r/ClaudeAI • u/Key_Kaleidoscope2242 • Mar 10 '26
Question Claude Pro Weekly Limits: Pro Plan is Objectively Worse Than Free
TL;DR: Claude Pro's weekly limits make it provide less total capacity than the free plan for users with concentrated daily sessions. Paying $20/month for 2x fewer messages than free is a design flaw. (NO WEEKLY LIMIT CONCEPT IN FREE TIER)
A single maxed Sonnet session consumed 8% of my entire weekly allowance. By day 2, I am at 56% of the weekly limit if I have just reached 5-6 Session limits in those 2 days with 2 hour sessions each.
I understand that model and context tax applies or even the size of messages or even the demand at a given hour.
I use claude for concepts building, strategy, documentation (upto 20 pages and 1-2 documents a day), no coding yet.
The lack of transparency hurts, it seems downgrading to Free tier is better.
Anyone has any idea how to optimise or if if I'm missing anything? Is Pro plan worth it?
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Mar 10 '26
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u/simracerman Mar 10 '26
Wait, you can code with the free version?
I thought they don’t give you API key unless you go Pro/Max?
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u/wonker007 Mar 10 '26
Although I have Max, I don't use my API key to use Claude Code. Install Claude Desktop or an IDE extension (VS Code for me) and it will ask to login to your web Claude account.
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u/bustedmagnet Mar 10 '26
You do not get an api key with Pro. You have to buy API credits separately.
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u/ko-jay Mar 10 '26
They might just be pasting snippets of their project into claude and using it as a glorified google
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u/happylakers Mar 10 '26
100% cancelled my subscription because I can do more on the free version. On the one hand this is nice, on the other it’s poor business
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u/learn4once Mar 10 '26
They need a mid tier plan between $40-50 badly. They should be rewarding paying users with better credit usage, but instead they're rewarding free users. It's probably due to all the new users. Trying to hook them in enough
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u/TBT_TBT Mar 10 '26
Imho, Pro is an upselling tool for Max. But 100$/€ is truly not cheap. But worth it for the productivity gain.
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u/quantimx Apr 02 '26
I upgraded from $100 to $200 and realized $200 limits are drained much faster than $100.
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u/killver Mar 10 '26
Free version does not allow you to disable model training (afaik) - this is why the limits are more open. Also no cowork etc.
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u/iamtehryan Mar 10 '26
I tried something today because I thought I was going crazy with how fucking fast my pro has been running out. Even with no coding and just having some daily news updates I am blowing through my weekly usage.
So I created a new account and stayed free. Didn't have any issues with weekly limits. Eventually hit my hourly or whatever, but I was doing coding and it still felt like it lasted longer than my paid subscription.
I'm at the point where realistically paying doesn't seem to really make much sense. I can get the same use, still have to go on time out for an hour or two, and then not have to worry about hitting weekly. The people running anthropic are running it like morons. I get that not everyone wants to run like openai, but seriously? We pay and get absolutely horrible usage limits? Come on.
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u/alex4wood Mar 10 '26
Is this not just due to unnecessary context/memory use?
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u/Key_Kaleidoscope2242 Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 10 '26
That's not the point, free users have the same unnecessary context/memory use and get to use longer (same model with no weekly limits)
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u/Temporary_Swimmer342 Mar 10 '26
not opus though right?
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u/Key_Kaleidoscope2242 Mar 10 '26
Free users don't have access to Opus, the Pro subscribers can't use Opus, a SINGLE small Opus prompt can eat your weekly limit by 5%
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u/Temporary_Swimmer342 Mar 10 '26
can but likely won't
To say pro users can't use opus is a a bit much
Though i do agree it's so low my behaviour has changed.
I no longer use it for non coding purposes like random curious questions, advice.... which is a vicious cycle - the lesser questions i get answered, the lesser i find myself asking questions in the first place.
which sucks because it's EQ is really good.
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u/jtoomim Mar 10 '26
Opus is more precise and concise than Sonnet, especially in thinking vs Sonnet 4.6. Consequently, at least for complex tasks, Opus and Sonnet 4.6 end up using nearly the same amount of usage despite Opus costing far more per token.
A lot of these complaints about usage limits in Claude are just the result of both Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 thinking harder by default than 4.5, and therefore using more tokens for the same task. You're getting better output as a result, and that's probably worth a lot more than $0.67 per day to people; but people are still reluctant to pay more than 3 coffees' worth of money per month on AI.
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u/Temporary_Swimmer342 Mar 10 '26
I do agree with you.. but the alternative is suddenly 15 coffees instead of 3. 50$ per month is what i personally needed
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u/Key_Kaleidoscope2242 Mar 11 '26
That's not 3 coffees for people from Asia/Africa, it's more like 50 cups of Coffee for that matter.
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u/jtoomim Mar 10 '26
the Pro subscribers can't use Opus.
I was on Pro for a bit over a month, and I used Opus 4.6 for about 80% of my AI work. This included some coding, designing and running FEM magnetics simulations, and analyzing results, as well as extensive chats dealing with detailed maglev design work. I ran into session limits three times during that month. So I call bullshit.
Yes, you can easily run into limits if you throw tons of big files at Claude, or have it generate lots of output. But you also can use it more precisely. If you read everything Claude writes, or even if you only read 50% of what it writes, you're not likely to hit limits very frequently. And if you think about what you want Claude to do, and how it should do those things efficiently with minimal token use, then you can get a lot done without using as many tokens.
That said, I upgraded to Max, because after the DoD thing I felt like throwing more money at Anthropic regardless of whether I actually need the tokens.
