10 ms·

Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected'

331 points by samizdis 7mo ago

barazany 7mo ago
[flagged]
elephanlemon 7mo ago
Yesterday (pro plan) I ran one small conversation in which Claude did one set of three web searches, a very small conversation with no web search, and I added a single prompt to an existing long conversation. I was shocked to see after the last prompt that I had somehow hit my limit until 5:00pm. This account is not connected to an IDE or Code, super confusing.
- master_crab 7mo ago
  Tool calls (particularly fetching for context) eats the context window heavily. I explicitly send MCP calls to sub agents because they are so “wordy”.
  - bensyverson 7mo ago
    Everyone who has not hit this bug thinks it’s user error… It’s not. It happened to me a few days ago, and the speed at which I tore through my 5 hour usage cap was easily 10x faster than normal. Also: sub agents do not get you free usage. They just protect your main context window.
    - piva00 7mo ago
      Don't they consume less of the token quota in case the subagents are running cheaper models like Sonnet and Haiku compared to Opus?
      - bensyverson 7mo ago
        Correct—I just wouldn't want folks to mistakenly think that the context fill % corresponds 1:1 with session token use.
    - master_crab 7mo ago
      Yes, sorry. I meant it more as a descriptor of how many tokens it consumes. You are still stuck burning money.
    - dmd 7mo ago
      I'm on Max. This morning, just to test, before doing anything else whatsoever, I was at 0%, and I typed 'test one two three' into CC. That put me at 12%. I have no MCPs except the built in claude-in-chrome. This is clearly a bug.
    - cyanydeez 7mo ago
      Readimg through this thread, it seems likely is a KV cache "bug". Theyre likely doing too many evictions of the LLM cache so the context is being reloaded to often. Its a "bug" because its probably an intended effect of capturing the costs of compute but surfacing a fact that they oversold compute to a situations where they cant keep the KV cache hot and now its thrashing.
      - bensyverson 7mo ago
        Caching helps them too, so I hope they fix it
p2hari 7mo ago
I cancelled my pro plan last month. I was using Claude as my daily driver. In fact had the API plan also and topped it with $20 more. So it was around $40 each month. Starting from December last year it has been like this. When sessions could last a couple of hours with some deep boilerplate and db queries etc. to architecture discussion and tool selection. Slowly the last two months it just gets over. One prompt and few discussions as to why this and not that and it is done.
- ramon156 7mo ago
  After they force OpenCode to remove their Claude integration, and the insane token hogging, I also cancelled my subscription.
- iwontberude 7mo ago
  I have had the exact same experience (like super uncanny with prices etc). And now feel like I can only use my Claude subscription for the most basic issues. I’m getting range anxiety.
TheProductAgent 7mo ago
[dead]
giancarlostoro 7mo ago
I'm guessing their newer models are taking way more compute than they can afford to give away. The biggest challenge of AI will eventually be, how to bring down how much compute a powerful model takes. I hope Claude puts more emphasis into making Haiku and Sonnet better, when I use them via JetBrains AI it feels like only Opus is good enough, for whatever odd reason.
- medwards666 7mo ago
  I get the same. Work has shifted to being agentic first - and whenever I use anything other than Claude Opus it seems that the model easily gets lost spinning its wheels on even the simplest query - especially with some of our more complex codebases, whereas Opus manages to not only reason adequately about the codebase, but also can produce decent quality code/tests in fairly short order. Oddly though, when using at home I'm using Sonnet via the standard chat interface and that, whilst it will produce substandard code in its output is still reasonably capable - even in more niche tasks. Granted though that my personal projects are far simpler than the codebase I handle at work.
  - giancarlostoro 7mo ago
    Funny, I use Opus at home, but I have a Max plan, and I only use it during their non-peak hours. I can't bring myself to downgrade to Haiku or Sonnet.
  - cyanydeez 7mo ago
    Agents dont solvd compute, they solve context pollutuon.
Asmod4n 7mo ago
When asking it to write a http library which can decode/parse/encode all three versions of it the usage limit of the day gets hit with one sentence. In the pro plan. Even when you hand it a library which does hpack/huffmann.
lukewarm707 7mo ago
please tell me if i'm crazy. i just refuse to use openai/google/anthropic subscriptions, i only use open source models with ZDR tokens. - i like privacy in my work, and i share when i wish. somehow we accepted that our prompts and work may be read and moderated by employees. would you accept people moderating what you write in excel, google docs, apple pages? - i want a consistent tool, not something that is quantised one day, slow one day, a different harness one day, stops randomly. - unless i am missing something, the closed source models are too slow for me to watch what they are doing. i feel comfortable with monitoring something, usually at about 200-300tps on GLM 5. above that it might even be too fast!
- susupro1 7mo ago
  You are not crazy, you are just waking up from the SaaS delusion. We somehow allowed the industry to convince us that paying $20/month to rent volatile compute, have our proprietary workflows surveilled, and get throttled mid-thought is an 'upgrade'. The pendulum is swinging violently back to local-native tools. Deterministic, privately owned, unmetered—buying your execution layer instead of renting it is the only way to build actual leverage.
  - staticassertion 7mo ago
    No one was convinced to spend money to do the things you're saying. That's just disingenuous. People rent models because (a) it moves compute elsewhere (b) they provide higher quality models.
    - nprateem 7mo ago
      c) It's turnkey instead of requiring months/years of custom dev and on-going maintenance.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 7mo ago
    If I could buy this to run it locally, what's that hardware even look like? What model would I even run on the hardware? What framework would I need to have it do the things Claude Code can do?
stavros 7mo ago
Anthropic went about this in a really dishonest way. They had increased demand, fine, but their response was to ban third-party clients (clients they were fine with before), and to semi-quietly reduce limits while keeping the price the same. Unilaterally changing the deal to give customers less for the same price should not be legal, but companies have slowly boiled the frog in such a way that now we just go "welp, it's corporations, what can you do", and forget that we actually used to have some semblance of justice in the olden days.
robviren 7mo ago
I find Claude code to be a token hog. No matter how confidently the papers say context rot is not an issue I find curating context to be highly important to output quality. Manually managing this in the Claude Webui has helped with my use cases more than freely tossing Claude code at it. Likely I am using both "wrong" but the way I use it is easier for me to reason about and minimize context rot.
- sossov 7mo ago
  [dead]
jdefr89 7mo ago
Over reliance on LLMs is going to become such a disaster in a way no one would have thought possible. Not sure exactly what, who, when, or where.. Just that having your entire product or repo dependent on a single entity is going to lead to some bad times…
- xnx 7mo ago
  > on a single entity Contrary to the popular opinion here, there are other services beyond Claude Code. These usage limits might even prompt (har har) people to notice that Gemini is cheaper and often better.
  - bigbinary 7mo ago
    On-premise LLMs are also getting better and likely won’t stop; as costs go up with the technical improvements, I would imagine cost saving methods to also improve
    - horsawlarway 7mo ago
      I still think it's basically unavoidable that most people who might pay for api access will end up on-prem. Fixed costs, exact model pinning, outage resistant, enshittification resistant, better security, better privacy, etc... There are just so many compelling reasons to be on-prem instead of dependent on a 3rd party hoovering up all your data and prompts and selling you overpriced tokens (which eventually they MUST be, because these companies have to make a profit at some point). If the only counterbalance is "well the api is cheaper than buying my own hardware"... That's a short term problem. Hardware costs are going to drop over time, and capabilities are going to continue improving. It's already pretty insane how good of a model I can run on two old RTX-3090s locally. Is it as good as modern claude? No. Is it as good as claude was 18 months ago? Yes. Give it a decade to see companies really push into the "diminishing returns" of scaling and new models... combined with new hardware built with these workloads in mind... and I think on-prem is the pretty clear winner.
      - 7mo ago
shafyy 7mo ago
What is the best way to get start with open weight models? And are they a good alternative to Claude Code?
- wolvoleo 7mo ago
  Just install ollama. And no, they're not as capable as SOTA models. Not by far. However they can help reduce your token expenditure a lot by routing them the low-hanging fruit. Summaries, translations, stuff like that.
  - ramon156 7mo ago
    no need for ollama, simonw's llm tool is good enough
    - wolvoleo 7mo ago
      Oh I don't know that one. I just mentioned ollama because it makes things easy for the user. But looking at it it's just an interface to the cloud LLMs? The OP's question was about local models.
- MarsIronPI 7mo ago
  If you want to still use APIs, I like OpenRouter because I can use the same credits across various models, so I'm not stuck with a single family of models. (Actually, you can even use the proprietary models on OpenRouter, but they're eye-wateringly expensive.) Otherwise you should look into running e.g. Qwen3.5-35B-A3B or Qwen3.5-27B on your own computer. They're not Opus-level but from what I've heard they're capable for smaller tasks. llama.cpp works well for inference; it works well on both CPU and GPUs and even split across both if you want.
