.
• serf 1y 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.
  • nojito 1y ago
    Use the API.
    • strictnein 1y ago
      The API is far more expensive. For Opus 4 it's almost priced in a way that says "don't use this".
      • chomp 1y ago
        That’s not what the parent commenter asked though, they wanted a price for not being concerned about limits. The API pricing is that.
        • johnpaulkiser 1y ago
          I doubts thats what they want. They want a static fixed price, $5k a month for example and never have to think about it.
          • paxys 1y ago
            Even if you used the API 24x7 for a single session (no parallel requests) I doubt you'd be able to hit $5k/mo in usage for Claude 4 Sonnet.
          • qeternity 1y ago
            Take the API and assume 24/7 usage (or whatever working hours are). That’s your fixed cost. It’s more likely that this sum is higher than they want. So really it’s not about predictability.
• jjcm 1y 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 1y ago
    The API exists. You can generate a token and use Claude Code with it directly, no plan needed.
    • tough 1y 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
      • paxys 1y ago
        If 95% of users are under the limit then it isn't a "fake" plan.
        • tough 1y ago
          fake for 5% of users. will they refund me my sub? when I subbed It was unlimited, they've rugged the terms twice already since then in less than a month
          • paxys 1y ago
            > Starting August 28 Read the announcement. You are getting a full month's notice. If you don't like the limits, don't renew your subscription. Of course that doesn't help if your primary goal is to be an online outrage culture warrior.
• malthaus 1y ago
  im really tired of all those ai players just winging it can someone please find a conservative, sustainable business model and stick with it for a few months please instead of this mvp moving target bs
  • motoxpro 1y ago
    You can use the API. You're using the fixed price becasue it's cheaper. It's cheaper because they price it assuming a certain amount of usage being below a threshold. The usage went above the threshold. The usage was limited because of that, and they will make a plan with an increased fixed price and/or increase the price of the pro plan. Seems pretty standard to me.
  • adtac 1y ago
    if you feel cheated now, I promise you'll feel more cheated if they did this after you rely on it for several months. the least worst option is to change pricing as early as possible.
  • cheema33 1y ago
    Agree with the other reply here. You are complaining about a problem that does not exist. Want price predictability? Use the API pricing! It is pay per use. The Buffet-style pricing gets you more bang for the buck. How much more? That bit is uncertain. Adjust your expectations accordingly.
• christophilus 1y 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?
  • jdboyd 1y 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.
  • andix 1y 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 1y 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.
  • 1y ago
• jimbo808 1y 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.
  • andix 1y ago
    I guess you need to get used to it. LLM token usage directly translates to energy consumption. There are also no flat fee electricity plans, it doesn't make any sense.
    • idunnoboutthat 1y ago
      that's true of everything on the internet.
      • andix 1y ago
        Yes, but for most things it's not significant. For example Stack Overflow used to handle all their traffic from 9 on-prem servers (not sure if this is still the case). Millions of daily users. Power consumption and hardware cost is completely insignificant in this case. LLM inference pricing is mostly driven by power consumption and hardware cost (which also takes a lot of power/heat to manufacture).
        • Twirrim 1y ago
          > For example Stack Overflow used to handle all their traffic from 9 on-prem servers (not sure if this is still the case). Millions of daily users. Power consumption and hardware cost is completely insignificant in this case. They just finished their migration to the cloud, unracked their servers a few weeks ago https://stackoverflow.blog/2025/07/16/the-great-unracking-saying-goodbye-to-the-servers-at-our-physical-datacenter/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2025/07/16/the-great-unracking-sa...
          • 1y ago
• wdb 1y 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 1y ago
    Are you crazy, considering time zones would have burned through their allotted tokens for the week.
  • SatvikBeri 1y ago
    Plenty of people using CC from multiple timezones, e.g. I use it from my laptop and from EC2 servers.
  • bananapub 1y ago
    this is a super-american thing, not a AI company thing
  • bravesoul2 1y ago
    Leaky bucket. No time zone needed.
• ComplexSystems 1y ago
  These are limits for the $200/mo plan?
  • CSMastermind 1y ago
    That's the subscription I have and this looks like the email that I got.
  • steveklabnik 1y ago
    "Max" is the name for both the $100 and $200 plan.
  • Disposal8433 1y ago
    There are limits for $200 per month?
• steve_adams_86 1y 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.