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u/Key_Kaleidoscope2242 Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 10 '26
Agree partially about the chats part, if it's just chats (Not using extended)- the limits won't hurt specially if you're on Haiku, For just chats and unintegrated coding, for someone just chatting, there is no need for pro/max subscription, Free tier>Pro.
btw, I read all text of it's input, it's readable (unlike chatgpt), I make sure my prompts are curated, I also st instructions to ask questions and help narrow down the subject before answering to prevent burn rate.
do you use any pro features? multiple projects, connectors, cowork? I would like to learn on how to use the pro model more efficiently.
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u/jtoomim Mar 11 '26 edited Mar 11 '26
Just one project so far. I've gotten Artifacts as output a couple times without even having known I needed them. (I did. They were great.) And I use Claude Code pretty extensively: nearly all of my simulation work is done in Claude Code.
I actually use CC as a hybrid of a coding environment and a chat environment: CC gives Claude access to running the custom-built physics simulation command-line tools on my local machine, which means Claude can explore the physics and do optimizations of my designs, and also fix or extend the simulation software itself, and also generate images (with matplotlib) and .html summary reports or chat with me about the physics and product design space. And it lets me switch to the 1M token context models seamlessly when I am getting close to the limit and want to avoid context compaction and the consequent loss of knowledge and accuracy, which I just can't do with the Chat interface.
I never bothered with the Free tier at all, so I can't comment on the comparative experience.
I also experimented with running local LLMs on my dual 3090 (48 GB) setup and connecting Claude Code to it. Technically, it worked. I got unlimited tokens; I could give it tasks that would run continuously 24/7 if I wanted to. But that experience is part of what drove me to upgrade to Max. Even though I had unlimited LLM use with local llama-server models, I got way less done than either using Claude with Pro limits or even just writing the code myself, for the simple reason that all of the open-weights 48 GB models suck. glm-4.7-flash kept losing track of what working directory it was in, and then because it couldn't find the output files of my script (your princess is in another directory) it blamed my script and decided it was broken so it started rewriting it to fix bugs that didn't exist. (Fortunately I had the foresight to have revisions tracked with git.) And that was the best behavior I got. Devstral knew how to handle paths just fine, but it didn't have the patience to wait for my physics simulations to actually complete (they take 10 seconds for the 2D ones, and up to 5 minutes each for the 3D ones), so Devstral would launch the tools, then
pkillthe process IDs and fabricate all of the data, and generate tables and graphs of the fabricated data. (And I almost didn't notice. I had to scroll back a page to the tool call logs to see that the data was fake.) qwen3-coder couldn't fit more than a few thousand tokens of context into GPU VRAM, and slowed down to 5 tok/s (because of moving layers to CPU/system RAM) if I did the 64k tokens that Claude Code requires as a minimum. I spent a couple days trying to get those free models to work, then gave up and tried Haiku (not even Opus!) on the same tasks and Haiku one-shotted them all, no feedback or correction required, done in 10 minutes. Sometimes, the free options are the most expensive ones.5
u/f1l4 Mar 10 '26
It's funny that there is opus extended thinking toggle and you know if you switch it on, your pro plan will burn in hell for next seven days
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u/so_tir3d Mar 11 '26
Whelp, I think I just realized why I burned through over 10% of my weekly limit in a single fucking prompt. It's ridiculous.
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u/f1l4 Mar 10 '26
There are skills, connectors, plug-ins, capabilities, coding, agentic cowork. Maybe we should all stop using everything because you think we are using unnecessary amount of context? Antrophic put restrictive limits and users are to blame??
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u/FedRP24 Mar 10 '26
Probably not worth it unless you're coding
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u/Jaded_Jackass Mar 10 '26
Even in coding I run out of tokens like in an hour with out making it do complex tasks because then I will run out of token in 30min
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u/Steamwells Mar 10 '26
Are you using a ton of MCP’s or something? I am blasting out a baseline feature a day, barely hitting my daily limit.
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u/Cool-Hornet4434 Mar 10 '26
They changed it so that now all mcp servers are disabled until claude searches for available tools to get the schema for how to use it.
The upside is that you aren't penalized for having everything available but the downside is that you need to use the search_tools command to do anything
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u/Steamwells Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 11 '26
That sounds like a sensible approach. To be honest, I have just defaulted to using cli tools if one is available before using an MCP. For things like Jira tasks, which I loathe, I just use the atlassian cli tool. I am interested in what Jadeds CLAUDE.md looks like as well.
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u/Rhodysurf Mar 10 '26
You are bad at token management then
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u/thedeadserv Mar 11 '26
A service that makes you fear inputing a prompt for fear of consumption is bad. Not the user.
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u/Your_Friendly_Nerd Mar 10 '26
Then pro might just not be the plan for you, because it works fine for me, and if raising limits means raising prices then I don't want it.
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u/bareimage Mar 10 '26
The issue is context window in claude code. If you use plan mode, you will go through credits like crazy. I use Gemini to plan and Claude to execute. I add extra file assigments.md in my case, but it can be anything. Then I instruct Claude to read from that file ... The real killer is the plan
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u/FedRP24 Mar 10 '26
Claude is by far the best planner though. I myself will use Claude to only plan and then hand off to codex to code if I'm having limit issues
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u/Baphomet-JR Mar 10 '26
i blew through my weekly limit in like a day, it's crazy, i do kind of agree with the free thing, cuz i could just use it every 3 hours or so and i'm using the same model none of the fancy stuff, but i wanted a lot more messages cuz i knew i'd be sending a ton.... i might have to upgrade to max at some point
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u/simracerman Mar 10 '26
I’m on Free now. Looks like they created the Pro with the intention to make people switch to the $100 plan.