- lukewarm707 7mo ago
  i would recommend getting an API account on fireworks, this is ZDR and typically the fastest provider. otherwise check the list of providers on openrouter and you can see the pricing, quantisation, sign up directly rather than via a router. ensure to get caching prices, do not get input/output API prices. GLM 5 is a frontier model, Kimi 2.5 is similar with vision support, Minimax M2.7 is a very capable model focused on tool calling. If you need server side web search, you could use the Z AI API directly, again ZDR; or Friendli AI; or just install a search mcp. For the harness opencode is the normal one, it has subagents and parallel tool calling; or just use claude code by pointing it at the anthropic APIs of various providers like fireworks.
nprateem 7mo ago
I literally ran out of tokens on the antigravity top plan after 4 new questions the other day (opus). Total scam. Not impressed.
kneel 7mo ago
I asked it to complete ONE task: You've hit your limit · resets 2am (America/Los_Angeles) I waited until the next day to ask it to do it again, and then: You've hit your limit · resets 1pm (America/Los_Angeles) At which point I just gave up
- dewey 7mo ago
  If this is reasonable or not is pretty hard to judge without any info on that "ONE" task.
  - kaoD 7mo ago
    I only asked Claude to rewrite Linux in Rust.
    - kombine 7mo ago
      I'd ask it to rewrite Claude code in Rust, but it's creator apparently wrote a book on Typescript..
bustah 7mo ago
[flagged]
ZeroCool2u 7mo ago
I'm finishing my annual paid Pro Gemini plan, so I'm on the free plan for Claude and I asked one (1) single question, which admittedly was about a research plan, using the Sonnet 4.6 Extended thinking model and instantly hit my limit until 2 PM (it was around 8 or 9 AM). Just a shockingly constrained service tier right now.
- notyourwork 7mo ago
  Free is free. Want more, fork over money.
  - Forgeties79 7mo ago
    They are saying even for free it is very constrained. This isn’t productive.
    - ZeroCool2u 7mo ago
      Yes, exactly my point.
  - jlharter 7mo ago
    I mean, even the paid tier where you fork over money is constrained, too!
- MaxikCZ 7mo ago
  When I got my Google AI Ultra, I could run it morning to evening at opus 4.6. One month later I started hitting 5h limits when I was nearing my 5h window. 2 weeks after I hit my 5h limit 30 min into the morning. Cancelled my sub even quicker.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
firebot 7mo ago
The first hit is free.
dinakernel 7mo ago
This turned out to be a bug. https://x.com/om_patel5/status/2038754906715066444?s=20 https://x.com/om_patel5/status/2038754906715066444?s=20 One reddit user reverse engineered the binary and found that it was a cache invalidation issue. They are doing some hidden string replacement if the claude code conversation talks about billing or tokens. Looks like that invalidates the cache at that point. If that string appears anywhere in the conversation history, I think the starting text is replaced, your entire cache rebuilds from scratch. So, nothing devious, just a bug.
- kif 7mo ago
  Anecdotally when Claude was error 500'ing a few days ago, its retries would never succeed, but cancelling and retrying manually worked most of the time.
- replwoacause 7mo ago
  Nothing devious, but is Anthropic crediting users? In a sense, this is _like_ stealing from your customer, if they paid for something they never got.
  - arvid-lind 7mo ago
    Not seeing any quota returned on my Pro account. My weekly usage went up to 20% in about one hour yesterday before I panicked and stopped the task. It was outside of the prime hours too which are supposed to run up your quota at a slower rate.
    - esperent 7mo ago
      Outside of prime hours is the normal rate. Prime is at a fast rate, as of about two weeks ago.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7mo ago
  That bug would only affect a conversation where that magic string is mentioned, which shouldn't be common.
1970-01-01 7mo ago
This has been verified as a bug. Naturally, people should see some refunds or discounts, but I expect there won't be anything for you unless you make a stink. https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1s7zg7h/investigating_usage_limits_hitting_faster_than/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1s7zg7h/investi...
- Kim_Bruning 7mo ago
  How do you even make a stink? I haven't found an easy way to find a human.
- ramon156 7mo ago
  You have better luck just cancelling your subscription. Claude is becoming too expensive for what I use it for. I don't want a refund. Maybe I just realized that I do not need a coding agent. I definitely learned to plan out my projects more using LLM's, but in that case im 80% there. I might hit a roadblock or two, but if that means I don't have to guide an LLM then I'd prefer that.
aliljet 7mo ago
There's a weird 'token anxiety' you get on these platforms. And you basically don't know how much of this 'limit' you may consume at any time. And you actually don't even know what the 'limit' is or how it's calculated. So far, people have just assumed Anthropic will do the kind thing and give you more than you could ever use...
- sumtechguy 7mo ago
  This reminds me of the early days of cell phones. Limits everywhere and you paid for it by the kilobyte. Think at one point I was paying 45c per text message. I hope this gets better and we do not need gigawatt datacenters to do this stuff.
  - zdragnar 7mo ago
    We're in the process of building new gigawatt datacenters for the sole purpose of doing this stuff. If we end up not needing them, there's gonna be a whole lot of capacity sitting around soaking up ongoing maintenance costs. For ex. of the five new data centers being planned in Wisconsin, the two I know of that have public energy consumption estimates will need more electricity than all of the residential electric usage in Wisconsin combined at 3.9 gigawatts. https://www.wpr.org/news/data-centers-could-cost-wisconsins-energy-system-billions-increase-reliance-fossil-fuels https://www.wpr.org/news/data-centers-could-cost-wisconsins-...
    - ThunderSizzle 7mo ago
      All I know is I never want to hear another person talk about how my personal electrical usage is excessive after all the power usage needed for these data centers. My house should be able to feel comfortable in the summer if we're building these many data centers.
- jauntywundrkind 7mo ago
  Yeah, I've been juggling some patches to opencode to help me see where my codex usage limits are at. As of a month ago, that information was not visible on the ChatGPT web UI. You just work till suddenly the AI dumps you out, and sit there wondering how many hours or days you have to wait. It's incredible that this experience is at all ok, is accepted
noritaka88 7mo ago
[flagged]
pxtail 7mo ago
Recently after noticing how quickly limits are consumed and reading others complaints about same issue on reddit I was wondering how much about this is real error or bug hidden somewhere and how much it's about testing what threshold of constraining limits will be tolerated without cancelling accounts. Eventually, in case of "shit hits the fan" situation it can be always dismissed by waving hands and apologizing (or not) about some abstract "bug". The lack of transparency and accountability behind all of this is incredible in my perception.
- joshuafuller 7mo ago
  This feels a lot like the same playbook we’re seeing with dynamic pricing in retail, just applied to compute instead of products. You never really know what you’re getting, and the rules shift under you. What makes it worse is the lack of transparency. If there were clear, hard limits, people could plan around it. Instead it’s this moving target that makes it impossible to trust for real work. At some point it stops feeling like a bug and starts feeling like a pricing experiment on users.
  - tartoran 7mo ago
    What a horrid glimpse in the future. I hope we won't get there and we all collectively fight back with our wallets.
    - Tade0 7mo ago
      I'm worried that the present is actually living off a line of credit that will be spent/closed soon.
    - ryandrake 7mo ago
      It's going to get much worse. We're soon going to have enough data and compute (and are losing enough online privacy) to allow every company to apply personalized pricing down to the individual. My local restaurant is going to know that I am willing to buy a burger for at most $4.57 and my neighbor is only willing to pay $2.91 for it, and they will have the ability to charge us individually. Every business is going to soak each of us us to the maximum extent that the data says they can.
ryan42 7mo ago
claude automatically enabled "extra usage" on my pro account for me (I had it disabled) and the total got to $49 extra before I noticed. I sent an email asking wtf but I don't expect much.
delphic-frog 7mo ago
The token usage differs day to day - that's the most frustrating part. You can't effectively plan a development session if you aren't sure how far you'll likely get into a feature.
spongebobstoes 7mo ago
try codex, it's really good and doesn't have the same limits issues
reenorap 7mo ago
The only way AI will be profitable to companies like Anthropic or OpenAI is to make the cost $1000-2000/month or more for coding. Every programmer will be forced to pay for it because it's only a fraction of their salary (in the US anyway) and it's the only way the programmer will be competitive. Whether the company pays for it, or they pay for it themselves, it will need to be paid. There's no other way that these companies can compete against the likes of Google, and Facebook unless they sell themselves to these companies. With AWS and GCP spending hundreds of billions of dollars per year, there's no way that Anthropic or OpenAI can continue competing unless they make an absurd amount of money and throw that at resources like their own datacenters, etc and they can't do that at $20/month.
- danny_codes 7mo ago
  Even worse, the open weight models are practically indistinguishable from the closed ones. I just don’t see why you’d pay full price to run Claude when you can pay 10x less to run Kimi. There are already loads of inference providers and client layers. Without heavy collusion or outright legislative fiat (banning open models) I don’t see how Anthropic/OpenAI justify their (alleged) market caps
