I've run into this, and I highly doubt I am one of the more extraordinary users. I have delays between working with it, don't have many running at once, am running on smaller codebases, etc. Yet just a few minutes ago I hit a quota. In the past I did far more work with it without running into the quota.

I emailed their support a few days ago with details, concerns, a link to the twitter thread from one of their employees, and a concrete support request, which had an AI agent ('Fin') tell me:

> While our Support team is unable to manually reset or work around usage limits, you can learn about best practices here. If you’ve hit a message limit, you’ll need to wait until the reset time, or you can consider purchasing an upgraded plan (if applicable).

I replied saying that was not an appropriate answer.

You're absolutely right re the lack of transparency and accountability. On one hand, Anthropic generates good will by appearing to have a more ethical stance then OpenAI, and a better product. On the other hand, they kill it fast through extremely poor treatment of their customers.

If they have a bug, they need to resolve it: and in the meantime refund quotas. 'Unable to' - that's shocking. This is simple and reasonable. It's basic customer service. I don't know if they realise the damage their attitude is doing.

It is also interesting to observe that your most valuable accounts in this kind of pricing model are the ones that are least used and therefore are not confronted by the limits. Heavy users canceling their accounts in frustration is a win for Anthropic not a punishment, at least a short term.

Once you get used to using claude as an abstraction layer you start getting pretty reckless with it.

My organization has the concept of "premium models" where our limits reset every month. I hit my limit pretty quickly last month because I was burning tokens doing things that would have been a simple bash loop in the past - all because I was used to interfacing with Claude at the chat layer for all my automation needs and not thinking any more about it.

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.

I suspect that Claude had a bug that undercounted tokens and they fixed it.

They keep running experiments like free $50 in extra use credits or 2x usage outside certain windows where inference is very slow. You can’t help but think this is all a slowly boiling the frog experiment. Experimenting how much they can charge.

Are they going to pay back if subscription was payed but token limit was less than advertised? Is there some tiny text somewhere preventing just suing or pulling money back with credit cards?

Working as intended? They openly state that how quickly your limit is reached depends on many factors (that you don't know) as well as current load on their systems.

Could just be that usage has gone up.