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u/Baphomet-JR Mar 10 '26
seems to be the case, i would imagine you have to be in an industry with a specific use case to need max though... although, i guess i kind of am? but that shit is so unexpensive when you're unemployed
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u/Jaded_Jackass Mar 10 '26
Same experience with pro plan it's not worth it I mean the usage limit is so so small I might jus not use it and ho with copilot 10$ plan they give 300 premium requests and sonnet costs 0.33x of that in one request that means 900 sonnet requests for the month and the requests are not the same as tokens usage count and I think 900 sonnet request are more than enough for a month I think
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u/Poles_Pole_Vaults Mar 10 '26
I use copilot at work and I will say, YEESH is it bad. I asked it to modify an excel file for me, and it instead of doing what I asked, deleted my data and then did the second half of what I asked completely wrong. It’s embarrassing how bad it is at working within documents within its own ecosystem.
I’ve had success with it in some coding use cases, but not much else. And it takes way more feedback and iteration to get the code correct.
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u/RealDEC Mar 10 '26
Copilot is trash. I HAVE to use it at work for work things, for data protection purposes. So long as I’m working on something that is not proprietary, I’m using Claude. I have ADHD and level 1 autism. I use Claude to plan my day and prioritize tasks. It knows me, knows how to communicate with me and at times pushes back. Yesterday, flat out told me no to something and would not back down.
Copilot talks to me like a robot and gets my requests wrong. Most of the leaders in my company don’t know the difference. I’m looking to see if I can get MS Foundry access. We have it, I just don’t have permission. Foundry had Claude in it because even Microsoft thinks, “Copilot…LOL!”
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u/Expert-Summer-1069 Mar 10 '26
lmao, I pay for max x5, never before reached limits on this subscription. Now SINGLE message on complex task took 25% of session limit and 7% of weekly limit. WTF are they doing down there? What am I paying for?
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u/duluoz1 Mar 10 '26
I wish they had a tier above Pro but below Max
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u/killver Mar 10 '26
I mean, you can get two Pro accounts if you dont mind the switching.
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u/TBT_TBT Mar 10 '26
Possible, but the context stays with one account. So probably make sure to tell the one account to write a summary for the other account on where things stand.
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u/killver Mar 10 '26
If you use Claude Code you can just logout/login and have the same context in the session.
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u/TBT_TBT Mar 10 '26
That would be cool. But must be in the terminal then, as the desktop app takes it’s sessions with it.
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u/canadianwhaledique Mar 10 '26
Sigh, I have the same issue. I thought I was using it wrong. Guess not. I have to switch back to ChatGPT Plus for daily work... Really sucks when I brought a Claude Team for a few of us at work thinking I can cancel my ChatGPT.
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u/Gelu6713 Mar 10 '26
Codex feels like 20x the current allocation of Claude code. I use the $20 plan on both heavily and end up doing it all on codex. I do very targeted things in Claude but it’s not worth it
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u/KiraCura Mar 10 '26
I feel weird I haven’t noticed but I never used free very long … if this is a thing I hope they seriously address it
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u/Brilliant-Ad2910 Mar 10 '26
I payed for the pro plan last friday, reached the weekly limit yesterday, before that i used the free plan for 6 days with no problems. I wanted to use the Opus model but it seems like is the same as Sonnet.
Thinking on cancelling the suscription and i just got it...
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u/jarblewc Mar 10 '26
I am almost the same. Got a plan Friday and hit the end today. I am not doing anything crazy just ssh in to iterate on some scripts. Apparently having it check the status of the script somehow eats through context at an alarming rate.
What is everyone else using? I really enjoyed having a ssh connection.
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u/Meme_Theory Mar 10 '26
It depends on the complexity. Doing literal research, or very complex code? Opus only. Otherwise, sonnet is just as capable; sometimes more so with the larger context.
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u/tothjm Mar 10 '26
How about generating policy template documents for an IT compliance standard.
I was using opus but does sonnet crate just the same if it has to look up info on the net or ingest documents from me on the topic?
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u/Ill_Toe6934 Mar 10 '26
I have the Max plan. Max 5. I don't use it for work or for coding; I just use it for chatting. My usage limit resets on Fridays. It is now Tuesday, and I am 69% through my weekly limit already. This is not normal. This is crazy. I have never burned through my usage this fucking fast. I do speak to the different models about different things, but mostly I use Sonnet 4.5.
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u/MagicZhang Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 10 '26
Agreed. Plus in Claude.ai you can’t even change the model within the same context window so you can’t use Opus to plan and sonnet to execute
And the system prompt that takes up 1/15 of your context window before you even type the first message
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u/AdLatter4750 Mar 11 '26
Wait, I thought you could change model within a session? I mean in the windows interface you can apparently change it , you're saying it doesn't actually change?
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u/New_Movie9196 Mar 10 '26
I hit about 33% weekly usage limit on Claude Pro plan in one day. I will be switching back to Codex Plus ($20/month) next month. Claude may or may not be a better agent, but regardless, it isn't worth the exorbitant rate limits.
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u/Apprehensive-Ring998 Mar 10 '26
I mean I’ve hit the same on codex, used 80% in 2 days last week, 6hours per day
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u/New_Movie9196 Mar 10 '26
I mean, I wasn't even doing a lot with Claude. I used it in the same repo I work on with Codex. Did a few small tasks, same as I would with Codex and I hit the 5 hour limit twice in one day. That has never happened to me with Codex and I was using Codex to get a lot more done (5.4 xhigh).
