alt Hacker NewsPro Max 5x Quota Exhausted in 1.5 Hours Despite Moderate Usage
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I skimmed the issue. No wonder Anthropic closes these tickets out without much action. That’s just a wall of AI garbage.
Here’s what I’ve done to mostly fix my usage issues:
* Turn on max thinking on every session. It save tokens overall because I’m not correcting it of having it waste energy on dead paths.
* keep active sessions active. It seems like caches are expiring after ~5 minutes (especially during peak usage). When the caches expire it sees like all tokens need to be rebuilt this gets especially bad as token usage goes up.
* compact after 200k tokens as soon as I reasonably can. I have no data but my usage absolutely sky rockets as I get into longer sessions. This is the most frustrating thing because Anthropic forced the 1M model on everyone.
I think this comes from Anthropic recently implementing auto routing of model effort. You can manually set effort with /effort in CC.
It does seem like this new routing is worse for the consumer in terms of code quality and token usage somehow.
I'm afraid the music may be slowly fading at this party, and the lights will soon be turned on. We may very well look back on the last couple years as the golden era of subsidized GenAI compute.
For those not in the Google Gemini/Antigravity sphere, over the last month or so that community has been experiencing nothing short of contempt from Google when attempting to address an apparent bait and switch on quota expectations for their pro and ultra customers (myself included). [1]
While I continue to pay for my Google Pro subscription, probably out of some Stockholm Syndrome, beaten wife level loyalty and false hope that it is just a bug and not Google being Google and self-immolating a good product, I have since moved to Kiro for my IDE and Codex for my CLI and am as happy as clam with this new setup.
[1] https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/24937
Quite scared by the fact that the original issue pointing out the actual root cause of the issue has been 'Closed as not planned' by Anthropic.
People need to understand a few things: vague questions make the models roam endlessly “exploring” dead ends. “Restarting” old chats immediately eats a lot of context. Anthropic CAN change their limits and rates as they see fit, there’s never been hard promises or SLOs on these plans.
With that said, I pay the Pro subscription (20/mo) and I hit limits maybe 2/3 times over a period of 4 months building a simple running app in Python. I’d not call it production ready but it’s not nothing either.
If people were considerably more willing to aggressively prune their context and scope tasks well, they could get a lot more done with it, at least in my experience. Anthropic can’t really fix anything because the underlying model architecture can’t be “patched”. But I definitely feel a lot of people can’t wrap their heads around the new paradigms needed to effectively prompt these models.
Additionally, opting out is always an option… but these types of issues feel more like laziness than real, structural issues with the model/harness…
I don't get it. Last week on the 100 bucks plan I generated probably 50k LOC (not a quality measure for sure!) and just barely kissed the weekly limit. I did get rate limited on some sessions for sure, but that's to be expected.
I'm curious what are people doing that is consuming your limits? I can't imagine filling the $200 a month plan unless I was essentially using Claude code itself as the api to mass process stuff? For basic coding what are people doing?
Been experiencing similar issues even with the lower tier models.
Fair transactions involve fair and transparent measurements of goods exchanged. I'm going to cancel my subscription this month.
Switched back to codex for the promotion. Opus at the start of the year was GOAT- just relentless at chewing through hard problems. Now it spins on pretty easy work (took three swings just to edit a ts file) and my session is like 1-3 prompts (downgraded to the $20 plan but still)
Something similar is happening with GitHub Copilot too. It's impossible to know what a "request" is and some change in the last couple of months has seen my request usage go up for the same style of work. Toss in the bizarre and impossible to understand rate limiting that occurs with regular usage and it's pretty obvious that these companies are struggle to scale.
Ever since this change they announced:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s4idaq/update_on...
It’s been unusable for me as my daily coding agent. I run out of credits in the pro account in an hour or so. Before that I had never reached the session limit. Switched back to Junie with Gemini/chatgpt.
I extensively used Claude till now and just tested Genini 3.1 pro yesterday via AI studio. In gemini cli, they don't offer this, i don't know why?
Taking a second opinion has significantly helped me to design the system better, and it helped me to uncover my own and Claude blindspots.
Also, agree that, it spent and waist a lot of token on web search and many a times get stuck in loop.
Going forward- i will always use all 3 of them. Still my main coding agent is Claude for now.. but happy to see this field evolving so fast and it's easy to switch and use others on same project.
No network effects or lock in for a customer. Great to live in this period of time.
In the anticipation of a future where,
a) quotas will get restricted
b) the subscription plan prices will go up
c) all LLMs will become good enough at coding tasks
I just open sourced a coding agent https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac
The entire goal is to be token efficient (over 50% cheaper), and by extension, take advantage of LLM's better reasoning at shorter context lengths
This really started as an internal side project that made me more productive, I hope it will help others too. Apache 2.0
Currently it still can't compete the subsidized coding plan rates using Anthropic API pricing though (even though it beats CC while both use API key), which tells me that all subscription plan operators are losing money on such plans
I pay for the lowest plan. I used to struggle to hit my quota.
Now a single question consistently uses around 15% of my quota
That's weird, I'm on the $100/mo and I use it for around 2-4hrs a day often with multiple terminal windows and I never even hit 20% of my quota.
