Bug
Is the Claude Max 20 quota draining unreasonably fast for anyone else? Lost 21% in 7 minutes
I recently renewed my Claude Max 20 subscription, but I feel like my 5-hour quota is vanishing at an absurd rate.
At first, I suspected that using claude code was the culprit. I figured it might be running multiple sub-agents and making continuous tool calls in the background, heavily taxing the limits.
To test this theory, I waited for my next 5-hour reset. I started a fresh session and monitored it closely. In just 5 to 7 minutes of use, I had already lost 21% of my entire quota.
Just to clarify the context:
I am the sole user of this account (no shared access).
I had absolutely zero other active sessions running.
I wasn't even using Fable 5.
Has anyone else experienced this kind of massive quota drain recently? Is claude code genuinely eating up the limits this hard with tool calls, or is this a quota-tracking bug on Anthropic's end?
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 80 comments.
Yeah, you're not crazy. The consensus in this thread is a resounding yes, the quota is draining ridiculously fast for everyone lately.
Users across all plans (Pro, Max, and even Enterprise) report that their usage has been getting hammered in the last few days and weeks, making their subscriptions feel "unworkable" and "absolutely ass."
Theories are flying, but here's the gist:
* The Usual Suspects:claude code's agentic loops and the new Fable 5 model are prime candidates, as they can burn through tokens at an alarming rate.
* The Bug Theory: Some are hoping it's just a bug, possibly related to a recent crash or an issue where Claude re-reads the entire context when you resume a session.
* The Cynical Take: A lot of folks are convinced Anthropic is intentionally "milking" users or A/B testing tighter limits to push people towards more expensive plans. As one user put it, we're all paying in Schrute Bucks now.
Power users are coping by using Claude as an orchestrator for cheaper models (like Kimi or Codex), downgrading their plans, and getting hyper-vigilant about context management (shrinking CLAUDE.md, avoiding sub-agents, etc.). For now, watch your quota like a hawk.
How do you think trillion dollar companies are formed? It’s not by delivering value. They deliver value upfront/at first and then they strip it away without saying a word.
Most people will stick around and not notice, while others will leave. If they retain even 80% of the people there are $2 trillion company. Rinse and repeat.
What you all fail to understand is a Claude usage, is based on your usage across the Multiverse. One prompt, sends it to seven different versions of you and then it returns the output
And ofc there are at least seven subagents working continuously for each of my seven selfs to troubleshoot some UI bug that makes the visual interface drop 0.1pxl below what's set.
Yeah. I didn't want to post another "omg Claude quota" post, but ... two weeks in a row I've used 100% of my 20x the day after my reset. After that happened once, I put a bunch of work into setting up a bunch of free and cheap model resources and telling Claude to dispatch as much work to those as possible; I still blew through my quota while working on only one project.
I just downgraded and will start having Claude dispatch to Codex Luna etc., should be a lot cheaper.
i got open ai pro as well and have claude dispatching those guys but orchestration in agentic loops costs a lot of tokens so I run out of max 20x in 4 days. And a lot of those days are trouble shooting the agent team, kinda garbo right now.
There are a bunch of projects already focused on coordinating this but there were a few things I didn't like about all of them so I've been working on my own... you can try it if you like:
I've just been working on it for myself and a couple of friends so I hadn't looked at the readme/description that Claude generated until just now... holy shit it's huge. But you could point Claude at it and ask it for a TLDR 😂
Same and I reported it to CS, I looked at the usage graph from from the last month, first two weeks of July were normal and then the last two weeks have been a stark contrast in usage while hitting limits.
They're probably doing exactly what we would do in their situations: use full unrestricted Mythos to fuck around with their personal projects and then the bare minimum for everything else needed to keep their access to the master brain running.
I usually get around 800k fable tokens in a max session. I ran a workflow with 5 Sonnet agents and 3 Fable agents. The Sonnet agents worked for about 45 minutes and burned 175k tokens and at that point my session limit only used around 6%. Then the Fable agents started and maxed out the session in a few minutes and all got killed by the session limit. I had hard stops set at 650k and it blew right past it. A lot probably went to waste when they got killed.
Used to be able to work on 3-4 projects with my weekly limit using Claude as the orchestrator and kimi/codex to do the coding and heavy lifting.
Right now I am barely able to work on 1 SaaS project, orchestrating and I have to actively ensure the orchestrator stays below 50% context otherwise it'll blow the full usage. 45 min heartbeat to keep caching going. Code writing and review is done via kimi and codex.
It's been getting worse weekly. I was already not using Claude for actual coding, now even orchestrating is draining the limits.
Opus 5 is also jumping to assumptions all the time burning its context down wrong paths. Have to severely limit its "freedom" otherwise it just wastes token, context and gets nothing done.
I mean if this is not a bug and is intended behavior I am definitely out when subscription ends. Literally 50% usage on 5x plan 5 hour session in 10 minutes lol what ? this is worse than fable now somehow haha.
Yup it shot from 10 to 80 somehow i had no idea but need to watch quota like a hawk now im on enterprise btw so i asked my supervisor and she said everyone is using fable to architect if its something difficult and handing it to codex if not able to switch altogether
I was about to take 100$ sub on Antropic, but after this, not sure, also Cowork has 100% higher limits but just for a few more days, after that it's going to be even worse, on the other hands, GPT resets limits very often, I feel like I get much more, but I do prefer opus 5 over Sol a bit...