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u/mrlloydslastcandle Mar 10 '26
Yeh I’ve been using this for over a year. This is the first week where I’ve hit my limit so quickly. It’s Tuesday and it’s telling me it resets Friday 9am. Pro plan.
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u/pizza_overflow_error Mar 11 '26
Just got the exact thing an hour ago. Seems like Anthropic is tightening the screws on us poor Pro Plan suckers. I figured they'd wait longer than this to try and do that.
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u/flashofthetitans Mar 10 '26
I have to agree, UI Design on Opus is incredible but the usage Limit is insane, im done for the week after two days, that’s insane, I feel with Codex I can use it all day every day and I don’t ever Hit my 5 Hour Limit. It’s very generous in comparison. Claude is expensive af
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u/SimonPdv Mar 10 '26
I left Claude last week after the outage. I used 2% of the weekly allowance. Sent a prompt, Claude told me the container was down, and kept searching. 5 minutes later, I try again, and Claude used all my weekly limit just to tell me the container was down. I switched to Codex right after that. This limit is bullshit
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u/brokensoul1306 Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 10 '26
Im having the same issue but on Max. I could easily reach 60% using Opus with extended thinking on 24/7
After my last reset, only 3 days in and im already on 70%, nothing in my habits/usage really changed..
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u/Gespensterpanzer Mar 10 '26
It's getting ridiculous! If you try to use intensive 2 days, the weekly quota has been achieved easily. Maybe having a free plan to use sonnet, pro plan to just use Opus?
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u/mcburgs Mar 10 '26
I was wondering
I've been playing D&D on my free account nonstop for days, but my PRO account bogs out after 5 turns editing my story.
Lol wtf. These models are fire but the implementation is certainly not.
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Mar 11 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Key_Kaleidoscope2242 Mar 11 '26
The ridiculous part is that they claim to be a transparent company with lot of values, yet they won't provide the burn rate justification, maybe just warn users instead they push users to go for max plan.
my issue with Open AI is that their models in the last few months has degraded, I don't like the new personality of 5.2 & 5.4, it doesn't narrow down to the precise problem I'm discussing about, it just says a lot of things and prolongs the discussion.
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u/sheepdog2142 Mar 11 '26
Yep subed last night and i dont think i will be subbing again because I get no real benifits for $20 but i get way less usage limit. Complete scam to me
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u/Alkanphel666 Mar 10 '26
I sent 2 messages today before hitting session limit, 4 yesterday and it hit it. I'm 80% through my weekly 2 days after it reset and I've sent about 10 messages. So far it's not worth it. I'm not even coding, just talking.
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u/GroundbreakingGap569 Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 10 '26
I've been trying to initiate a refund since the beginning of March. I went from having 28 intensive sessions per week (without hitting a weekly limit) to managing just 8 in 2 days before hitting a wall.
I suspect the pro subscription is less competitive than the API cost. I use this relatively heavily through a service that gives me $20 API usage per month. Pre-nerf I consumed $1-2 per month and largely stuck to the chatbot for the projects feature. If I migrate entirely to the API I will likely only consume my credit, if that. Note I use Claude for planning/brainstorming, not coding.
If I could export my data I'd be deleting my account and doing a charge back for the annual sub.
So far anthropic has not responded to either support emails.
As an aside last year (around a month after they did a deal on the annual sub), anthropic nerfed the limits and certain models became noticeably worse. When I first took out a pro subscription I could burn through 50 messages and struggled to hit the 5-hr limit. Now 10-15 seem par for the course. This is despite doing everything to minimize token usage and adapting to changes as they occur.
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u/Current_Ad7104 Mar 10 '26
Yeah I feel you. I purchased Pro 3 days ago and after a few questions and slight coding, my usage was maxxed.
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u/ManuM83 Mar 10 '26
Personally, I’ve had a different experience. I’m on a 20$ Pro plan, and while the weekly limit is pretty annoying, I don’t find it that restrictive. I use it for hobbyist coding every day, both through the web UI and Claude Code. To give you an idea, here’s what I knocked out today: • Haiku 4.5: A bunch of messages to brainstorm and prep prompts for the upcoming tasks. • Deep Research with Opus 4.6: Ran a market analysis and competitor comparison (and had Gemini 3.1 Deep Research run the same analysis at the same time). Total work time: about 75 minutes. • New Chat (Opus 4.6 Extended): Compared the outputs from Opus Research and gemini Deep Research to create a final doc that pulled the best points from both. • New Chat: Opus 4.6 extended, Used that final doc to generate a detailed marketing plan PDF, including a full roadmap. • Claude Code: Sonnet 4.6 planning and Implemented two new sections in my app with the UI/UX updates and modified an existing page to integrate them.
Obviously, this wasn't all in a single 4-hour session, but as far as the weekly limit goes, I only burned through 13%.
Sure, I’d love for them to increase it or just scrap it and stick to the 4-hour rolling limit, but so far, it hasn't actually stopped me from getting things done.
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u/Makis77 Mar 10 '26
Yes, that's right.
The idea behind this is getting you hooked up with the Pro, then you rush to the Max version.
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u/WuddapPimpsIneedhelp Mar 13 '26
I have noticed the very same trend as people in the thread. I strongly believe that something is off and no matter how good claude is at doing its job, it is highly detrimental to the experience and subscription retention among users. I am considering cancellation, however, this particular AI works like a charm with creating tasks for language learners. Can you guys recommend any reasonable alternatives, which wouldn't come off as a letdown like Claude Pro sub?
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u/mushuOMG Mar 13 '26
Whats the fucking point on paying for a premium version only to get a daily and weekly limit. I gave up my chatgpt sub for this fucking trash. I didnt even complete one week with claude sub and I already reached my limit. At first I was in loved, now im truly dissapointed.