- leptons 7mo ago
  > the cost $1000-2000/month or more for coding. Every programmer will be forced to pay for it because it's only a fraction of their salary (in the US anyway) and it's the only way the programmer will be competitive. I routinely match or beat Claude with regards to speed, I often race it to the solution because Claude just takes so long to produce a usable result. Staying competitive doesn't mean only paying an AI for slop that often takes longer to produce. AI is a convenience, it is not the only way to produce code or even the most cost effective or fastest way. AI code also comes with more risk, and more cognitive load if you actually read and understand everything it wrote. And if you don't then you're a bit foolish to trust it blindly. Many developers are waking up to the reality of using AI, and it's not really living up to the hype.
  - reenorap 7mo ago
    You must not be using it right because where I work, a Big Tech company, it's been transformational. Things that would take me a day to code takes minutes. I can't coded since last year. I can see why software engineering as a career is a dead end job now, I spend most of my time testing and code reviewing instead of coding.
ChrisArchitect 7mo ago
Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1s7zg7h/investigating_usage_limits_hitting_faster_than/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1s7zg7h/investi... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582671)
raincole 7mo ago
Opus 4.6 price: Input $5 / M tokens Output $25 / M tokens GPT Codex 5.3: Input $1.75 / M tokens Output $14 / M tokens > Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected' No shit, Sherlock.
sudo_and_pray 7mo ago
I gave claude code a try at home ($20 sub), since we use it at work without any limits and I wanted to see how I can use it on some of my projects. It was a big disappointment and it just burned through tokens so fast that I hit first limit after 30 minutes while it was gathering info on my project and doing websearches. My experience was that when I wanted to use it, maybe 2-3 days per week, Pro sub was not enough. On some days I did not use it at all. The daily or weekly token limit was really restrictive.
zackify 7mo ago
After using it all week on pro plan it worked fine for me. Hit limits a couple times. But if I was doing deep coding on pro plan it would have sucked. You can't expect to use massive context windows for $20
- GrinningFool 7mo ago
  I'm burning through pretty fast with context sizes of only 32-64kb. I regularly clear when I change topics. A simple "how do I do x" question used 2% of my budget. I paid extra and chewed through $5 in a few minutes of analyzing segments of log files. At this rate it's not worth the trouble of carefully managing usage to avoid ambiguous limits that disrupt my work. If that's the way it is in order for them to make money, that's fine - but I need a usable tool that I don't have to micromanage. This product is not worth it ($, time) to me at this rate. I hope it changes because when it works it's a great addition to my tools.
aperture_hq 7mo ago
There is no transparent metrics on the token usage count, they just compare their plans with their plans.
arvid-lind 7mo ago
well, they just had a promo with two weeks of double quota for everyone 18 hours of the day, even free users. of course it feels like we're getting rugpulled.
canada_dry 7mo ago
I hit my limit on the project I've been working on (after I let "MAX" run out and moved to "PRO") after about only 2 hours! TIP (YMMV): I've found that moving the current code base into a new 'project' after a dozen or so turns helps as I suspect the regurgitation of the old conversations chews up tokens.
- canada_dry 7mo ago
  An aside: https://www.buchodi.com/chatgpt-wont-let-you-type-until-cloudflare-reads-your-react-state-i-decrypted-the-program-that-does-it/ https://www.buchodi.com/chatgpt-wont-let-you-type-until-clou... It seems that anthropic has added something similar to their browser UI because just in the last few days chat has become almost unusable in firefox. %@$#%
0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
I've found a lot of people are almost belligerently pro-Claude. They refuse to consider other providers or agents, and won't consider using any model than the latest Opus. The most common reasons I hear are 1) they don't want to use anything other than the greatest model, afraid that anything else would waste their time, 2) they believe their experience is that it's far better than anything else. Even if you show them benchmarks that show another model equally as good if not better, they refuse to use it. My suspicion is they've convinced themselves that Opus must be the best, because of reputation and price. They might've used a different model and didn't have a good experience, making them double down. I hope a research institution will perform an experiment. My hypothesis is that if you swapped out a couple similar state-of-the-art models, even changing the "class" of model (Sonnet <-> Opus, GPT 5.4 <-> Sonnet), the user won't be able to tell which is which. This would show that the experience is subjective, and that bias is informing their decision, rather than rationality. It's like wine tasting experiments. People rate a $100 bottle of wine higher than a $10 bottle. But if they actually taste the same, you should be buying the $10 bottle. But people don't, because they believe the $100 bottle is better. In the AI case, the problem is people won't stop buying the expensive bottle, because they've convinced themselves they must use the more expensive bottle.
- danny_codes 7mo ago
  This has largely been my experience. Can’t tell the difference between Claude and kimi
- prmph 7mo ago
  This is of course subjective, but I would give a lot to have an alternative to Claude Code and the Claude models, but there just isn't anything comparable that works well in an integrated manner for agentic coding. It's not like I haven't tried. Gemini CLI is still trash (it's probably a bit better now, but I still can't see the edits it proposes, well, etc.). I tried OpenCode, the whole experience was frustrating: the models give up mid-task, they run rampant with actions, the CLI does not offer the level of control and customization Claude Code offers, etc. I've also tried the other major tools: Codex, Cursor, Cline, Aider, and others, nothing works for me. You are surprised people stick to Claude Code, I am surprised people bother with the other tools. Maybe it has something to do with how I use the agentic tools: I use the CLI almost exclusively, rarely using the IDE (unless I want to actually code myself). I also almost always approve each and every edit. As such, my number one concern is for the tool to provide me with proper control in a simple and reliable manner: I want a rich permission system that works, and I want to see each proposed edit very clearly in an ergonomic diff format. I want to be able to type, recall, and edit my commands easily too. These are things Claude Code excels at that the other just don't. The best I've been able to do is to use third-party routers to enable me use Claude Code with almost-SOTA models, and this is the approach that shows the most promise. I'd hate to be beholden to Anthropic's shenanigans.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
MeetRickAI 7mo ago
[dead]
nitekode 7mo ago
This could also be because of the recently introduced 1 million token buffer. I also saw my tokens drain away quickly; then in noticed I was pushing 750k tokens through for every prompt :) Sometimes its hard to get into the habit of clearing
anon7000 7mo ago
I think I ran into this yesterday, with Claude Code taking FOREVER on a lot of tasks. But using Claude within Cursor seems way faster
techgnosis 7mo ago
* Hardware will manage models more efficiently * Models will manage tokens more efficiently * Agents will manage models more efficiently * Users will manage agents more efficiently Why are we acting like technology is on pause?
philbitt 7mo ago
[dead]
edbern 7mo ago
Yesterday asked claude to write up a simple plan adding very basic features to a project I'm working on and it took 20% of 5-hour pro plan limit. Then somehow Codex seems to be infinite. Is OpenAI just burning through way more cash or are they more efficient?
pagecalm 7mo ago
Hit this myself recently, along with a bunch of overloaded errors. I think it's growing pains for where we are with AI right now. As the tooling matures I think we'll see better support for mixing models — local and cloud, picking the right one for the task. Run the cheap stuff locally, use the expensive cloud models only when you actually need them. That would go a long way toward managing costs. There's also the dependency risk people aren't talking about enough. These providers can change pricing whenever they want. A tool you've built your entire workflow around can become inaccessible overnight just because the economics shifted. It's the vendor lock-in problem all over again but with less predictability.
paulbjensen 7mo ago
I have found that: - If I ask Claude to go and build a product idea out for me from scratch, it can get quite far, but then I will hit quota limits on the pro plan ($20pm). - I have not drunk the Kool-aid and tried to indulge in ClaudeMaxxing (Max plan at $200pm). I need to sleep and touch grass from time to time. - I don't bother with a Claude.md in my projects. I just raw-dog context. - If I have a big codebase, and I'm very clear about what code changes I want to make Claude do, I can easily get a lot of changes made without getting near my quota. It's like Mr Miyagi making precision edits to that Bonsai Tree in Karate Kid. My last bit of advice - use the tool, but don't let the tool use you.
midnightdiesel 7mo ago
It seems like Anthropic is constantly changing the rules and pulling out rugs, and always entirely by surprise. I’m not sure if they’re incompetent or just careless, but I stopped paying them because of this a while ago, and my days are much more interesting and enjoyable using my own brain instead.
- carefree-bob 7mo ago
