Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code without telling users

I made a quick site so you can see what tools are using the most context and help control it, totally free and in your browser.

https://claude-code-analysis.pages.dev/

> One user, who asked not to be identified, said it has been impossible to advance his project since the usage limits came into effect.

Vibe limit reached. Gotta start doing some thinking.

The other day I was doing major refactorings on two projects simultaneously while doing design work for two other projects. It occurred to me to check my API usage for Gemini and I had spent $200 that day already.

Users are no doubt working these things even harder than I am. There's no way they can be profitable at $200 a month with unlimited usage.

I think we're going to evolve into a system that intelligently allocates tasks based on cost. I think that's part of what openrouter is trying to do, but it's going to require a lot of context information to do the routing correctly.

The funny thing is Claude 4.0 isn't even that 'smart' from a raw intelligence perspective compared to the other flagship models.

They've just done the work to tailor it specifically for proper tool using during coding. Once other models catch up, they will not be able to be so stingy on limits.

Google has the advantage here given they're running on their own silicon; can optimize for it; and have nearly unlimited cashflows they can burn.

I find it amusing nobody here in the comments can understand the scaling laws of compute. It seems like people have a mental model of Uber burned into their head thinking that at some point the price has to go up. AI is not human labor.

Over time the price of AI will fall, not rise. Losing money in the short term betting this will happen is not a dumb strategy given it's the most likely scenario.

I know everybody really wants this bubble to pop so they can make themselves feel smart for "calling it" and I'm sure it will, but in the long term this is all correct.

I played with Claude Code using the basic $20/month plan for a toy side project.

I couldn't believe how many requests I could get in. I wasn't using this full-time for an entire workweek, but I thought for sure I'd be running into the $20/month limits quickly. Yet I never did.

To be fair, I spent a lot of time cleaning up after the AI and manually coding things it couldn't figure out. It still seemed like an incredible number of tokens were being processed. I don't have concrete numbers, but it felt like I was easily getting $10-20 worth of tokens (compared to raw API prices) out of it every single day.

My guess is that they left the limits extremely generous for a while to promote adoption, and now they're tightening them up because it’s starting to overwhelm their capacity.

I can't imagine how much vibe coding you'd have to be doing to hit the limits on the $200/month plan like this article, though.

They're likely burning money so I can't be pissed off yet, but we see the same Cursor as well; the pricing is not transparent.

I'm paying for Max, and when I use the tooling to calculate the spend returned by the API, I can see it's almost $1k! I have no idea how much quota I have left until the next block. The pricing returned by the API doesn't make any sense.

That’s funny I literally started the $200/month plan this week because I routinely spend $300+/month on API tokens.

And I was thinking to myself, “How does this make any sense financially for Anthropic to let me have all of this for $200/month?”

And then I kept getting hit with those overloaded api errors so I canceled my plan and went back to API tokens.

I still have no idea what they’re doing over there but I’ll happily pay for access. Just stop dangling that damn $200/month in my face if you’re not going to honor it with reasonable access.

I went from pro to max because I hve been hitting limits, I could tell they were reducing it because I used to go multiple hours on pro but now its like 3. Congrats Anthropic you got $100 more out of me, at the cost of irrecoverable goodwill

I need to see a video of what people are doing to hit the max limits regularly.

I find sonnet really useful for coding but I never even hit basic limits. at $20/mo. Writing specs, coming up with documentation, doing wrote tasks for which many examples exist in the database. Iterate on particular services etc.

Are these max users having it write the whole codebase w/ rewrites? Isn't it often just faster to fix small things I find incorrect than type up why I think it's wrong in English and have it do a whole big round trip?

I have the $100 plan and now quickly get downgraded to Sonnet. But so far have not hit any other limits. I use it more on the weekends over several hours, so lets see what this weekend has in store.

I suspected that something like this might happen, where the demand will outstrip the supply and squeeze small players out. I still think demand is in its infancy and that many of us will be forced to pay a lot more. Unless of course there are breakthroughs. At work I recently switched to non-reasoning models because I find I get more work done and the quality is good enough. The queue to use Sonnet 3.7 and 4.0 is too long. Maybe the tools will improve reduce token count, e.g. a token reducing step (and maybe this already exists).

I'm not sure this is "intentional" per se or just massively overloaded servers because of unexpected demand growth and they are cutting rate limits until they can scale up more. This may become permanent/worse if the demand keeps outstripping their ability to scale.

I'd be extremely surprised if Anthropic picked now of all times to decide on COGS optimisation. They potentially can take a significant slice of the entire DevTools market with the growth they are seeing, seems short sighted to me to nerf that when they have oodles of cash in bank and no doubt people hammering at their door to throw more cash at them.

“It just stopped the ability to make progress,” the user told TechCrunch. “I tried Gemini and Kimi, but there’s really nothing else that’s competitive with the capability set of Claude Code right now.”

This is probably another marketing stunt. Turn off the flow of cocaine and have users find out how addicted they are. And they'll pay for the purest cocaine, not for second grade.