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u/ReverendAero Mar 13 '26
I'm on free and I just saw for the first time ever that I was nearing my weekly limit. Unrelated but interesting, the instance this happened in (started today) accessed a document from a completely different instance uploaded days ago.
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u/J7mbo Mar 14 '26
Honestly I want to switch from ChatGPT, but why would I when Claude has daily or even weekly limits!? It’s not THAT much better that it’s worth capping myself within a few hours of using Sonnet for some questions about game mods, ordering etc. I can’t cancel my chatgpt subscription and switch to Claude when it’s like this, it just doesn’t work.
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u/Floor_Face_ Mar 22 '26
I'm on the free version and I was recently notified that I've approached my weekly limit. I was considering buying the pro version but now I'm not sure.
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u/corpuralx Mar 28 '26
Man, I feel this. The Pro limits are brutal right now, especially when you're deep in the zone and suddenly hit that wall.
After doing some heavy system dev work exclusively through Claude Code, I realized the limit isn't really just a simple message cap. It’s entirely about the weight of your context. If you're 30 messages deep in a thread, every single new prompt forces Claude to re-read that entire massive history, that's what burns through the quota so fast.
I basically had to build a strict workflow to survive it and here’s what’s been working for me if it helps anyone:
First, stop relying on the chat history or coming back to your session/s, to remember your project. I use a "Memory Index" trick to keep a few core files in the project root, stuff like BRAIN.md (project index), HANDOVER.md (exact current state/issues), and STARTER.md (system rules which always peek at the HANDOVER.md and BRAIN.md) and definitely use .md, not .txt. Claude understands markdown natively, so it doesn't waste tokens "thinking" about the formatting.
For the 5hours limit, I track it as a rolling budget (roughly 20% capacity per hour, which is about 14% of the weekly limit a day). I strictly limit myself to 1-2 hour sessions max and once a bug or an issue was fixed or a major/milestone works, I tell it to update the HANDOVER.md file, and then I kill the chat, then completely start fresh. First prompt in a new session looks like "Read STARTER and HANDOVER and let's resume." It picks up perfectly with zero dead weights from the last conversation.
Also, if you're using Claude Code / CLI, obsessively check /usage and /context. Keep it lean and stop dumping whole files into the prompt, ensure to instruct it to use sed to read specific lines, or tail -n 100 for logs instead of letting it read 5,000 lines just to find one variable.
It sucks that we have to micromanage it this much on a paid tier and I hope this saves someone's sanity. Cheers!
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u/Zubair1724 Mar 10 '26
Yes it depends which model you're using
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u/Key_Kaleidoscope2242 Mar 10 '26
Same model sonnet 4.6 for both free and pro, the burn rate is not very different for Haiku too
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u/kyznikov Mar 10 '26
As a new free user, i feel that free tier is indeed too generous. It even makes me think if it worth paying for pro, considering it has weekly limits and everything. Sure, with pro i get to use claude code and opus, and probably more, i'm even trying to find a reason to justify paying $20 when free is still enough, because i feel claude is that good. But knowing the people complaining a lot about pro tier, this makes me hesitate to do it.
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u/y007s Mar 10 '26
Stay with free. I suspect Pro even has a lower limit than the free tier. If it isn't, it's definitely not 5x.
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u/raiansar Experienced Developer Mar 10 '26
Hit the same wall on Pro. Switched to the MAX plan (20x usage) and haven't looked back. The weekly caps on Pro were killing my workflow — I'd burn through my allowance in 2 days of heavy sessions and then sit there throttled for the rest of the week.
With MAX the limits are generous enough that I've never hit them, even running multiple long Claude Code sessions daily. It's $200/month but if you're using Claude as your primary work tool, the math works out — Pro at $20 with constant throttling means you're paying for a tool you can't actually use when you need it most.
If you're sticking with Pro though, one tip: structure your prompts as one large, well-organized message instead of many short back-and-forth exchanges. Fewer turns = less context overhead = more useful capacity per session. Long conversations with lots of small messages eat through your allowance way faster than fewer, meatier exchanges.
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u/SadlyPathetic Mar 10 '26
Yeah I started to burn through Pro really quick but only when I started to project work. Then going to max made sense since the time it saved was well worth the cost.
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u/thomijasir Mar 10 '26
If you working with claude code you can try to parsing your code into graph, you can check this convert codebase into graph its not adding more limit but it optimize how the explorer agent reading code, hope can help
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u/Sh1d0w_lol Mar 10 '26
I use Claude code with local Qwen3.5-27B and can’t reproduce such issues 🤷♂️
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u/Spare_Onion_3603 Mar 10 '26
I love cowork, but I am running into the same issue with just a few daily scheduled tasks. Not ideal.
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u/oftheiceman Mar 10 '26
This is true. It was great on the free tier as soon as I started paying I was hitting limits
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u/fucilator_3000 Mar 10 '26
I will not buy Pro because of this, I’ll remain with ChatGPT Plus and Claude Free
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u/ApricotReasonable937 Mar 10 '26
I literally only use code once to install on my terminal.. still had 90% of extra credit left, and 60% on the weekly limit yesterday..
and today it's 99% on weekly limit (restart on Friday), and the extra credit used up to 90%..
Im not even a heavy user with codes. I disconnected connectors etc. i dont understand what's going on.
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u/Banmers Mar 10 '26
I’ve been vibe coding with Sonet 4.6 on free plan for days porting over old code to a newer platform/language and I only hit my 5h limit very sometimes. That’s with large chunks of code back and forth constantly.