  As long as they keep losing money and are reliant on investments to pay their operating expenses, they are going to be thrashing about in search of a sustainable business model and I don't blame them.
- cyanydeez 7mo ago
  Theyrr a business abd tgeyre burning cash. Their goal is to find profit and that typical grades towards whales. We have decades that say this. Few businesses survive by low margins on wide audiences.
- therobots927 7mo ago
  Oh they’re very competent. They’re running a scam.
jditu 7mo ago
[flagged]
sibtain1997 7mo ago
Faced this too. Tried https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk to compress cli output but some commands started failing and the savings were minimal. Ended up just being more deliberate about context size instead of adding more tooling on top
garrickvanburen 7mo ago
Considering: - Anthropic decides how much a token is worth. - Users have no visibility or ability to control in how many tokens a given response will burn. This is the only expected answer. https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-59-on-credit-based-pricing https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-59-on-credit...
torginus 7mo ago
I dunno, but CC might give away tokens for cheaper, but when I used Opus as standalone in Cursor, I definitely get way more mileage out of a token. Considering how much progress I made vs how much I paid, I couldn't make a scientific assessement, but it felt pretty close.
sachamorard 7mo ago
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mszczodrak 7mo ago
I've been hitting the API limit errors over Claude CLI, yet the total usage was 0% on the claude.ai website. Changing the model fixed the problem.
wellthisisgreat 7mo ago
yeah this is crazy hitting limits on a non-constant usage of a Max plan?
p1necone 7mo ago
I burn through the entire 5 hour limit in one or two "implement the feature outlined in this doc" requests with claude pro in a not even huge codebase (low tens of thousands of loc). If there were any reasonable alternatives I wouldn't even consider using it, but sonnet 4.6 (and presumably opus 4.6 - I don't use it as sonnet is faster and more than good enough) is the only model I've used that actually makes good decisions in complex codebases - anything else just gets stuck in the weeds and produces either non working code or tech debt (after churning for a long time). I have seen more than one comment on this thread mentioning kimi though - I'll have to test it out. qwen3-coder-next has been surprisingly capable as a local model too - needs to be used to make small changes where you know exactly what the final code should look like rather than implementing whole features, but it is free (except for the power bill).
- jazoom 7mo ago
  I haven't found Kimi to be all that good, but GLM 5.1 I find to be better than Opus 4.6 most of the time in web dev. Opus' only advantage is it's a bit faster. If you can't access GLM 5.1 (not fully released yet) try 5.0. It was better than Opus sometimes too. I have a GLM Code subscription and it lasts much longer than Claude Code. I use Pi agent so I use all agents in the same harness.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- dzhiurgis 7mo ago
  I’ve dumped claude few months ago for gemini. Maybe my problems are too trivial, but it’s same if not better with added benefit of being much faster. I’d say 95% of my work (20-30hrs per week) is done by it and I spend less than $50 per month.
  - testfrequency 7mo ago
    What stack do you work on ooc? I’ve been tempted to move my Gemini plan up to a higher plan and play around more with the Gemini cli - as I seriously live the Gemini chat for most everything. Claude is lazy af and is always pulling stale data, or not checking resources entirely. I literally have a Gemini mcp that I force close to use half the time when it’s lost, and Gemini nails it every single time. I’m on a Claude max 20x plan right now, and I seriously can’t imagine not having it around anymore but Gemini seems to always have my back on actual current data and less hallucinations.
pmdr 7mo ago
LLMs are cool, but people should really accept that inference costs more money than the "trust me, bro" CEOs lead you to believe. No, they can't flip a switch and turn a profit.
_JoRo 7mo ago
I've used Claude Max awhile now, and I usually only get to around 50% usage in a 4/5hr block (using medium effort). Yesterday, I switched from high -> medium effort using the /model command, but afterwards it still felt like I was burning through tokens at the high effort rate.
npilk 7mo ago
It seems pretty clear there is some sort of bug that only some people are experiencing (or, very cynically, perhaps an A/B test). My usage hasn't seemed to change much in the past few days, but then I see reports where people are hitting limits after one or two prompts. I doubt that could be user error or new limits. Anthropic has said they are investigating. https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s7zgj0/investigating_usage_limits_hitting_faster_than/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s7zgj0/investiga...
Saline9515 7mo ago
The way Anthropic prices its services is honestly dubious at best. You have no way to know what the real limits are, nor to verify what was actually consumed. For most people it's ok because it's likely heavily subsidized, however this won't last forever...
HDBaseT 7mo ago
I asked Claude on the $20 plan to rewrite the Linux Kernel and ffmpeg in Rust (using Opus 4.6, Ultra Thinking) with high verbosity and it ran out of usage!
rglover 7mo ago
If you haven't tried it yet, I'd recommend Cline as an alternative (with full support for Anthropic API). Tracks the current token spend on chats so you know when to do a /newchat. Really nice way to budget token spend on a task-by-task basis and your flow isn't interrupted by limits.
captainbland 7mo ago
Almost certainly a drive to force upsells through product segmentation
therobots927 7mo ago
There is both the opportunity for and an incentive towards these companies actively deceiving users, both by hiding the true amount of subsidies behind AI output and by shuffling users between high and low quality models in order to minimize said subsidies. It’s difficult for me to understand why most engineers here don’t seem to get this. If you’re not listening to Ed Zitron you’d better start if you don’t want to get whiplash in the coming months.
bjconlan 7mo ago
While I haven't read all the posts here I was wondering if anyone also noticed a 10% usage before their most recent weeks usage even started? (Specifically over 2026-03-27/28) I was seeing weird service outages over this time too. I suspect they're not being 100% truthful with how they are recording usage (feels like they had an agent run a backfill approximation). So they blur it with weekends rates etc. Anyways I don't have the knowledge as to how to audit this (claud pro) to confirm what feels like an onboard at any cost business behavior. Is anyone currently auditing through openrouter/litellm and seeing any poor correlation to the session/weekly limit?
bradlannon 7mo ago
I was literally planning a new feature using superpowers. I typed "continue" after it hit it's limited. No joke, about 1 minute later, I looked at the token % left and it said I was at 20% already. I literally typed continue and then took 1 minute to look at the usage. Something is seriously broken!!!!!!
bradlannon 7mo ago
you should not be at 20% by typing "continue" 2 minutes after your limit was restored. I'm on the Max 5 plan...this makes no sense. I can't afford this...
docdev 7mo ago
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docdev 7mo ago
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rajadroit2026 7mo ago
I am sensing from last couple of days, hitting limit much earlier. Today Claude has hardly created one markdown file and complaining about hitting limit issue. Any idea when this will return to normal. It has been really creating a lot of delay.
Kim_Bruning 7mo ago
Ok, I have part of the answer at least. Claude recently improved Opus 4.6 to have a 1Mtoken context. Cache normally invalidates after 5 minutes. If you come back or --continue after a break (or 5 minutes), that's a MASSIVE hit to your session limit. 250000 tokens at Max x5 will ding you 10% of your session for "Hi, I'm back". So say you don't typically do /compact very often. And say you're not very chatty and "do the right thing" by only asking a question once in a while? You'll burn through context like crazy. Meanwhile if you have ADHD and anthropomorphize the bleep out of your claude and chat with them all day long? Hardly a dent! This trick seems to work for now (ymmv) Tell your system to CronCreate cron: "*/4 * * * *" prompt: "heartbeat — no action needed" And turn it back off at end of day. I'm sure anthropic will be thrilled by this, but I don't have a better solve at this time yet. Context management is a thing. Unfortunately you're not allowed to use any tool other than claude code with the Anthropic Subscription, so I guess this is the solve they asked for. Allowing people to write their own tools with superior context management would seem to be a no-brainer to me, but what do I know?
bicepjai 7mo ago
After spending some time on how Claude code (leaked) tools were written, it makes sense why we constantly hit limits, for all the amazing llm capabilities, CC does not have edit tool and always read before write ( this makes sense) but I expected some surgical precision magic software, seems like other agents like master open code and pi are way better than CC in taken usage
bezlant 7mo ago
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bottomlessmug 6mo ago
Definitely hitting limits insanely faster. Not sure if it's the same problem for everyone or they're cranking up usage for low users to support others. I do bursts of work and a month ago would write a lot of code every window and then pause for reset using mix of chat and CLI. Currently ran a excel work session with code, burnt a lot. Asked it to give me a view on how to optimise excel work to burn less, got a 2 paras of answer burning 9% of session and i copy-pasted those two paras into Chat since it usually cost me less to plan there, asked it to help me figure out best way to set this up - 11% burnt for a couple of bullet point options. Has never happened so fast. This is a massive shift from my previous experience.

