Claude Code weekly rate limits

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

Working as Intended.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think they should have done instead?

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

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

You can set cash on fire if you want to.

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

Internet and SMS used to be expensive and metered until they weren't thanks to technological advances and expanded use. I think LLMs will follow the same path, maybe on a shorter timespan.

> That’s not the case with LLM’s at this moment.

I'd be curious to know how many tokens the average $200/mo user uses and what the cost on their end for it is.

This is my strategy as well. I definitely have surges of usage.

Except for one catastrophic binge where I accidentally left Opus on for a whole binge (KILL ME!!!), I use around $150/month. I like having the spigot off when I am not working.

Would the $100/month plan plus API for overflow come out ahead? Certainly on some months. Over the year, I don't know. I'll let you know.

Gemini 2.5 Pro is a better coding model, but Gemini CLI is way behind Claude Code, perhaps because the model itself isn’t well-tuned for agentic work. If you’re just doing targeted refactoring and exploration, you can copy and paste back and forth from the web app for $20 a month.

Can anyone help compare a cost comparison between Gemini 2.5 pro vs Claude Code on a plan or API?

> My opinion is all of these tools should completely get rid of the "pay 20/month, 200/month", etc just to get access.

I think that you should just subscribe to a preset allotment of tokens at a certain price, or a base tier with incremental usage costs for models that aren’t tiny (like paid per minute “long distance calling”).

I use an LLM tool that shows the cost associated with each message/request and most are pennies each. There’s a point where the friction of paying is a disincentive to using it. Imagine you had to pay $0.01 every time you Google searched something? Most people would never use the product because trying to pay $0.30/mo for one day a month of usage is annoying. And no one would want to prepay and fund an account if you weren’t familiar with the product. No consumer likes micro transactions

No one wants to hear this, but the answer is advertising and it will change the game of LLMs. Once you can subsidize the lowest end usage, the incentive for businesses to offer these $20 subscriptions will change, and they’d charge per-usage rates for commercial users.

I think Claude Code also already has the option to provide an API key directly for usage based pricing.

I'm a fan of having both a subscription and a usage based plan available. The subscription is effectively a built in spending limit. If I regularly hit it and need more value, I can switch to an API key for unlimited usage.

The downside is you are potentially paying for something you don't use, but that is the same for all subscription services.

Investors love MRR/ARR, so I do not think we will see that as the main option anytime soon. That said, you can use the Claude API to get usage-based billing.

> Mask off completely and just make it completely usage based for everyone.

you can already pay per token by giving Claude Code an API key, if you want.

thus, the subtext of every complaint on this thread is that people want "unlimited" and they want their particular use to be under whatever the cap is, and they want it to be cheap.

I'm often using LLMs for stuff that requires recent data. No way I'm running a web crawler in addition to my local LLM. For coding it could theoretically work as you don't always need latest and greatest but would still make me anxious.

npx ccusage@latest

I'm assuming it'll get updated to include these windows as well. Pass in "blocks --live" to get a live dashboard!

Totally agree with this. I live in constant anxiety not knowing how far into my usage I am in all the time.

It's not exactly the same thing, but imagine my complete surprise when, in the middle of a discussion with Copilot and without warning, it announced that the conversation had reached its length limit and I had to start a new one with absolutely no context from the current one. Copilot has many, many usability quirks, but that was the first that actually made me mad.

You can't really predict usage of output tokens, too, so this is especially concerning

that's true of everything on the internet.

That's not what they claim:

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

I've been tracking usage in my first month of "20x" Max (which was, unfortunately, this month). Depending on how this usage is amortised (working days, which is what matters to me, or 5 hour periods, or I guess, now weeks..?) their marketing material has been varying degrees of false. This has ranged from 'a bit false' to 'extremely false'.

That is true both on a relative scale ("20x") compared to my previous use of the $20 plan, but - more dishonestly, in my opinion - absolutely false when comparing my (minimal, single-session, tiny codebase) usage to the approximate usage numbers quoted in the marketing materials. The actual usage provided has regularly been 10% of the quoted allowance before caps are hit.

I have had responses from their CS team, having pointed this out, in the hope they would _at least_ flag to users times that usage limits are dramatically lower so that I can plan my working day a little better. I haven't received any sort of acknowledgement of the mismatch between marketing copy and delivered product, beyond promised "future fixes". I have, of course, pointed out that promised and hypothetical future fixes do not have any bearing on a period of paid usage that exists in the past. No dice!

I'm, unfortunately, a UK customer, and from my research any sort of recourse is pretty limited. But it has - without question - been one of the least pleasant customer experiences I've had with a company in some time, even allowing for Anthropic experiencing extremely high-growth.

