Considering all the problems they've been having with over-charging Claude Code users over the past few weeks it's the very least they could do. Max subscribers are hitting their 5 hour usage limits in 30-40 minutes with a single instance doing light work, while Anthropic have no support or contact mechanism for users that they respond to.
It's known that Anthropic's $20 Pro subscription is a gateway plan to their $100 Max subscription, since you'll easily burn your token rate on a single prompt or two. Meanwhile, I've had ample usage testing out Codex on the basic $20 ChatGPT Plus plan without a problem.
As for Anthropic's $100 Max subscription, it's almost always better to start new sessions for tasks since a long conversation will burn your 5-hour usage limit with just a few prompts (assuming they read many files). It's also best to start planning first with Claude, providing line numbers and exact file paths prior, and drilling down the requirements before you start any implementation.
> It's known that Anthropic's $20 Pro subscription is a gateway plan to their $100 Max subscription, since you'll easily burn your token rate on a single prompt or two.
I genuinely have no idea what people mean when I read this kind of thing. Are you abusing the word "prompt" to mean "conversation"? Or are you providing a huge prompt that is meant to spawn 10 subagents and write multiple new full-stack features in one go?
For most users, the $20 Pro subscription, when used with Opus, does not hit the 5-hour limit on "a single prompt or two", i.e. 1-2 user messages.
> you'll easily burn your token rate on a single prompt or two
My experience has been that I can usually work for a few hours before hitting a rate limit on the $20 subscription. My work time does not frequently overlap with core business hours in PDT, however. I wonder whether there is an aspect of this that is based on real-time dynamic usage.
“Light work” is a pretty bold statement my dude. I run max for 8+ hour coding sessions with 3-4 windows where I’m babysitting and watching the thing and I never even get session warnings. The only time I bump up against limits is on token hungry tasks like reverse engineering 3M+ LOC codebases or 5-6 agents generating unit tests in parallel. Something tells me that what you call “light work” is not remotely the same as what I consider “light work”
You hit a vague, never-quite-explained 5h window limit that has nothing to do with what you're doing, but with what every user is doing together. It's totally not downtime, you're just "using it too much" and they're telling you to fuck off until the overall usage slows down.
The order of priority is: everyone using the API (you don't want to calculate the price) → everyone on a $200/month plan → everyone on a $20/month plan → every free user.
you can just watch the limit on the claude usage settings view.
itd be nice to know how much the session context window applies wrt token caching, but disabling all those skills and stopping sending a screenshot every couple messages gets that 5hour limit and weekly limit a bunch better
It hasn't always done this, it's a relatively recent problem in the last 1-4 weeks (roughly). (note: I'm on the $160AUD/mo plan, so I think that's $100USD).
That would be heartening, if I wasn’t consuming tokens 10x as fast as expected, and they just had attribution bugs.
Do you have references to this being documented as the actual issue, or is this just speculation?
I want to support Anthropic, but with the Codex desktop app *so much better* than Anthropic’s combined with the old “5 back and forths with Opus and your quota is gone”, it’s hard to see going back
Yeah I think it's either a billing bug, or some sort of inbuilt background sub-agent loop gone wild inside Claude Code, if you have a look at recent issues on the Github relating to 'limits', 'usage', 'tokens' you'll see a lot of discussion about it: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues?q=sort%3Aup...
Is this one of those, Hey turn off the overcharge protection because you can go $50 into debt for free, and then maybe you'll just keep going and not notice you owe us an extra $500 type of situations?
I was worried about this when I turned it on myself, but under the usage panel it shows that it limited my spending to just the $50 and that auto-reload is off, so it doesn't seem this would be the case.
I'll pass on this $50, but please hire real human and fix your crappy app, Claude!
This bug has been for years: in Claude (web or app), if you create a new chat at the middle of existing chat thinking or tool calling, the existing chat will be broken, either losing data, or become unusable.
It's unbelievable Anthropic worth hundreds of billions but can't fix this.