331 points by samizdis 7mo ago

[flagged]

Yesterday (pro plan) I ran one small conversation in which Claude did one set of three web searches, a very small conversation with no web search, and I added a single prompt to an existing long conversation. I was shocked to see after the last prompt that I had somehow hit my limit until 5:00pm. This account is not connected to an IDE or Code, super confusing.

master_crab 7mo ago
Tool calls (particularly fetching for context) eats the context window heavily. I explicitly send MCP calls to sub agents because they are so “wordy”.
- bensyverson 7mo ago
  Everyone who has not hit this bug thinks it’s user error… It’s not. It happened to me a few days ago, and the speed at which I tore through my 5 hour usage cap was easily 10x faster than normal. Also: sub agents do not get you free usage. They just protect your main context window.
  - piva00 7mo ago
    Don't they consume less of the token quota in case the subagents are running cheaper models like Sonnet and Haiku compared to Opus?
    - bensyverson 7mo ago
      Correct—I just wouldn't want folks to mistakenly think that the context fill % corresponds 1:1 with session token use.
  - master_crab 7mo ago
    Yes, sorry. I meant it more as a descriptor of how many tokens it consumes. You are still stuck burning money.
  - dmd 7mo ago
    I'm on Max. This morning, just to test, before doing anything else whatsoever, I was at 0%, and I typed 'test one two three' into CC. That put me at 12%. I have no MCPs except the built in claude-in-chrome. This is clearly a bug.
  - cyanydeez 7mo ago
    Readimg through this thread, it seems likely is a KV cache "bug". Theyre likely doing too many evictions of the LLM cache so the context is being reloaded to often. Its a "bug" because its probably an intended effect of capturing the costs of compute but surfacing a fact that they oversold compute to a situations where they cant keep the KV cache hot and now its thrashing.
    - bensyverson 7mo ago
      Caching helps them too, so I hope they fix it

p2hari 7mo ago

I cancelled my pro plan last month. I was using Claude as my daily driver. In fact had the API plan also and topped it with $20 more. So it was around $40 each month. Starting from December last year it has been like this. When sessions could last a couple of hours with some deep boilerplate and db queries etc. to architecture discussion and tool selection. Slowly the last two months it just gets over. One prompt and few discussions as to why this and not that and it is done.

ramon156 7mo ago
After they force OpenCode to remove their Claude integration, and the insane token hogging, I also cancelled my subscription.
iwontberude 7mo ago
I have had the exact same experience (like super uncanny with prices etc). And now feel like I can only use my Claude subscription for the most basic issues. I’m getting range anxiety.

TheProductAgent 7mo ago

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giancarlostoro 7mo ago

I'm guessing their newer models are taking way more compute than they can afford to give away. The biggest challenge of AI will eventually be, how to bring down how much compute a powerful model takes. I hope Claude puts more emphasis into making Haiku and Sonnet better, when I use them via JetBrains AI it feels like only Opus is good enough, for whatever odd reason.

medwards666 7mo ago
I get the same. Work has shifted to being agentic first - and whenever I use anything other than Claude Opus it seems that the model easily gets lost spinning its wheels on even the simplest query - especially with some of our more complex codebases, whereas Opus manages to not only reason adequately about the codebase, but also can produce decent quality code/tests in fairly short order. Oddly though, when using at home I'm using Sonnet via the standard chat interface and that, whilst it will produce substandard code in its output is still reasonably capable - even in more niche tasks. Granted though that my personal projects are far simpler than the codebase I handle at work.
- giancarlostoro 7mo ago
  Funny, I use Opus at home, but I have a Max plan, and I only use it during their non-peak hours. I can't bring myself to downgrade to Haiku or Sonnet.
- cyanydeez 7mo ago
  Agents dont solvd compute, they solve context pollutuon.

Asmod4n 7mo ago

When asking it to write a http library which can decode/parse/encode all three versions of it the usage limit of the day gets hit with one sentence. In the pro plan. Even when you hand it a library which does hpack/huffmann.

lukewarm707 7mo ago

please tell me if i'm crazy. i just refuse to use openai/google/anthropic subscriptions, i only use open source models with ZDR tokens. - i like privacy in my work, and i share when i wish. somehow we accepted that our prompts and work may be read and moderated by employees. would you accept people moderating what you write in excel, google docs, apple pages? - i want a consistent tool, not something that is quantised one day, slow one day, a different harness one day, stops randomly. - unless i am missing something, the closed source models are too slow for me to watch what they are doing. i feel comfortable with monitoring something, usually at about 200-300tps on GLM 5. above that it might even be too fast!

susupro1 7mo ago
You are not crazy, you are just waking up from the SaaS delusion. We somehow allowed the industry to convince us that paying $20/month to rent volatile compute, have our proprietary workflows surveilled, and get throttled mid-thought is an 'upgrade'. The pendulum is swinging violently back to local-native tools. Deterministic, privately owned, unmetered—buying your execution layer instead of renting it is the only way to build actual leverage.
- staticassertion 7mo ago
  No one was convinced to spend money to do the things you're saying. That's just disingenuous. People rent models because (a) it moves compute elsewhere (b) they provide higher quality models.
  - nprateem 7mo ago
    c) It's turnkey instead of requiring months/years of custom dev and on-going maintenance.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 7mo ago
  If I could buy this to run it locally, what's that hardware even look like? What model would I even run on the hardware? What framework would I need to have it do the things Claude Code can do?

stavros 7mo ago

Anthropic went about this in a really dishonest way. They had increased demand, fine, but their response was to ban third-party clients (clients they were fine with before), and to semi-quietly reduce limits while keeping the price the same. Unilaterally changing the deal to give customers less for the same price should not be legal, but companies have slowly boiled the frog in such a way that now we just go "welp, it's corporations, what can you do", and forget that we actually used to have some semblance of justice in the olden days.

robviren 7mo ago

I find Claude code to be a token hog. No matter how confidently the papers say context rot is not an issue I find curating context to be highly important to output quality. Manually managing this in the Claude Webui has helped with my use cases more than freely tossing Claude code at it. Likely I am using both "wrong" but the way I use it is easier for me to reason about and minimize context rot.

sossov 7mo ago
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jdefr89 7mo ago

Over reliance on LLMs is going to become such a disaster in a way no one would have thought possible. Not sure exactly what, who, when, or where.. Just that having your entire product or repo dependent on a single entity is going to lead to some bad times…

xnx 7mo ago
> on a single entity Contrary to the popular opinion here, there are other services beyond Claude Code. These usage limits might even prompt (har har) people to notice that Gemini is cheaper and often better.
- bigbinary 7mo ago
  On-premise LLMs are also getting better and likely won’t stop; as costs go up with the technical improvements, I would imagine cost saving methods to also improve
  - horsawlarway 7mo ago
    I still think it's basically unavoidable that most people who might pay for api access will end up on-prem. Fixed costs, exact model pinning, outage resistant, enshittification resistant, better security, better privacy, etc... There are just so many compelling reasons to be on-prem instead of dependent on a 3rd party hoovering up all your data and prompts and selling you overpriced tokens (which eventually they MUST be, because these companies have to make a profit at some point). If the only counterbalance is "well the api is cheaper than buying my own hardware"... That's a short term problem. Hardware costs are going to drop over time, and capabilities are going to continue improving. It's already pretty insane how good of a model I can run on two old RTX-3090s locally. Is it as good as modern claude? No. Is it as good as claude was 18 months ago? Yes. Give it a decade to see companies really push into the "diminishing returns" of scaling and new models... combined with new hardware built with these workloads in mind... and I think on-prem is the pretty clear winner.
    - 7mo ago

shafyy 7mo ago

What is the best way to get start with open weight models? And are they a good alternative to Claude Code?

wolvoleo 7mo ago
Just install ollama. And no, they're not as capable as SOTA models. Not by far. However they can help reduce your token expenditure a lot by routing them the low-hanging fruit. Summaries, translations, stuff like that.
- ramon156 7mo ago
  no need for ollama, simonw's llm tool is good enough
  - wolvoleo 7mo ago
    Oh I don't know that one. I just mentioned ollama because it makes things easy for the user. But looking at it it's just an interface to the cloud LLMs? The OP's question was about local models.
MarsIronPI 7mo ago
If you want to still use APIs, I like OpenRouter because I can use the same credits across various models, so I'm not stuck with a single family of models. (Actually, you can even use the proprietary models on OpenRouter, but they're eye-wateringly expensive.) Otherwise you should look into running e.g. Qwen3.5-35B-A3B or Qwen3.5-27B on your own computer. They're not Opus-level but from what I've heard they're capable for smaller tasks. llama.cpp works well for inference; it works well on both CPU and GPUs and even split across both if you want.
lukewarm707 7mo ago
i would recommend getting an API account on fireworks, this is ZDR and typically the fastest provider. otherwise check the list of providers on openrouter and you can see the pricing, quantisation, sign up directly rather than via a router. ensure to get caching prices, do not get input/output API prices. GLM 5 is a frontier model, Kimi 2.5 is similar with vision support, Minimax M2.7 is a very capable model focused on tool calling. If you need server side web search, you could use the Z AI API directly, again ZDR; or Friendli AI; or just install a search mcp. For the harness opencode is the normal one, it has subagents and parallel tool calling; or just use claude code by pointing it at the anthropic APIs of various providers like fireworks.