  • bad_haircut72 1y ago
    Im not a formula 1 driver but why do they have those big padel things on the back? looks dumbo IMHO I just dont get it
    • steve_adams_86 1y ago
      I respectfully consider this analogy void, but welcome an explanation of why I'm wrong. I haven't yet seen anyone doing anything remarkable with their extensive use of Claude. Without frequent human intervention, all of it looks like rapid regression to the mean, or worse.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
  • mendor 1y ago
    I've found that asking for deep research consumes my quota quite fast, so If I run 2 or 3 and normal use I hit the limit and have to wait to reset
    • steve_adams_86 1y ago
      Me too. I've also found that even when trying to restrict models meant for these tasks, they tend to go on tangents and waste tremendous amounts of tokens without providing meaningfully better outputs. I'm not yet sold on these models for anything outside of fuzzy tasks like "does this logic seem sound?". They tend to be good at that (though they often want to elaborate excessively or propose solutions excessively).
• beiconic 1y ago
  I saw this one coming. Going to make more and more people switch over to gemini.
• tough 1y 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
• mkl 1y ago
  Other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44713837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44713837
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• aliljet 1y 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_ 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
      not really true per https://artificialanalysis.ai/?intelligence-tab=coding https://artificialanalysis.ai/?intelligence-tab=coding
• flashgordon 1y 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).
  • richwater 1y ago
    If you're okay with lower quality output, a $10k Mac Studio will get you there. But you _will_ have to accept lower quality outputs compared to todays' frontier models.
    • flashgordon 1y ago
      Yeah I was actually thinking about a proper rig - My gut feel is a rig wouldnt be as expensve as a mac and would actually have a higher ROI (at the expense of portability)? My other worry about the mac is how unupgradable it is. Again not sure how fruitful it is - in my (probably fantasy land) view if I can setup a rig and then keep updating components as needed - it might last me a good 5 years say for 20k over that period? Or is that too hopeful? So for 20K over 5 years or 4k per year - it comes to about 400 a month (ish). The equivalent of 2 MAX pro subscriptions. Let us be honest - right now with these limits running more than 1 in parallel is going to be forbidden. if I can run 2 claude level models (assuming the DS and Qwens are there) then I am already breaking even but without having to participating in training with all my codebases (and I assume I can actually unlock something new in the process of being free).
      • lossolo 1y ago
        Buy 4–8 used 3090s (providing 96–192 GB of VRAM), depending on the model and weight quantization you want to run. Used 3090 costs around $800. Add more RAM to offload layers if needed. This setup currently offers the best value for performance. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1iqpzpk/8x_rtx_3090_open_rig/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1iqpzpk/8x_rtx_... You can look for more rig examples on that subreddit.
• latchkey 1y ago
  A bunch of words to just say: We're going to punish the 5% that are using our service too much.
  • famahar 1y ago
    What is the use case for that much usage? Are people mass running vibe code agents? Genuinely curious.
    • taormina 1y 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.
• itsalotoffun 1y 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 1y 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.
• thoughtfulappco 1y ago
  Yes, yes let the normies who wait for their pizza to cook while running one prompt at a time "eat" so to speak mwuahahah #deathtopowerusers
• thoughtfulappco 1y ago
  Let the normies who cook things between single prompt to finish "eat" so to speak. wmuahahaha leveling the playing field i see lol
• usernamed7 1y 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.
• Wowfunhappy 1y 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.
  • sva_ 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • adastra22 1y ago
      Was it necessary to post this? FYI many input methods (including my own) turn two hyphens into an em dash. The em-dash-means-LLM thing is bogus.
      • seb1204 1y ago
        Ms word does this by default
    • fredoliveira 1y ago
      You can't possibly think that using an em dash is exclusive to AI-generated output.
    • Wowfunhappy 1y ago
      On a Mac, you can use option-shift-dash to insert an emdash, which is muscle memory for me. If I had used an LLM, maybe I wouldn't have misspelled "losing" not once but twice and not noticed until after the edit window. <_<
    • tomhow 1y ago
• blalezarian 1y ago
  Can we PLEASE fix the bug in VS Code where the terminal occasionally scrolls out of control and VS Code crashes? It is very painful and we have to start the context all over again. This happens at least 1x per day.
  • steveklabnik 1y ago
    > we have to start the context all over again. Use /resume
• thoughtfulappco 1y ago
  I don't get the idea that using more compute or running a continuous agent is considered "power user". Consuming more =! power users lol
• dboreham 1y ago
  Whenever a marketing person uses the word "unlimited", they mean: "limited".
• bachittle 1y 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.