I've been feeling the squeeze too. I've tried switching between different models as a test, I can at least say it feels like the limits are about half of what they used to be a few months ago. I'd be totally willing to concede that this is just my perception if Anthropic would only release some tools for measuring your usage.
In theory the /stats command tells you how many tokens you've used, which you could use to compute how much you are getting for your subscription, but in practice it doesn't contain any useful info, it may be counting what is printed to the terminal or something - my stats suggest my claude code usage is a tiny amount of tokens, but they must be an extremely underestimated token count, or they are charging much more for the subscription than the API per token (which is not supposed to be the case).
Last week's free extra usage quota shed some light on this. It seems like the reported tokens are probably are between 1/30th to 1/100th of the actual tokens billed, from looking at how they billed (/stats went up 10k tokens and I was billed $7.10). With the API it should be $25 for a million tokens.
I've got a dual path system to keep costs low and avoid TOS violations.
For general queries and investigation I will use whatever public/free model is available without being logged in. Not having a bunch of prior state stacked up all the time is a feature for me. This is essentially my google replacement.
For very specific technical work against code files, I use prepaid OAI tokens in VS copilot as a "custom" model (it's just gpt5.4).
I burn through maybe $30 worth of tokens per month with this approach. A big advantage of prepaying for the API tokens is that I can look at everything copilot is doing in my usage logs. If I use the precanned coding agent products, the prompts are all hidden in another layer of black box.
I had Max plan and never reached its limit despite constantly working. Now I use the Pro plan and regularly reach the 5h limit as well as the weekly limit, as expected. I found that it makes a huge difference if you provide clear context when developing code. If you leave open room for interpretation, Claude Code uses tokens up much faster than in a defined context. The same is true for his time to answer getting longer if there isn't much documentation about the project.
I'm i alone to think that it become slower that usual to get responses?
For whoever else is having the same problems, worth voting these kind of issues. There needs to be more transparency over what goes on with our subscriptions.
"Hey Claude, can you help me create a strategy to optimize my token use so I don't run into limits so often?" --> worked for me! I had two $200 plans before and now I am cool despite all day use
Unless the agent code is open-sourced, there is hardly any transparency in how the agent is spending your tokens and how does it calculate the tokens. It's like asking your lawyer why they charged some amount.
Yeah perplexity used to be great but they've also clamped down on the 20€ plan. Only one deep research query was enough to block me until the end of the month.
The thing is, if it's going to be this expensive it's not going to be worth it for me. Then I'll rather do it myself. I'm never going to pay for a €100 subscription, that's insane. It's more than my monthly energy bill.
Maybe from a business standpoint it still makes sense because you can use it to make money, but as a consumer no way.
I had used Claude Code max as my daily driver last year and this sort of drama was par for the course. It's why I migrated entirely to Codex, despite liking Claude, the harness, more.
There's this honeymoon period with Claude you experience for a month or two followed by a trough of disillusionment, and then a rebound after a model update (rinse and repeat). It doesn't help that Anthropic is experiencing a vicious compute famine atm.
How good are local LLMs at coding these days? Does anyone have any recommendations for how to get this setup? What would the minimum spend be for usable hardware?
I am getting bored of having to plan my weekends around quota limit reset times...
Make an AI usage tracker like https://marginlab.ai/trackers/codex/. These hearsay anecdotes prove nothing.
Besides some of the obvious hacks to reduce token usage, properly indexed code bases (think IntelliJ) reduce token usage significantly (30%-50%, while keeping or exceeding result quality compared with baseline) as shown with https://github.com/ory/lumen
Anthropic is not incentivized to reduce token use, only to increase it, which is what we are seeing with Opus 4.6 and now they are putting the screws on
A little off topic, but did Anthropic distill from an older OpenAI model? All the sudden over the last few days I'm getting a ton of em dashes in claude code responses!
They also need to fix the 30 second lag between submitting the request and actually starting to get tokens back - it used to be instant, and still is at work where we use Anthropic models via an enterprise copilot subscription.
My personal experience is way different: I struggle to burn through more than 50% of the 5 hour limit
For context, with Google AI Pro, I can burn through the Antigravity weekly limit in 1-2 hours if I force it to use Gemini 3.1 Pro. Meanwhile Gemini 3 Flash is basically unlimited but frequently produces buggy code or fail to implement things how I personally would (felt like it doesn't "think" like a software dev)
I also tried VS Code + Cline + OpenRouter + MiniMax M2.7. It's quite cheap and seems to be better than Gemini 3 Flash, but it gets really pricy as the context fills up because prompt caching is not supported for MiniMax on OpenRouter. The result itself usually needs 3-6 revisions on average so the context fills up pretty often
Eventually I got Claude Max 5x to try for a month. VS Code + Claude Code extension on a ~15k lines codebase, model set to "Default", and effort set to "Max". So far it's been really good: 0-2 revisions on average, and most of the time it implements things exactly how I would or better. And, like I said, I can only consume 40-60% of the 5-hour limits no matter how hard I try
Granted, I'm not forcing it to use Opus like OP (nor do I use complicated skills or launch multiple tasks at the same time), but I feel like they really nailed the right balance of when to use which model and how to pass context between the them. Or at least enough that I haven't felt the need to force it to use Opus all the time
It's a bit shocking to me how opaque the pricing for the subscription services by the frontier labs is. It's basically impossible for people to tell what they're actually buying, and difficult to even meaningfully report or compare experiences.