My favorite bug is when I spend 5 minutes writing something and send it, then something breaks and refreshes, deleting the whole thing. Like, thanks, much appreciated, please waste more of my time.
Literally every time if I press the "stop" button while it's writing back for the first conversation turn because I notice I forgot something and want to correct it, my prompt is lost.
Anytime I run into a bug like this, part of me wants to go calculate how much of humanity's collective time has been wasted by one company not fixing a trivial bug. It's got to be a lot.
I mean, it's a nice gesture. I use extra usage a little bit when the quota runs out and I'm still in the middle of a task. (Afterwards I switch to other agents that track limits monthly instead of by 5 hour window.) This $50 credits should last a while.
Considering all the problems they've been having with over-charging Claude Code users over the past few weeks it's the very least they could do. Max subscribers are hitting their 5 hour usage limits in 30-40 minutes with a single instance doing light work, while Anthropic have no support or contact mechanism for users that they respond to.
"Max subscribers are hitting their 5 hour usage limits in 30-40 minutes with a single instance doing light work"
This has not been my experience at all. The only time I even got close to this is multiple long sessions that had multiple compacts.
The key is if you hit compact, start a new session.
It's known that Anthropic's $20 Pro subscription is a gateway plan to their $100 Max subscription, since you'll easily burn your token rate on a single prompt or two. Meanwhile, I've had ample usage testing out Codex on the basic $20 ChatGPT Plus plan without a problem.
As for Anthropic's $100 Max subscription, it's almost always better to start new sessions for tasks since a long conversation will burn your 5-hour usage limit with just a few prompts (assuming they read many files). It's also best to start planning first with Claude, providing line numbers and exact file paths prior, and drilling down the requirements before you start any implementation.
> It's known that Anthropic's $20 Pro subscription is a gateway plan to their $100 Max subscription, since you'll easily burn your token rate on a single prompt or two.
I genuinely have no idea what people mean when I read this kind of thing. Are you abusing the word "prompt" to mean "conversation"? Or are you providing a huge prompt that is meant to spawn 10 subagents and write multiple new full-stack features in one go?
For most users, the $20 Pro subscription, when used with Opus, does not hit the 5-hour limit on "a single prompt or two", i.e. 1-2 user messages.
> you'll easily burn your token rate on a single prompt or two
My experience has been that I can usually work for a few hours before hitting a rate limit on the $20 subscription. My work time does not frequently overlap with core business hours in PDT, however. I wonder whether there is an aspect of this that is based on real-time dynamic usage.
“Light work” is a pretty bold statement my dude. I run max for 8+ hour coding sessions with 3-4 windows where I’m babysitting and watching the thing and I never even get session warnings. The only time I bump up against limits is on token hungry tasks like reverse engineering 3M+ LOC codebases or 5-6 agents generating unit tests in parallel. Something tells me that what you call “light work” is not remotely the same as what I consider “light work”
Wait, if it burns through a $200/mo allotment that fast, what are all these people who “barely wrote code anymore” doing?
You hit a vague, never-quite-explained 5h window limit that has nothing to do with what you're doing, but with what every user is doing together. It's totally not downtime, you're just "using it too much" and they're telling you to fuck off until the overall usage slows down.
The order of priority is: everyone using the API (you don't want to calculate the price) → everyone on a $200/month plan → everyone on a $20/month plan → every free user.
Yeah it's way too vague.
This morning: (new chat) 42 seconds of thinking, 20 lines of code changed in 4 files = 5% usage
Last night: 25 minutes of thinking, 150 lines of code generated in 10 new files = 7% usage
you can just watch the limit on the claude usage settings view.
itd be nice to know how much the session context window applies wrt token caching, but disabling all those skills and stopping sending a screenshot every couple messages gets that 5hour limit and weekly limit a bunch better
> what are all these people who “barely wrote code anymore” doing?