  • swalsh 1y ago
    This happens when you prompt it poorly. If you want to avoid slop, the first step is to write an extensive BRD. Read it, understand it, make sure it has everything needed. Then write a solutions architecture document. Read it, understand it, make sure it is fully specified including how things are structured, architecture, principles etc. You can use AI to write these documents. Just make sure to read them, and edit them as needed. When you have your functional spec, and your tech spec, ask it to implement it. Additionally add some basic rules, say stuff like "don't add any fallback mechanisms or placeholders unlessed asked. Keep a todo of where you're at, ask any questions if unsure. The key is to communicate well, ALWAYS READ what you input. Reivew, and provide feedback. Also i'd reccomend doing smaller chunks at a time once things get more complicated.
    • albertgoeswoof 1y ago
      When do you read the code
      • swalsh 1y ago
        While it's being generated, I'll spot check it, and after I test the code i'll peek in more detail at it. I review the code in much the same way I review code from a human dev. I almost never look closely at ALL lines. I'll do a quick look through just looking to see if anything jumps out, and then for the areas I intuitively know there might be some funny business I'll do a deeper dive into the code.
• strictnein 1y 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.
  • akmarinov 1y ago
    I upgraded to 20x because i was constantly running against Opus limits and now it seems the 20x is almost equal to the 5x in that regard
  • lvl155 1y ago
    This is why I stopped using the MAX. Downgraded to Pro and started using o3 and others via API. I really don’t need that many hours to game plan in the beginning. At most it will cost me $10 between o3, Gemini, and Opus per project. There are new model releases every couple of weeks and I’d hate to get stuck with just one provider.
  • foota 1y ago
    You're paying for prioritization during high traffic periods, not for 2x usage.
    • strictnein 1y ago
      That's not what they claim: https://www.anthropic.com/pricing https://www.anthropic.com/pricing > Max > Choose 5x or 20x more usage per session than Pro* > Higher output limits for all tasks > Priority access at high traffic times That first bullet pretty clearly implies 4x the usage and the last one implies that Max gets priority over Pro, not that 20x gets priority over 5x.
      • foota 1y ago
        That is sort of what it implies, but I don't think that's what's actually happening on the backend. I was looking at this yesterday though and I agree that it's all a bit hand-wavy. I feel for them somewhat though because it's hand-wavy because it's a difficult problem to solve. They're essentially offering spot instances.
• dsrtslnd23 1y 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.
• swalsh 1y ago
  That's fine, please make it VERY CLEAR how much of my limit is left, and how much i've used.
  • loufe 1y 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 1y ago
      https://github.com/ryoppippi/ccusage https://github.com/ryoppippi/ccusage
  • kaztal 1y 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.
• nbbaier 1y ago
  Will there be a native way to track in Claude Code how close we are to hitting those weekly rate limits?
• anonzzzies 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
• manveerc 1y 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 1y ago
    It's to make you use it less on Monday for fear of losing it by Friday.
• alwillis 1y 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.
  • tomwphillips 1y ago
    I think it might actually be because they're selling services at a loss.
  • Tokumei-no-hito 1y ago
    guy was bragging about it on twitter yesterday. $13,200 of spend for his $200 account. he said he had like 4-5 opus only agents running nonstop and calling each other recursively. clearly that's abusive and should be targeted. but in general idk how else any inference provider can handle this situation. cursor is fucked because they are a whole layer of premium above the at-cost of anthropic / openai etc. so everyone leaves goes to cc. now anthropic is in the same position but they can't cut any premium off. you can't practically put a dollar cap on monthly plans because they are self exposing. if you say 20/mo caps at 500/mo usage then that's the same as 480/500 (95%) discount against raw API call. that's obviously not sustainable. there's a real entitled chanting going on too. i get that it sucks to get used to something and have it taken away but does anyone understand that just the cap/opex alone is unsustainable let alone the RD to make the models and tools. I’m not really sure what can be done besides a constant churn of "fuck [whoever had to implement sustainable pricing], i'm going to [next co who wants to subsidize temporarily in exchange for growth]". i think it's shitty the way it's playing out though. these cos should list these as trial periods and be up front about subsidizing. people can still use and enjoy the model(s) during the trial, and some / most will leave at the end, but at least you don't get the uproar. maybe it would go a long way to be fully transparent about the cap/op/rdex. nobody is expecting a charity, we understand you need a profit margin. but it turns it from the entitled "they're just being greedy" chanting to "ok that makes sense why i need to pay X to have 1+ tireless senior engineers on tap".
• oidar 1y ago
  How do we know when we are close to hitting these limits? Will there be a way to check that?
• polarbear67 1y 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 1y 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.
• westonplatter0 1y 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.