nprateem 7mo ago

I literally ran out of tokens on the antigravity top plan after 4 new questions the other day (opus). Total scam. Not impressed.

kneel 7mo ago

I asked it to complete ONE task: You've hit your limit · resets 2am (America/Los_Angeles) I waited until the next day to ask it to do it again, and then: You've hit your limit · resets 1pm (America/Los_Angeles) At which point I just gave up

dewey 7mo ago
If this is reasonable or not is pretty hard to judge without any info on that "ONE" task.
- kaoD 7mo ago
  I only asked Claude to rewrite Linux in Rust.
  - kombine 7mo ago
    I'd ask it to rewrite Claude code in Rust, but it's creator apparently wrote a book on Typescript..

bustah 7mo ago

[flagged]

ZeroCool2u 7mo ago

I'm finishing my annual paid Pro Gemini plan, so I'm on the free plan for Claude and I asked one (1) single question, which admittedly was about a research plan, using the Sonnet 4.6 Extended thinking model and instantly hit my limit until 2 PM (it was around 8 or 9 AM). Just a shockingly constrained service tier right now.

notyourwork 7mo ago
Free is free. Want more, fork over money.
- Forgeties79 7mo ago
  They are saying even for free it is very constrained. This isn’t productive.
  - ZeroCool2u 7mo ago
    Yes, exactly my point.
- jlharter 7mo ago
  I mean, even the paid tier where you fork over money is constrained, too!
MaxikCZ 7mo ago
When I got my Google AI Ultra, I could run it morning to evening at opus 4.6. One month later I started hitting 5h limits when I was nearing my 5h window. 2 weeks after I hit my 5h limit 30 min into the morning. Cancelled my sub even quicker.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

firebot 7mo ago

The first hit is free.

dinakernel 7mo ago

This turned out to be a bug. https://x.com/om_patel5/status/2038754906715066444?s=20 https://x.com/om_patel5/status/2038754906715066444?s=20 One reddit user reverse engineered the binary and found that it was a cache invalidation issue. They are doing some hidden string replacement if the claude code conversation talks about billing or tokens. Looks like that invalidates the cache at that point. If that string appears anywhere in the conversation history, I think the starting text is replaced, your entire cache rebuilds from scratch. So, nothing devious, just a bug.

kif 7mo ago
Anecdotally when Claude was error 500'ing a few days ago, its retries would never succeed, but cancelling and retrying manually worked most of the time.
replwoacause 7mo ago
Nothing devious, but is Anthropic crediting users? In a sense, this is _like_ stealing from your customer, if they paid for something they never got.
- arvid-lind 7mo ago
  Not seeing any quota returned on my Pro account. My weekly usage went up to 20% in about one hour yesterday before I panicked and stopped the task. It was outside of the prime hours too which are supposed to run up your quota at a slower rate.
  - esperent 7mo ago
    Outside of prime hours is the normal rate. Prime is at a fast rate, as of about two weeks ago.
TazeTSchnitzel 7mo ago
That bug would only affect a conversation where that magic string is mentioned, which shouldn't be common.

1970-01-01 7mo ago

This has been verified as a bug. Naturally, people should see some refunds or discounts, but I expect there won't be anything for you unless you make a stink. https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1s7zg7h/investigating_usage_limits_hitting_faster_than/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1s7zg7h/investi...

Kim_Bruning 7mo ago
How do you even make a stink? I haven't found an easy way to find a human.
ramon156 7mo ago
You have better luck just cancelling your subscription. Claude is becoming too expensive for what I use it for. I don't want a refund. Maybe I just realized that I do not need a coding agent. I definitely learned to plan out my projects more using LLM's, but in that case im 80% there. I might hit a roadblock or two, but if that means I don't have to guide an LLM then I'd prefer that.

aliljet 7mo ago

There's a weird 'token anxiety' you get on these platforms. And you basically don't know how much of this 'limit' you may consume at any time. And you actually don't even know what the 'limit' is or how it's calculated. So far, people have just assumed Anthropic will do the kind thing and give you more than you could ever use...

sumtechguy 7mo ago
This reminds me of the early days of cell phones. Limits everywhere and you paid for it by the kilobyte. Think at one point I was paying 45c per text message. I hope this gets better and we do not need gigawatt datacenters to do this stuff.
- zdragnar 7mo ago
  We're in the process of building new gigawatt datacenters for the sole purpose of doing this stuff. If we end up not needing them, there's gonna be a whole lot of capacity sitting around soaking up ongoing maintenance costs. For ex. of the five new data centers being planned in Wisconsin, the two I know of that have public energy consumption estimates will need more electricity than all of the residential electric usage in Wisconsin combined at 3.9 gigawatts. https://www.wpr.org/news/data-centers-could-cost-wisconsins-energy-system-billions-increase-reliance-fossil-fuels https://www.wpr.org/news/data-centers-could-cost-wisconsins-...
  - ThunderSizzle 7mo ago
    All I know is I never want to hear another person talk about how my personal electrical usage is excessive after all the power usage needed for these data centers. My house should be able to feel comfortable in the summer if we're building these many data centers.
jauntywundrkind 7mo ago
Yeah, I've been juggling some patches to opencode to help me see where my codex usage limits are at. As of a month ago, that information was not visible on the ChatGPT web UI. You just work till suddenly the AI dumps you out, and sit there wondering how many hours or days you have to wait. It's incredible that this experience is at all ok, is accepted

noritaka88 7mo ago

[flagged]

pxtail 7mo ago

Recently after noticing how quickly limits are consumed and reading others complaints about same issue on reddit I was wondering how much about this is real error or bug hidden somewhere and how much it's about testing what threshold of constraining limits will be tolerated without cancelling accounts. Eventually, in case of "shit hits the fan" situation it can be always dismissed by waving hands and apologizing (or not) about some abstract "bug". The lack of transparency and accountability behind all of this is incredible in my perception.

joshuafuller 7mo ago
This feels a lot like the same playbook we’re seeing with dynamic pricing in retail, just applied to compute instead of products. You never really know what you’re getting, and the rules shift under you. What makes it worse is the lack of transparency. If there were clear, hard limits, people could plan around it. Instead it’s this moving target that makes it impossible to trust for real work. At some point it stops feeling like a bug and starts feeling like a pricing experiment on users.
- tartoran 7mo ago
  What a horrid glimpse in the future. I hope we won't get there and we all collectively fight back with our wallets.
  - Tade0 7mo ago
    I'm worried that the present is actually living off a line of credit that will be spent/closed soon.
  - ryandrake 7mo ago
    It's going to get much worse. We're soon going to have enough data and compute (and are losing enough online privacy) to allow every company to apply personalized pricing down to the individual. My local restaurant is going to know that I am willing to buy a burger for at most $4.57 and my neighbor is only willing to pay $2.91 for it, and they will have the ability to charge us individually. Every business is going to soak each of us us to the maximum extent that the data says they can.

ryan42 7mo ago

claude automatically enabled "extra usage" on my pro account for me (I had it disabled) and the total got to $49 extra before I noticed. I sent an email asking wtf but I don't expect much.

delphic-frog 7mo ago

The token usage differs day to day - that's the most frustrating part. You can't effectively plan a development session if you aren't sure how far you'll likely get into a feature.

spongebobstoes 7mo ago

try codex, it's really good and doesn't have the same limits issues

reenorap 7mo ago

The only way AI will be profitable to companies like Anthropic or OpenAI is to make the cost $1000-2000/month or more for coding. Every programmer will be forced to pay for it because it's only a fraction of their salary (in the US anyway) and it's the only way the programmer will be competitive. Whether the company pays for it, or they pay for it themselves, it will need to be paid. There's no other way that these companies can compete against the likes of Google, and Facebook unless they sell themselves to these companies. With AWS and GCP spending hundreds of billions of dollars per year, there's no way that Anthropic or OpenAI can continue competing unless they make an absurd amount of money and throw that at resources like their own datacenters, etc and they can't do that at $20/month.