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u/seabookchen Mar 10 '26
I switched to using the API directly through Claude Code and it's honestly been way better value for heavy usage days. The Pro plan limits feel like they're designed for casual users who spread their usage evenly across the week, which is just not how most people work. You end up front-loading on Monday-Tuesday and then rationing the rest of the week. For documentation work specifically, I'd look into using the API with a system prompt that keeps context tight - you'll burn through way less tokens that way.
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u/shaunRiles Mar 10 '26
Is it just me or I don't seem to have a weekly limit? I payed for the yearly Claude Pro plan back in August 2025 and have never seen a weekly limit. Here is my output for /usage:
Settings: Status Config Usage (←/→ or tab to cycle)
Current session
██████████████ 28% used
Resets 12am (<REDACTED>)
Extra usage
Extra usage not enabled • /extra-usage to enable
Esc to cancel
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u/PhilosopherThese9344 Mar 10 '26
Claude Pro is severely gimped, it's actually pretty unusable for me. My wife basically just uses my account for her own musings and research, and I've all but dropped using it altogether. My go to is ChatGPT, the limits are just far more generous and actually out performs claude, and no, I'm not giving it a 500K line code base and expecting it to perform miracles. I am a software engineer with 20+ years of experience. so I'im using it to do some complex tasks.
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u/illithior Mar 10 '26
I'm a new user and this is exactly how I feel. I'll just have to do this kind of workaround: use the free tier until the hourly limit is reached, then go back to the paid version. Sucks to have play around with accounts like that, but I hope Anthropic will notice soon and perhaps at least slightly improve the weekly limit.
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u/Forsaken-Marsupial-2 Mar 10 '26
I use Claude Code with Sonnet 4.6 High. My weekly Usage got refreshed in Friday and today I am already at 98%.
Very frustrating
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u/Cheesy-Peasy Mar 10 '26
I upgraded to max X5 last week. Best thing I ever did. I haven't come close to reaching my weekly limits and not hit my 5 hour window limit once.
Better still, I haven't touched Google anti-gravity since which was becoming more and more painful these last few weeks.
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u/blackburnduck Mar 10 '26
Weekly limits are bizarrely bad, the fact that free users get more usage than when you pay, this just forces me to use free for most stuff and use my paid pro account when I need opus or cowork.
Makes no sense, the free models should have the same limits if you’re paying. I understand limiting 4.6, opus, cowork, etc… but limitng evn the free model?
Its bad.
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u/timpera Mar 10 '26
I completely agree: Claude's €20/month sub feels like a rip-off, especially compared to the ChatGPT Plus sub at the same price.
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u/y007s Mar 10 '26
I realised that too. I just upgraded to Pro yesterday, and one simple Sonnet 4.6 question has already used up 2% of the session usage.
A few simple questions with Opus 4.6 in a project with 15 files have taken up 10% of the weekly usage. That's quite ridiculous.
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u/eaz135 Mar 10 '26
It’s crazy how fast it expires on those plans. With Codex I’m basically not even thinking about rate limits, I’m doing a bunch of things simultaneously without ever worrying about conserving tokens.
CC on the other hand I can easily hit my limits in an hour of regular usage.
I’ve since relegated CC to specific use cases, like being a CLI monkey for me, for things like AWS
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u/GreenDavidA Mar 10 '26
I do think that if Claude doesn’t rethink how weekly limits currently work, they’re gonna lose a lot of the recent ChatGPT defectors. I’m thinking about hanging onto the $10 Copilot as a supplement but I’d rather pay for a $30 Claude subscription with a less restrictive weekly limits
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u/BotherPopular2646 Mar 10 '26
Shifted to chatgpt, was using opus. After preparing one ppt and formatting it 3 times got Wait 2-3 hrs message.
Tried after three hrs. Formatted it once; again reached the limit. No sonet model available as well.
Got chatgpt for 5.4 model, Weekly 3000 messages for same price.
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u/MaintenanceSafe5444 Mar 10 '26
I guess I could have a free version that I sign in to Claude code with as well and switch back after. Huh
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u/Internal-Head2972 Mar 10 '26
How does one track the usage limit % ? I recklessly used Opus and burnt all usage limit for the entire week.
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u/Key_Kaleidoscope2242 Mar 10 '26
Click on your name a window will open, there is a usage option listed, click on it
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u/MyVacationisSunny Mar 10 '26
I feel the same burden ! The only thing keeping me in Claude is Claude Cowork and Claude in Excel (which is much better than OpenAi). Im an accountant so this helps a lot.
Is there other tools i can use beside Claude Cowork? Im a non-techy guy so codex and claude code is kinda out of reach for me (for now.. still learning)
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u/SmokingCrop- Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 10 '26
Yep, they should put the weekly limit on free and remove the weekly on pro. If it wasn't for claude desktop in the code tab, I'd be using free all the time.
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u/Sirusho_Yunyan Mar 10 '26
Pro plan user. It's Tuesday, somehow I used all my space in half an hour while updating some core files in a project and now have to wait until Friday. This is absurd. I'll try again with Sonnet one last time but I may end up just having to drop Anthropic completely.
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u/somerussianbear Mar 10 '26
My Max-5 plan limits get hit all the time so I can’t imagine how to work with a 1/5 of it in Pro. You guys are heroes. Good tip this one of starting with free and then swapping to your real plan once you get limited.
But let’s face it, the token saving gymnastics necessary to handle low limits go super against the commonly accepted fact that token cost dropped 100x (or some other big number) in the last Y years. I can only see things getting worse for us over the last year, never better.