• esskay 1y ago
  Starting to realise the business model of LLM's has some serious flaws I see.
• knowsuchagency 1y 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 1y 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 https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/sub-agents
  • gardnr 1y 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.
• eigenvalue 1y 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 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.
• lvl155 1y ago
  I think it’s hilarious they roll this out right after subagent introduction.
• raytopia 1y 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 1y 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
• ChadMoran 1y 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.
• lucb1e 1y 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_ 1y 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 1y 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)
• bouyaveman6 1y ago
  Play it fair, and it will be fine
• Oras 1y 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 1y 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.
• data-ottawa 1y 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.
• vonneumannstan 1y ago
  Apparently people are consistently getting thousands of dollars worth of tokens for their $200/mo sub so this was just obviously unsustainable for Anthropic.
  • lyu07282 1y ago
    The 95% of users are subsidizing the 5% power users, in theory they could adjust the usage cap dynamically depending on usage vs. total number of subscribers. But of course with a complete lack of transparency it doesn't matter, there is no reason to ever give the benefit of the doubt to a for-profit company.
    • vonneumannstan 1y ago
      >But of course with a complete lack of transparency it doesn't matter, there is no reason to ever give the benefit of the doubt to a for-profit company We know inference is very expensive so it's not reasonable to expect unlimited usage in general...
      • lyu07282 1y ago
        Look if you make a service a flat rate you can oversubscribe and rate limit like crazy to squeeze it for profit, or measure the 5% of power users and set rate limits to maintain reasonable balance between cost vs. profits for all users. We don't know, nobody knows but them. Don't be a peasant.
• natch 1y ago
  I wish you could allow some concept of rollover of credits, even if only fractional, for cases where someone has to be away for a few days and the clock is ticking with no usage.
• dionian 1y ago
  afraid im in the 5%. not doing anything nefarious, just lots of parallel usage, no scripting or overnight or anything. i just found ccusage, which is very helpful. i wish i could get it straight from the source, i dont know if i can trust it... according to this ive spent more my 200$ 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
• shreezus 1y 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.
• mattnewton 1y 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.
• yumraj 1y 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 1y ago
    Same boat. Feels like a nice, big bait & switch.
• blinded 1y ago
  Dial back the vibe :)
• LTL_FTC 1y 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.
• neom 1y 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 1y 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.
• mushufasa 1y 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.
• acedTrex 1y ago
  oh no, anyway!
• Bluestein 1y ago
  Gosh, maybe there's something I am not understandinng, but 24/7? Wow.- PS. Ah! Of course. Agents ...
• naze 1y ago
  Cancelled my subscription.
  • cheema33 1y 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.
• sauwan 1y 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?
• mkbelieve 1y 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.
  • OtherShrezzing 1y 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.
  • bananapub 1y 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).
• naze 1y ago
  I cancelled my subscription. The enshittification is hitting this space massively already.
• submeta 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
• wg0 1y 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.
• OtherShrezzing 1y 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.
• submeta 1y 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.
  • lvl155 1y ago
    There are many but none are as polished as CC.
  • lavezzi 1y ago
    use a proxy and use Claude Code with other models.
• jjice 1y 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.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• thenaturalist 1y ago
  Ah, the beauty of price discovery. Economists are having a field day.
• QuadmasterXLII 1y 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
  • bravesoul2 1y ago
    That elusive free lunch.
  • reasonableklout 1y 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 https://epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends
    • what 1y 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.
    • pluto_modadic 1y 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".
• jacquesm 1y 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.
• cdelsolar 1y ago
  the party is over
• GiorgioG 1y 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.
• acaloiar 1y ago
  LLM Token and usage limit anxiety aught to pair nicely with battery and range anxiety. All part of a head-healthy diet.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• taormina 1y 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.
• thenano2 1y ago
  Well those who need more than the limits, register a second account and pay for a second subscription... Not the end of the world
• brainless 1y 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.
• bravesoul2 1y 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.
• geor9e 1y 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.
• pxc 1y 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.)?
• incomingpain 1y ago
  Claude's vague limits is literally why im not a subscriber.
• aeternum 1y ago
  If you're paying per-month why are the limits weekly?
• octernion 1y ago
  wow, a team that has one nine of availability and trending downwards fast is relieving pressure. big surprise!
• verelo 1y ago
  Am i missing something? Why don’t people just add an api key to Claude…are the subscription models that much better?
  • resonious 1y ago
    The subscription models are more cost effective.
    • verelo 1y ago
      Are you sure? I found that the subscriptions were hitting limits real fast.
• brenm 1y 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.