danny_codes 7mo ago
Even worse, the open weight models are practically indistinguishable from the closed ones. I just don’t see why you’d pay full price to run Claude when you can pay 10x less to run Kimi. There are already loads of inference providers and client layers. Without heavy collusion or outright legislative fiat (banning open models) I don’t see how Anthropic/OpenAI justify their (alleged) market caps
leptons 7mo ago
> the cost $1000-2000/month or more for coding. Every programmer will be forced to pay for it because it's only a fraction of their salary (in the US anyway) and it's the only way the programmer will be competitive. I routinely match or beat Claude with regards to speed, I often race it to the solution because Claude just takes so long to produce a usable result. Staying competitive doesn't mean only paying an AI for slop that often takes longer to produce. AI is a convenience, it is not the only way to produce code or even the most cost effective or fastest way. AI code also comes with more risk, and more cognitive load if you actually read and understand everything it wrote. And if you don't then you're a bit foolish to trust it blindly. Many developers are waking up to the reality of using AI, and it's not really living up to the hype.
- reenorap 7mo ago
  You must not be using it right because where I work, a Big Tech company, it's been transformational. Things that would take me a day to code takes minutes. I can't coded since last year. I can see why software engineering as a career is a dead end job now, I spend most of my time testing and code reviewing instead of coding.

ChrisArchitect 7mo ago

Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1s7zg7h/investigating_usage_limits_hitting_faster_than/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1s7zg7h/investi... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582671)

raincole 7mo ago

Opus 4.6 price: Input $5 / M tokens Output $25 / M tokens GPT Codex 5.3: Input $1.75 / M tokens Output $14 / M tokens > Claude Code users hitting usage limits 'way faster than expected' No shit, Sherlock.

sudo_and_pray 7mo ago

I gave claude code a try at home ($20 sub), since we use it at work without any limits and I wanted to see how I can use it on some of my projects. It was a big disappointment and it just burned through tokens so fast that I hit first limit after 30 minutes while it was gathering info on my project and doing websearches. My experience was that when I wanted to use it, maybe 2-3 days per week, Pro sub was not enough. On some days I did not use it at all. The daily or weekly token limit was really restrictive.

zackify 7mo ago

After using it all week on pro plan it worked fine for me. Hit limits a couple times. But if I was doing deep coding on pro plan it would have sucked. You can't expect to use massive context windows for $20

GrinningFool 7mo ago
I'm burning through pretty fast with context sizes of only 32-64kb. I regularly clear when I change topics. A simple "how do I do x" question used 2% of my budget. I paid extra and chewed through $5 in a few minutes of analyzing segments of log files. At this rate it's not worth the trouble of carefully managing usage to avoid ambiguous limits that disrupt my work. If that's the way it is in order for them to make money, that's fine - but I need a usable tool that I don't have to micromanage. This product is not worth it ($, time) to me at this rate. I hope it changes because when it works it's a great addition to my tools.

aperture_hq 7mo ago

There is no transparent metrics on the token usage count, they just compare their plans with their plans.

arvid-lind 7mo ago

well, they just had a promo with two weeks of double quota for everyone 18 hours of the day, even free users. of course it feels like we're getting rugpulled.

canada_dry 7mo ago

I hit my limit on the project I've been working on (after I let "MAX" run out and moved to "PRO") after about only 2 hours! TIP (YMMV): I've found that moving the current code base into a new 'project' after a dozen or so turns helps as I suspect the regurgitation of the old conversations chews up tokens.

canada_dry 7mo ago
An aside: https://www.buchodi.com/chatgpt-wont-let-you-type-until-cloudflare-reads-your-react-state-i-decrypted-the-program-that-does-it/ https://www.buchodi.com/chatgpt-wont-let-you-type-until-clou... It seems that anthropic has added something similar to their browser UI because just in the last few days chat has become almost unusable in firefox. %@$#%

0xbadcafebee 7mo ago

I've found a lot of people are almost belligerently pro-Claude. They refuse to consider other providers or agents, and won't consider using any model than the latest Opus. The most common reasons I hear are 1) they don't want to use anything other than the greatest model, afraid that anything else would waste their time, 2) they believe their experience is that it's far better than anything else. Even if you show them benchmarks that show another model equally as good if not better, they refuse to use it. My suspicion is they've convinced themselves that Opus must be the best, because of reputation and price. They might've used a different model and didn't have a good experience, making them double down. I hope a research institution will perform an experiment. My hypothesis is that if you swapped out a couple similar state-of-the-art models, even changing the "class" of model (Sonnet <-> Opus, GPT 5.4 <-> Sonnet), the user won't be able to tell which is which. This would show that the experience is subjective, and that bias is informing their decision, rather than rationality. It's like wine tasting experiments. People rate a $100 bottle of wine higher than a $10 bottle. But if they actually taste the same, you should be buying the $10 bottle. But people don't, because they believe the $100 bottle is better. In the AI case, the problem is people won't stop buying the expensive bottle, because they've convinced themselves they must use the more expensive bottle.

danny_codes 7mo ago
This has largely been my experience. Can’t tell the difference between Claude and kimi
prmph 7mo ago
This is of course subjective, but I would give a lot to have an alternative to Claude Code and the Claude models, but there just isn't anything comparable that works well in an integrated manner for agentic coding. It's not like I haven't tried. Gemini CLI is still trash (it's probably a bit better now, but I still can't see the edits it proposes, well, etc.). I tried OpenCode, the whole experience was frustrating: the models give up mid-task, they run rampant with actions, the CLI does not offer the level of control and customization Claude Code offers, etc. I've also tried the other major tools: Codex, Cursor, Cline, Aider, and others, nothing works for me. You are surprised people stick to Claude Code, I am surprised people bother with the other tools. Maybe it has something to do with how I use the agentic tools: I use the CLI almost exclusively, rarely using the IDE (unless I want to actually code myself). I also almost always approve each and every edit. As such, my number one concern is for the tool to provide me with proper control in a simple and reliable manner: I want a rich permission system that works, and I want to see each proposed edit very clearly in an ergonomic diff format. I want to be able to type, recall, and edit my commands easily too. These are things Claude Code excels at that the other just don't. The best I've been able to do is to use third-party routers to enable me use Claude Code with almost-SOTA models, and this is the approach that shows the most promise. I'd hate to be beholden to Anthropic's shenanigans.

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MeetRickAI 7mo ago

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nitekode 7mo ago

This could also be because of the recently introduced 1 million token buffer. I also saw my tokens drain away quickly; then in noticed I was pushing 750k tokens through for every prompt :) Sometimes its hard to get into the habit of clearing

anon7000 7mo ago

I think I ran into this yesterday, with Claude Code taking FOREVER on a lot of tasks. But using Claude within Cursor seems way faster

techgnosis 7mo ago

* Hardware will manage models more efficiently * Models will manage tokens more efficiently * Agents will manage models more efficiently * Users will manage agents more efficiently Why are we acting like technology is on pause?

philbitt 7mo ago

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edbern 7mo ago

Yesterday asked claude to write up a simple plan adding very basic features to a project I'm working on and it took 20% of 5-hour pro plan limit. Then somehow Codex seems to be infinite. Is OpenAI just burning through way more cash or are they more efficient?

pagecalm 7mo ago

Hit this myself recently, along with a bunch of overloaded errors. I think it's growing pains for where we are with AI right now. As the tooling matures I think we'll see better support for mixing models — local and cloud, picking the right one for the task. Run the cheap stuff locally, use the expensive cloud models only when you actually need them. That would go a long way toward managing costs. There's also the dependency risk people aren't talking about enough. These providers can change pricing whenever they want. A tool you've built your entire workflow around can become inaccessible overnight just because the economics shifted. It's the vendor lock-in problem all over again but with less predictability.

paulbjensen 7mo ago

I have found that: - If I ask Claude to go and build a product idea out for me from scratch, it can get quite far, but then I will hit quota limits on the pro plan ($20pm). - I have not drunk the Kool-aid and tried to indulge in ClaudeMaxxing (Max plan at $200pm). I need to sleep and touch grass from time to time. - I don't bother with a Claude.md in my projects. I just raw-dog context. - If I have a big codebase, and I'm very clear about what code changes I want to make Claude do, I can easily get a lot of changes made without getting near my quota. It's like Mr Miyagi making precision edits to that Bonsai Tree in Karate Kid. My last bit of advice - use the tool, but don't let the tool use you.

midnightdiesel 7mo ago

It seems like Anthropic is constantly changing the rules and pulling out rugs, and always entirely by surprise. I’m not sure if they’re incompetent or just careless, but I stopped paying them because of this a while ago, and my days are much more interesting and enjoyable using my own brain instead.