How is this normal?
Codex is the only CLI I've had purely positive experiences with. Take that for what you will
Vote with wallet. The voting continues until product improve or die.
We also experienced hitting our Claude limits much earlier than before during the last two weeks. Up to a degree where we were thinking it must be a bug.
So glad I just pay by the token.
Wasn't Antrophic previously offering double the token usage outside busy hours? Now they are counting tokens back at normal rate. But yeah, it's not good. I use codex because claude insists in peaking at and messing with folders and file outside its work area though
And in classic Anthropic fashion at this point, their issues appear to just be for show. No one triages them, no one responds to them.
I guess it’s better to step down now that we can rather than wait until it becomes impossible (Stockholm syndrome)
No FOMO
this same pattern seems to occur every time a new model is about to release. i didnt notice the usage problem - i am on 20x. but opus 4.6 feels siginificantly dumber for some reason. i cant qualitify it, but it failed on everyday tasks where it used to complete perfectly
I’m processing some images(custom board game images -> JSON) with a common layout and basic structure and I exhausted my quota after just 30 images(pleb Pro account). I have 700 images to process…
What I did instead is tune the prompt for gemma 4 26b and a 3090. Worked like a charm. Sometimes you have to run the main prompt and then a refinement prompt or split the processing into cases but it’s doable.
Now I’m waiting for anyone to put up some competition against NVIDIA so I can finally be able to afford a workstation GPU for a price less than a new kidney.
I feel like I am living in a bubble, no one seems to mention Antigravity in these discussions and I have not had any issues with Ultra subscription yet. It seems to go on forever and the Interface is so much better for dev work as compared to CC. (Though admittedly my experience with cc is limited).
I strongly believe google's legs will allow it to sustain this influx of compute and still not do the rug-pull like OAI or Anthropic will be forced to do as more people come onboard the code-gen use case.
You know Emacs still works.
Lol imagine how much overcharging is going on for enterprise tokens. This is just the beginning.
I don't use Claude so this doesn't affect me, but I worry it will spoil the fun for me for following reason.
They inflated how much their tools burn tokens from day one pretty much,remember all the stupid research and reports Claude always wanted to do, no matter what you asked it. Other tools are much smarter so this is not such a big deal.
More importantly, these moves tend to reverberate in the industry, so I expect others will clamp down on usage a lot and this will spoil my joy of using AI without countring every token.
Burning tokens doesn't just wastes your allotment, it also wastes your time. This gave rise to turbo offering where you get responses faster but burn 2x your tokens.
I've seen ridiculously fast quota usage on antigravity too, where sometimes lots of work is possible, then it all goes literally within 4 questions.
Probably a combination of it being vibe coded shit and something in the backend I expect.
I mean this is expected is it not? These companies burned unimaginable amounts of investor cash to get set up and now they have to start turning a profit. They can't make up for the difference with volume because the costs are high, so the only option is to raise prices.
It's crazy, a few weeks ago the limits would comfortably last me all week. This week, I've used up half the limit in a day.
GPT-5.4 works amazingly well.
I’ve moved away from Claude and toward open-source models plus a ChatGPT subscription.
That setup has worked really well for me: the subscription is generous, the API is flexible, and it fits nicely into my workflow. GPT-5.4 + Swival (https://swival.dev) are now my daily drivers.
That’s why I switched to Codex. It’s so much more generous and in my experience, just as good. Also, optimizing your setup for working with agents can easily make a 5x difference.
I don't understand Anthropic. Be consistent. Why do models deteriorate to shit, this is not good for workflows and or trust. What Opus 4.7 is gonna come out and again the same thing? Come on.
Claude has gotten noticeably worse for me too. It goes into long exploration loops for 5+ minutes even when I point it to the exact files to inspect. Then 30 minutes later I hit session limits. Three sessions like that in a day, and suddenly 25% of the weekly limit is gone.
I ended up buying the $100 Codex plan. So far it has been much more generous with usage and more accurate than Claude for the kind of work I do.
That said, Codex has its own issues. Its personality can be a bit off-putting for my taste. I had to add extra instructions in Agents.md just to make it less snarky. I was annoyed enough that I explicitly told it not to use the word “canonical.”
On UI/UX taste, I still think current Codex is behind the Jan/Feb era of Claude Code. Claude used to have much better finesse there. But for backend logic, hard debugging, and complex problem-solving, Codex has been clearly better for me. These days I use Impeccable Skillset inside Codex to compensate for the weaker UI taste, but it still does not quite match the polish and instinct Claude Code used to have.
I used to be a huge Claude Code advocate. At this point, I cannot recommend it in good conscience.
My advice now is simple: try the $20 plans for Codex and Cursor, and see which one matches your workflow and vibes best