• sneak 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
      • bananapub 1y ago
        "no click" is insane, people pay $20/$100/$200 a month to have predictable bills, silently charging them unlimited money when you run out of quota is ridiculous. as to upgrade path, when you use up your quota, it tells you you can type /upgrade to switch to per-token API key billing.
        • sneak 1y ago
          Usage-based pricing is how most cloud providers work. It’s not ridiculous.
• bitdeep 1y ago
  deserved for this 5%, people get out of mind and abuse the service.
• yieldcrv 1y 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.
• j45 1y 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.
• Workaccount2 1y ago
  The pitfalls of being beholden to 3rd parties for hardware.
• vessenes 1y 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.
• 0xbadcafebee 1y 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 1y 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.
• Xmd5a 1y ago
  We are the 95%!!
• neutrinobro 1y 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.
• lerchmo 1y ago
  Why don’t they just offer a $500/m plan?
• jeswin 1y 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.
• browningstreet 1y ago
  I was actually going to $ign up this week. Now I have to study everything before committing.
• slimebot80 1y 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)
• nurettin 1y 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.
• ehnto 1y 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 1y ago
    Share your account with people on different timezone
• JyB 1y ago
  I thought Claude code was pay as you go!?
• jongjong 1y 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 1y 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.
• 3cats-in-a-coat 1y 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.
• ripped_britches 1y ago
  Everybody freaking out about this should just pay for API access like an adult
• ed_elliott_asc 1y 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
• tiku 1y 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.
• epolanski 1y ago
  You can always create a second account, no?
• low_tech_punk 1y 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.
• eshack94 1y ago
  Lol enshittification begins [continues].
• 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
  Why is there no link to an official blogpost? I have no way to verify that this HN post is authentic.
• pembrook 1y 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 1y 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
• PeterStuer 1y 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?
• mekpro 1y ago
  Is this limit will also count together with Claude Chat ?
• Finbarr 1y ago
  We're all going to end up with free open source/weight models, running locally, with no usage limits. This is temporary.
  • aniviacat 1y 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.
• social_quotient 1y 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.
  • nojs 1y ago
    > 2- Sub-agents encourage 24x7 workflows, then get punished… The Sub-agent feature docs literally showcase spawning parallel tasks that run unattended. Yeah, the new sub-agents feature (which is great) is effectively unusable with the current rate limits.
  • Inufu 1y ago
    You can use Claude Code with your own API key if you want to use more tokens than included in the Pro / Max plans.
    • social_quotient 1y ago
      Yeah I get that, I’m not “stuck” it’s that I don’t think the comms make sense and it’s troubling none of these teams have figured out a pricing model that isn’t a rug pull. If all of these ai llm coders were priced right, they would be out of the hands of many of the operators that are not dependent users. It’s got a bait and switch feel to it. I’ll deal with it. It’s a good product, I just feel like we deserve better and that these guys are smarter than this. Can you imagine if AWS pulled half of these tricks with cloud services as a subscription not tethered to usage? They wait for you to move all of your infrastructure to them (to the detriment of their competitors) and then … oh we figured out we can’t do business like this, we need to charge based on XYZ… we are all adults and it’s our job to deal with it or move on but… something doesn’t smell right and that’s the problem.
• mohsen1 1y ago
  You can use GLM 4.5 instead. It is matching Claude 4 https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-4.5 https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-4.5 It's even possible to point Claude Code CLI to it
• krisworld11 1y ago
  I think this is set to happpen. Welp
• HenriNext 1y 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
• sngltoon 1y ago
  Darth Viber: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."
• 127 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
      Asymptotically, prompting is a programming language.
• bluelightning2k 1y 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?
• dcchambers 1y ago
  How long until Anthropic, OpenAI, etc introduce surge pricing for LLM usage?
• kvthweatt 1y 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.
• kelnos 1y 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.
• donperignon 1y ago
  So we are not touching the rate limits for those that doesn’t reach them… that’s passive aggressive behavior in my opinion
• sam_goody 1y 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.
• baggachipz 1y 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.
• maCDzP 1y ago
  Who was it that used it 24/7? THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS!
• rybosworld 1y 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.
• clbrmbr 1y 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!
• muzani 1y 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.
• nobodywillobsrv 1y ago
  A related question: has anyone looked into secondary markets for services like this and rate limit "sharing"? Legals, technicals etc.
• blu_jobs 1y 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.
• ScammedMaxUser 1y 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.
• p5v 1y ago
  Has anyone figured out getting Claude Code to work with a locally installed (e.g via ollama) or a self-hosted LLM already?