Claude Code Router has been a Godsend for my usage level. I'm not sure I can justify the time and effort to care and pursue Anthropic's functional bait-and-switch offering more than I already have, because being annoyed about things doesn't make me happy.

But I completely second this: it's not acceptable to sell customers a certain amount of a thing - then and deliver another - and I hope US customers (who I believe should have more recourse) take action. There are few other industries where "it's a language and compute black box!" would be a reasonable defence, and I think it sets a really bad precedent going forward for LLM providers.

One might imagine that Anthropic's recent ~$200m US gov contract (iirc) might allow for a bit of spare cash to, for example, provide customers with the product they paid for (let alone refund them, where necessary) but that does not seem to be the case.

It makes me sad to see a great product undermined like this, which is, I think, a feeling lots of people share. If anyone is actually working towards wider recourse, and would find my (UK) usage data useful, they're very welcome to get in touch.

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

The API is far more expensive. For Opus 4 it's almost priced in a way that says "don't use this".

I use Claude Code authenticated via the API (Anthropic Console). There's no limits for me. And I also assume API-metered requests are prioritized, so it's faster as well.

Or just use any other CLI and API provider and let Anthropic hang with their -alignment- and selling out to warmongers

actually you can keep using claude code (cli) tool with any provider, just replace the env endpoints.

https://github.com/musistudio/claude-code-router

I know how to program; I just don’t have the time to do it all and my company doesn’t have the revenue to support more devs. So; this is the best way to make do with what I have.

What if they're using it to help them learn to program? There are plenty of valid uses people might have. And ultimately, it's their call, right? Capitalism and all that. I suppose the argument then is "just use the API", and sure, that's a solution. Yet it's odd to have an expensive subscription that's heavily rate limited like this.

It's a non-issue for me. When I hit the limit, which is rare, I go back to analog life where I use my head's brain to do the heavy lifting and that has all kinds of perks that Claude doesn't have. I get why people are frustrated, though.

If you launch your service without knowing how much it costs to offer your service at the maximum rate it could be used, then this will definitely happen. Engineering directors need to require performance testing benchmarks and do the math to figure out where the ceiling is. If you happen to be "lucky" enough to scale very fast, you don't want to then bang your customer's heads repeatedly on a ceiling.

> clearly that's abusive and should be targeted.

You can't abuse a company by buying their services and using them to their own terms and conditions. The T&C is already stacked against you, you're in a position of no leverage.

The correct solution is what Anthropic is doing here - change the T&C so you can make money. If you offer unlimited stuff, people will use it... unlimitedly. So, don't let them call your bluff.

> 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.

Do you have a link?

I'm always curious to see these users after working at a startup that was the target of some creative use from some outlier customers.

If VCs want to give me free money in exchange for using their product, do you expect me to say no?

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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.

[dead]

I hadn't considered that. I'm using it almost exclusively to validate logic, kind of like a fuzzer in nature ("What if we need to do this with this logic/someone tries to do that/what am I missing/etc"), or to fill in specifications ("what feature would compliment this/what could be trimmed to achieve MVP more easily/does this spec appear to be missing anything according to this set of requirements"), which requires a lot of review, and using more expensive models like Opus doesn't appear to provide meaningfully better results. After prompting it, I typically have a lot to think about and the terminal goes quiet, or I prompt it on a related matter that will similarly require my eyes and brain for long enough that I won't be able to limit out.

I can see how work involving larger contexts and deeper consideration would lead to exhausting limits a lot faster though, even if you aren't using it like a slot machine.

"find a list of social events in my area"

Isn't this something you can do with a simple Google search? Or Perplexity?

No need to shove by far the most expensive LLM (Claude Opus 4) at it.

When you say not even in the running, is that including Deep Research on o3-pro?

Switching to Opus is an eye-opening experience. You hit limits often, and need to get creative to avoid burning through limits, but the difference is seriously impressive. You'll waste a lot less time with dead ends and bad code.

I think this is it. They use it like a slot machine, and when something isn't quite what they wanted, they provide broad instructions to refine and do better. Progress is slow and questionable, but anticipation and (sometimes) reward is increased.

The issue could be, in part, that a lot of users don't care to be efficient with token usage and maintaining condensed, efficient, focused contexts to work with.

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).

I use this approach because I like to work on features or logical components in isolation and then bring them together. I still can't limit out most of the time because I need to actually look at the outputs and think about what I'm building. At the moment I have 3 directories in my work tree. Sometimes I prompt in more than one at a time, especially at interfacing code, but that could mean 30–90 minutes of reviewing and implementing things in each directory. Over a work day I apparently send an average of ~40 messages according to `claude --resume`

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.