Writing self-serving LinkedIn productivity porn
It hasn't always done this, it's a relatively recent problem in the last 1-4 weeks (roughly). (note: I'm on the $160AUD/mo plan, so I think that's $100USD).
Yeah I can work for minutes in the $20 Claude plan but potentially hours with Codex. It’s just not worth bothering.
It hadn’t occurred to me this was a billing bug.
That would be heartening, if I wasn’t consuming tokens 10x as fast as expected, and they just had attribution bugs.
Do you have references to this being documented as the actual issue, or is this just speculation?
I want to support Anthropic, but with the Codex desktop app *so much better* than Anthropic’s combined with the old “5 back and forths with Opus and your quota is gone”, it’s hard to see going back
Yeah I think it's either a billing bug, or some sort of inbuilt background sub-agent loop gone wild inside Claude Code, if you have a look at recent issues on the Github relating to 'limits', 'usage', 'tokens' you'll see a lot of discussion about it: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues?q=sort%3Aup...
Is this one of those, Hey turn off the overcharge protection because you can go $50 into debt for free, and then maybe you'll just keep going and not notice you owe us an extra $500 type of situations?
I was worried about this when I turned it on myself, but under the usage panel it shows that it limited my spending to just the $50 and that auto-reload is off, so it doesn't seem this would be the case.
There is also an Auto-reload option, I think it is off by default.
You guys are putting a lot of trust into vibe-coded software...
The underreported story is how we over-trust human-coded software.
Too true, lets not trust any software.
most slop is human slop, who do you think claude learned from :)
> You guys are putting a lot of trust into vibe-coded software...
Nope. I'm putting a lot of trust in American Express and the continued availability of Claude competitors.
Meanwhile codex is running a free tier for a month right now for anyone who wants to experiment with it: https://openai.com/index/introducing-the-codex-app/
Doesn't appear to include the new model though, only the state-of-yesterdays-art (literally yesterdays).
I have access to 5.3 in the Codex desktop app. I'm really not pleased with the desktop software (insane performance issues) but the LLM is good.
I'll pass on this $50, but please hire real human and fix your crappy app, Claude!
This bug has been for years: in Claude (web or app), if you create a new chat at the middle of existing chat thinking or tool calling, the existing chat will be broken, either losing data, or become unusable.
It's unbelievable Anthropic worth hundreds of billions but can't fix this.
I get this regularly too, it's very annoying. I've started using one git worktree per Claude session specifically to avoid this issue.
My favorite bug is when I spend 5 minutes writing something and send it, then something breaks and refreshes, deleting the whole thing. Like, thanks, much appreciated, please waste more of my time.
Literally every time if I press the "stop" button while it's writing back for the first conversation turn because I notice I forgot something and want to correct it, my prompt is lost.
Anytime I run into a bug like this, part of me wants to go calculate how much of humanity's collective time has been wasted by one company not fixing a trivial bug. It's got to be a lot.
Yes!! The whole chat part of app is flaky as hell!
Sometimes I think it’s better to just use code tab to chat knowing that’s more reliable.
Sometimes you can recover it by refreshing the page where you lost the text.
You can use this if you started your Pro or Max subscription before Wednesday, February 4, 2026 at 11:59 PM PT.
Go to https://claude.ai/settings/usage, turn on extra usage and enable the promo from the notification afterwards.
I received €42, top up was not required and auto-reload is off.
You started your Pro or Max subscription before Wednesday, February 4, 2026 at 11:59 PM PT.
Ah well. Back to Codex.
The AI spam on this site is way out of control. It's every single article on the front page.
They are trying to breed more whales
I mean, it's a nice gesture. I use extra usage a little bit when the quota runs out and I'm still in the middle of a task. (Afterwards I switch to other agents that track limits monthly instead of by 5 hour window.) This $50 credits should last a while.
Expires after 60 days per the link. In case you're thinking of stretching it out beyond a couple of months.
So much cynicism here, I for one am loving Opus and appreciate this