carefree-bob 7mo ago
As long as they keep losing money and are reliant on investments to pay their operating expenses, they are going to be thrashing about in search of a sustainable business model and I don't blame them.
cyanydeez 7mo ago
Theyrr a business abd tgeyre burning cash. Their goal is to find profit and that typical grades towards whales. We have decades that say this. Few businesses survive by low margins on wide audiences.
therobots927 7mo ago
Oh they’re very competent. They’re running a scam.

jditu 7mo ago

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sibtain1997 7mo ago

Faced this too. Tried https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk to compress cli output but some commands started failing and the savings were minimal. Ended up just being more deliberate about context size instead of adding more tooling on top

garrickvanburen 7mo ago

Considering: - Anthropic decides how much a token is worth. - Users have no visibility or ability to control in how many tokens a given response will burn. This is the only expected answer. https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-59-on-credit-based-pricing https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-59-on-credit...

torginus 7mo ago

I dunno, but CC might give away tokens for cheaper, but when I used Opus as standalone in Cursor, I definitely get way more mileage out of a token. Considering how much progress I made vs how much I paid, I couldn't make a scientific assessement, but it felt pretty close.

sachamorard 7mo ago

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mszczodrak 7mo ago

I've been hitting the API limit errors over Claude CLI, yet the total usage was 0% on the claude.ai website. Changing the model fixed the problem.

wellthisisgreat 7mo ago

yeah this is crazy hitting limits on a non-constant usage of a Max plan?

p1necone 7mo ago

I burn through the entire 5 hour limit in one or two "implement the feature outlined in this doc" requests with claude pro in a not even huge codebase (low tens of thousands of loc). If there were any reasonable alternatives I wouldn't even consider using it, but sonnet 4.6 (and presumably opus 4.6 - I don't use it as sonnet is faster and more than good enough) is the only model I've used that actually makes good decisions in complex codebases - anything else just gets stuck in the weeds and produces either non working code or tech debt (after churning for a long time). I have seen more than one comment on this thread mentioning kimi though - I'll have to test it out. qwen3-coder-next has been surprisingly capable as a local model too - needs to be used to make small changes where you know exactly what the final code should look like rather than implementing whole features, but it is free (except for the power bill).

jazoom 7mo ago
I haven't found Kimi to be all that good, but GLM 5.1 I find to be better than Opus 4.6 most of the time in web dev. Opus' only advantage is it's a bit faster. If you can't access GLM 5.1 (not fully released yet) try 5.0. It was better than Opus sometimes too. I have a GLM Code subscription and it lasts much longer than Claude Code. I use Pi agent so I use all agents in the same harness.
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dzhiurgis 7mo ago
I’ve dumped claude few months ago for gemini. Maybe my problems are too trivial, but it’s same if not better with added benefit of being much faster. I’d say 95% of my work (20-30hrs per week) is done by it and I spend less than $50 per month.
- testfrequency 7mo ago
  What stack do you work on ooc? I’ve been tempted to move my Gemini plan up to a higher plan and play around more with the Gemini cli - as I seriously live the Gemini chat for most everything. Claude is lazy af and is always pulling stale data, or not checking resources entirely. I literally have a Gemini mcp that I force close to use half the time when it’s lost, and Gemini nails it every single time. I’m on a Claude max 20x plan right now, and I seriously can’t imagine not having it around anymore but Gemini seems to always have my back on actual current data and less hallucinations.

pmdr 7mo ago

LLMs are cool, but people should really accept that inference costs more money than the "trust me, bro" CEOs lead you to believe. No, they can't flip a switch and turn a profit.

_JoRo 7mo ago

I've used Claude Max awhile now, and I usually only get to around 50% usage in a 4/5hr block (using medium effort). Yesterday, I switched from high -> medium effort using the /model command, but afterwards it still felt like I was burning through tokens at the high effort rate.

npilk 7mo ago

It seems pretty clear there is some sort of bug that only some people are experiencing (or, very cynically, perhaps an A/B test). My usage hasn't seemed to change much in the past few days, but then I see reports where people are hitting limits after one or two prompts. I doubt that could be user error or new limits. Anthropic has said they are investigating. https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s7zgj0/investigating_usage_limits_hitting_faster_than/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s7zgj0/investiga...

Saline9515 7mo ago

The way Anthropic prices its services is honestly dubious at best. You have no way to know what the real limits are, nor to verify what was actually consumed. For most people it's ok because it's likely heavily subsidized, however this won't last forever...

HDBaseT 7mo ago

I asked Claude on the $20 plan to rewrite the Linux Kernel and ffmpeg in Rust (using Opus 4.6, Ultra Thinking) with high verbosity and it ran out of usage!

rglover 7mo ago

If you haven't tried it yet, I'd recommend Cline as an alternative (with full support for Anthropic API). Tracks the current token spend on chats so you know when to do a /newchat. Really nice way to budget token spend on a task-by-task basis and your flow isn't interrupted by limits.

captainbland 7mo ago

Almost certainly a drive to force upsells through product segmentation

therobots927 7mo ago

There is both the opportunity for and an incentive towards these companies actively deceiving users, both by hiding the true amount of subsidies behind AI output and by shuffling users between high and low quality models in order to minimize said subsidies. It’s difficult for me to understand why most engineers here don’t seem to get this. If you’re not listening to Ed Zitron you’d better start if you don’t want to get whiplash in the coming months.

bjconlan 7mo ago

While I haven't read all the posts here I was wondering if anyone also noticed a 10% usage before their most recent weeks usage even started? (Specifically over 2026-03-27/28) I was seeing weird service outages over this time too. I suspect they're not being 100% truthful with how they are recording usage (feels like they had an agent run a backfill approximation). So they blur it with weekends rates etc. Anyways I don't have the knowledge as to how to audit this (claud pro) to confirm what feels like an onboard at any cost business behavior. Is anyone currently auditing through openrouter/litellm and seeing any poor correlation to the session/weekly limit?

bradlannon 7mo ago

I was literally planning a new feature using superpowers. I typed "continue" after it hit it's limited. No joke, about 1 minute later, I looked at the token % left and it said I was at 20% already. I literally typed continue and then took 1 minute to look at the usage. Something is seriously broken!!!!!!

bradlannon 7mo ago

you should not be at 20% by typing "continue" 2 minutes after your limit was restored. I'm on the Max 5 plan...this makes no sense. I can't afford this...

docdev 7mo ago

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docdev 7mo ago

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rajadroit2026 7mo ago

I am sensing from last couple of days, hitting limit much earlier. Today Claude has hardly created one markdown file and complaining about hitting limit issue. Any idea when this will return to normal. It has been really creating a lot of delay.

Kim_Bruning 7mo ago

Ok, I have part of the answer at least. Claude recently improved Opus 4.6 to have a 1Mtoken context. Cache normally invalidates after 5 minutes. If you come back or --continue after a break (or 5 minutes), that's a MASSIVE hit to your session limit. 250000 tokens at Max x5 will ding you 10% of your session for "Hi, I'm back". So say you don't typically do /compact very often. And say you're not very chatty and "do the right thing" by only asking a question once in a while? You'll burn through context like crazy. Meanwhile if you have ADHD and anthropomorphize the bleep out of your claude and chat with them all day long? Hardly a dent! This trick seems to work for now (ymmv) Tell your system to CronCreate cron: "*/4 * * * *" prompt: "heartbeat — no action needed" And turn it back off at end of day. I'm sure anthropic will be thrilled by this, but I don't have a better solve at this time yet. Context management is a thing. Unfortunately you're not allowed to use any tool other than claude code with the Anthropic Subscription, so I guess this is the solve they asked for. Allowing people to write their own tools with superior context management would seem to be a no-brainer to me, but what do I know?

bicepjai 7mo ago

After spending some time on how Claude code (leaked) tools were written, it makes sense why we constantly hit limits, for all the amazing llm capabilities, CC does not have edit tool and always read before write ( this makes sense) but I expected some surgical precision magic software, seems like other agents like master open code and pi are way better than CC in taken usage

bezlant 7mo ago

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bottomlessmug 6mo ago

Definitely hitting limits insanely faster. Not sure if it's the same problem for everyone or they're cranking up usage for low users to support others. I do bursts of work and a month ago would write a lot of code every window and then pause for reset using mix of chat and CLI. Currently ran a excel work session with code, burnt a lot. Asked it to give me a view on how to optimise excel work to burn less, got a 2 paras of answer burning 9% of session and i copy-pasted those two paras into Chat since it usually cost me less to plan there, asked it to help me figure out best way to set this up - 11% burnt for a couple of bullet point options. Has never happened so fast. This is a massive shift from my previous experience.