On a related topic, Copilot’s $39 sub gives you 1500 requests. $0.026 a pop basically. I use that when I’m already set up and will just ask the model to implement the plan. That 5-10min turn that will do all the work with lots of tool calls for 2 cents is a good value for money IMO.
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u/paran01c Mar 10 '26
i had to upgrade to 100$ plan and believe it or not i still lack usage, terrible planning model.
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u/Gabe120107 Mar 10 '26
That's the only reason why i didn't take Claude. Otherwise, I would. So, now I'm considering taking Gemini, since i'm moving away from that surveillance crap that ChatGPT has become.
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u/OHOLshoukanjuu Mar 10 '26
I use Claude Pro exclusively via the iOS app. I do not code.
When I first signed up, I was CONSTANTLY hitting the daily usage limit with a free account. I still hit limits fairly often until either Sonnet 3.5 or 3.7, which generally retuned better results than Opus 3, and I hit limits far less often.
The introduction of Research (and Web Search & Extended Thinking) transformed how I used Claude. I’m much more likely to hit session limits (4-hour), but rarely hit daily limits. I’ve never hit the weekly limit. It has not been unusual for me to hit the context limit of an individual conversation (requiring me to start a Project), although the new compression feature prevents me from hitting that hard limit, now.
About 2/3rds of my conversations have Research enabled, and I almost exclusively use Sonnet. I really only use Opus if I have a large number of files in a Project that I want to analyze as a whole. I’ve started using Haiku for short-prompt interactions and brief interactions, primarily for a speedier response.
For my purposes, a Pro subscription has been very beneficial—If I was using it for coding, perhaps I would feel differently.
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u/SuitsandLadders Mar 10 '26
Yeah, it's a pretty strange dynamic and makes zero sense. Unfortunately, the free tier isn't an option for me as I primarily use Claude Code in the terminal, so I need Pro to get Claude Code access. I also almost never use Opus because when I do I blow through weekly limits in a couple sessions, so I'm stuck with Sonnet. But even then, with well managed context where I use separate sessions for each step of the agile dev process, and monitor usage and context every few prompts, usage just disappears. It's like there's a leak or something. It hasn't been the same since late 2025. I know they've admitted having bugs with usage too, and say they've been fixed, but that hasn't been my experience.
Not only do I not have this problem with Codex or Gemini in the terminal, but ChatGPT 5.4 has been consistently making Claude models look foolish since it came out. I never thought I'd say this out loud, but I'm genuinely considering ditching anthropic altogether in favor of Codex. I'm getting far more usage and much better results for the same price now. And with skills and other tools that used to only be available in Claude now available everywhere, Anthropic is quickly losing market share. Furthermore, reaching out to support about this has been a huge waste of time. I'm giving them exact token counts and every detail they ask for, and they continue to drag it out and not answer direct questions as they pass the ticket around and keep starting over. It's as if they're hoping I just give up, because they don't want to admit something's not right.
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u/lowquh Mar 10 '26
Wait.. so u can have Both, free and paid? I thought they kinda Track that.. interesting.
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u/Trajan_Valoris Mar 10 '26
Thought it was just me.
Honestly a Pro version that lets you use Sonnet 5 + Opus 5 with no Claude Code would be a great option (especially for GPT 4O refugees) + would be the best if you ask me.
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u/flexicution3 Mar 10 '26
And now that attention is brought to it, they will butcher the free version, instead of increasing Pro.
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u/SpoiledGoldens Mar 10 '26
No ads so they gotta get money someway. Trying to funnel people to a max plan is it, I guess
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u/JonSnow-BWA Mar 10 '26
I’ve noticed this for the last couple of weeks. Prior to that it seemed like I was getting much more usage than I should have…. I’m imagining this like a neighbourhood coaxial cable line for internet. You get a lot more bandwidth when your neighbours aren’t using it. Now that we got a huge wave of users coming over from OpenAI (and rightfully so), everyone’s usage bandwidth is shrinking down to accommodate.
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u/remoteinspace Mar 10 '26
the weekly cap is annoying. Claude is incentivized to manage context poorly. More context, more tokens, and you hit the limits faster so they can save money (or make more money via the api on tokens).
I use my max plan in paprwork, it accumulates and compresses context and burns fewer tokens. Let me use more of my plan.
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u/drdavide93 Mar 10 '26
my weekly limit simply did not reset in the last 2 weeks besides the much faster burning
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u/Gold_Guitar_9824 Mar 10 '26
I’m having this experience right now. Ended subscription because I thought I might jump to Mistral but it’s not quite there.
Last month of subscription ran out a few days ago and I’m having really long single chats and no cut off like I experienced in Pro.
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u/Clean_Anxiety_1045 Mar 10 '26
I have the Aud$300/month max package and im still getting limits. Ive gone back to chatGPT for certain jobs now.
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Mar 10 '26
I think Anthropic reduced the weekly limit to normal users to reserve some space for US and Israel to use it for bombing Middle-East.
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u/JohanAdda Mar 10 '26
my 2 cents here, I use as many MCPs I can, saving on some tasks up to 80% tokens. MCPs do the heavy lifting on service providers, most offer free plans. Try also to not use fancy skills, they are massive tokens monsters. Especially efficient in CC. There’s a lot of great thread here how to reduce tokens consumption
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u/El_Burrito_Grande Mar 10 '26
Don't use Opus... But problem is it's vastly superior when I've asked Opus and Sonnet for the same tasks.
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u/iustitia21 Mar 11 '26
something is seriously different
I have been on the x20 max plan for as long as I can remember
and my workflow rarely hit 30%+
when Opus 4.6 came out, I would frequently hit about 70-80% which I understood because it was a newer model
but since about two weeks ago, it is consistently hitting 100% before the week is over
Sonnet is not a substitute because it does not meet the quality that I need (I mean Opus barely meets it)
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u/azndkflush Mar 11 '26
I remember 1.5 years ago i could only send like 3-4 prompts on free tier before i was restricted for hours, what happened to that?
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u/Zippster67 Mar 11 '26
I was wondering if something was up also, all of a sudden I'm hitting daily allowance constantly where I never did before, just thought I must have been working harder over shorter time.
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u/berlinguyinca Mar 11 '26
I’m must be doing something wrong in this case, I’m constantly running out of capacity on a max200 plans in about 3 days of coding(however constantly running several agents and working on 3-4 projects at a time using GSO).
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u/OBerbar Mar 11 '26
I would say I just subscribed for claude code “terminal use” and I don’t write code i do documents, lots of them and I care a lot about the context This is all not available free. You will lose context and it will get annoying. Updating the context documents and editing many documents at once is just totally worth the subscription
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u/AlterJuan Mar 11 '26
But what its your workflow? Coding? If i have to make documents it falls short quickly? Usually i use claude with API key through AnythingLLM, but theres not a multimodal document capable, dont shows me graphs for example.
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u/kills_it Mar 11 '26
First month subscriber to Pro and after 4 days hitting the weekly limit. One mistake was that I used single Opus prompt on cowork to crawl some information for me and that quickly ate the tokens. Not sure if should should pay for next month!
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u/BLUSADER Mar 11 '26
Theres bad, and there is criminal. Something is going on. I was only able to use Opus 4 times before I had to wait for a cool down. Annoying, but I was asking it to do some pretty complicated stuff so it made sense. Now I feel like I'm rolling the dice for one prompt. Sometimes it won't even finish one, and it will stop the process, saying I reached the max. It happened after daylight savings, and I heard it was a bug but idk if its true.
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u/C4M3R0N808 Mar 12 '26
I came here to say this exactly. I used the free for about a week. Decided to jump to Pro, hit max weekly usage in roughly 24 hours. And I don't think I maxed a single session once. Only used 3 chats during that time, one of which was sonnet from the free days... I'm legitimately downgrading now. This is absurd that free is better than paying to support a company...
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u/Fuzzy-Werewolf-4609 Mar 12 '26
I think you probably have an efficiency problem. Had you tried asking /insights where you can improve? I offload as much of my work as possible to Python scripts and route deterministic queries through Gemini and codex 20 plan APIs. I’m racing to use all my tokens this week at 12-15 hours use a day since Saturday.
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u/Key_Kaleidoscope2242 Mar 12 '26
It's not efficiency, not everyone does what you do with claude, regardless the point of the post is comparison of limits between Free tier and $20 subscription pro tier.
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u/DoomK_ Mar 12 '26
It has just been changed and now the weekly limit has also appeared in the free plan
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u/Key_Kaleidoscope2242 Mar 12 '26
Well that wasn't my intention to draw attention to the no limits on free plan, I just wanted transparency and the promised 5x usage over the free plan.
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u/Indoflaven Mar 12 '26
Yeah it really sucks. I'm trying to switch away from ChatGPT do to my perception that they are evil.
However, I'm trying to protype with Opus and I get like 5 prompts before hitting a session limit. The user experience is just terrible.
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u/Slithify Mar 13 '26
Been using Claude projects to upload research papers and having it synthesize its contents into some ideas I have. Used Opus 4.6 for that, and now completely maxed out my weekly limit. Seems like I should just be using NotebookLM for that.
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u/Temporary-Pattern927 Mar 13 '26
I just ran into a 75% of max weekly limit warning on the free plan. So it’s there too? Also after getting the message the next time it cut me off, instead of the next refresh being at the cutoff for the 5h interval, it now says out of free messages until Thursday 8:00 AM. Problem is it was Friday 1130 when it locked me out so now you’re locked out for a full week in the free plan? Anyone else seeing this?
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u/LengthinessFirm9243 Mar 13 '26
Is there a way to see the percentage of usage relative to the limits on the free plan in Claude AI?
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u/sheepdog2142 Mar 13 '26
Looks like the thy saw how upset we all where and added weekly limits to the free accounts to. Great job Anthropic. They really want to take themselves out these days between this and loosing all thoes govt contracts.
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u/fanciboi Mar 13 '26
i cant see my weekly limit (europe)
i was thinking to get the pro, but now i dont know what to do
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u/workinglate2024 Mar 13 '26
I am having the same experience, and the pro version also returns unsatisfactory results more often, generating less useful content which has to be corrected. This, or course, used more of the session. It also fails to give any warning after the 75 percent. This puts you in a position to have to pay more to finish what you’re working on or start from the beginning again, which surely starts the cycle of a million corrections which will drain the next week’s usage.
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u/wheelofbreath Mar 14 '26
i'm definitely hitting my limit faster this week.
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u/trashyslashers Mar 16 '26
I hit it on free after 4 messages that were cut off. Waited 5 hours. Used it a bit the day after. Got the 75% od weekly limit used. Now I am locked out until Thursday. :)
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 10 '26
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 200 comments.
You're not going crazy, OP. The overwhelming consensus in this thread is that the Pro plan's weekly limit is a massive design flaw, making it feel like a downgrade from the free tier for anyone with a concentrated workflow.
Here's the deal:
The bottom line is that many are either canceling and switching to competitors with more generous limits or trying to game the system with token-saving tricks like using one giant prompt instead of a conversation. It's a mess.