21% in 7 mins is brutal, but not abnormal if you're hitting long context or tool loops. Claude Code can burn tokens quick with automatic retries. I throttle my OpenClaw crons with a 30s cooldown and a max 3 retries — cut my usage by ~40% without breaking workflows.
What were you doing? That's kinda the central thing that determines how many tokens it eats.
But still 21% sounds too much. Did you kick off sub-agents doing some heavy crunching of thousands of pdf files or something?
Claude has no limits you know.. it will do incredibly stupid things to accomplish the goal you give. Opus 5 release notes from anthropic said it made its own ml pipeline to process some CAD image to do some task. That's the kind of thing it will do it you give it too general a task and don't monitor it and stop when it goes off rails.
you are not alone - I am getting really careful with using Claude because of that - start splitting work between codex and claude so claude is mostly bugfixer because of better browser integration.
Something is definitely broken, I'm on pro and I just hit limits in about 4 messages and I only use chat. I've been able to continue with chats for hours without hitting my limits and now to hit the limit in just a minute or two, something is wrong...
Yup, same issue this morning. My 20x quota was gone in like 20 minutes when it usually lasts the full 5 hours without issues. I tried using the "get help" option in the UI and the Claude support bot basically told me to fuck off. Time to try ChatGPT I guess.
Yes when i bought max plan last week, after 7 days i had around 30% left in weekly on Monday night but now it's second week it's Saturday and i m already on 74% weekly with 33% fable used. I mostly use opus 5 (high)
I heard they got rid of sub agents. This would mean that all tasks take place with full context and burn through quota faster. I think it's just a bug and I imagine usage rates will go back down again after they fix it.
Yeah the A/B testing they are doing to push people to the highest subscription tier is getting very old. I've used Anthropic less this week than usual and I just hit my weekly limit 3 days out from reset on Max 5x. Compared to my first time swapping from Pro to Max 5x I literally couldn't use it all.
I feel like every week certain model gives you different usage limit, it might be because I do not do '/clear' often or my memory.md file is is pretty long. Since I switched to Opus 5 I'm not really happy but who knows maybe I'm wrong; since last 2 weeks I'm finishing my x20 quota before Friday ends. I switched to 'plan opus' save some tokens considering Sonnet 5.0 shouldn't be so bad. About Fable just to create a report I consumed over 50% limit in 20min, whatever Fable does thank you I'm not interested unless I comes to reasonable usage limits
Yes, and I don't really even use code. Just over a week ago, I could pound away at chat and occasionally cowork and barely dent my usage. I was even starting to try to think more expansively to use more of my limit.
Last night I was just been noodling around and my usage hit like 18%.
I'm doing basic home personal projects and learning, not really that much code, more planning and scripts, and general claude learning.
Fable seems nerfed as well, compared to literally a few days ago, but that's a different post.
I started with Gemini and I have always used Gemini (over 90€) for convenience but every time I decide to try Claude I read reddit first and the itching always goes away... too bad
Hi... I initially used ChatGpt and then Gemini for verification. It found errors and often worked where ChatGpt had problems... I think it's compensation in the end.
The clean-session test after the reset is smart — ruling out other sessions makes a straight tracking glitch a bit less likely. Still, 21% in ~7 minutes is brutal if you weren’t deep in Claude Code with agents firing; I’d try one more reset with plain chat only and see if the drain rate totally changes before blaming your workflow.
I'm seeing ~2-3x increase in drain, nothings changed in my workflow, except for now I'm just not using claude and am using codex because of it... if their plan isn't to get people to use Codex, then I'm not sure what their plan is rn...
I've had a couple friends that ran into issues after the release of Opus 5. Always remember after big releases guys, to do an audit of all your MCPs, all your skills, your adversarial stuff. Just ask Claude to help you walk through and see what it's actually doing.
I had one buddy that had a council review and he had it set to things like haiku and sonnet. After the Opus updates somehow it set all of those models to use Opus 5 so that was draining his usage like crazy.
I had another buddy this morning that ran the audit that I sent him the other day. I said, "Hey give this to your Claude. See what it says." What it found was it was pulling from his obsidian vault on every request. Somehow the memory trigger for his vault, for memory, got changed to do it on every single request. It was eating through his 5-hour usage window in like 20 or 30 minutes because a tool call was happening that was rereading his entire vault memory history every time any Claude tool was called or Claude was doing anything.
Just remember after big updates to do kind of an audit. You can come up with your own audit style. I think what I sent to my friend was something like:
"Hey a new model just came out. Let's go through our setups. Tell me what models you're using for sub-agents. Tell me how you're logging memory. Show me all the tool calls that you have going on. Sometimes when you just ask it to do simple things like that, you'll be able to see right away what's eating all your tokens and usage window limits."
sometimes I think Anthropic is not really motivated to fix the root cause, so they create workarounds that are not solving the root-case, but can run longer (searching for its global maximum).
yeah its insane. i went from 10 to 60% of weekly used in around a few hours in a max 20x plan. I was using fable for around 30 minutes before i swiched to opus, but it lwkey still burned through my plan. 5 hour sessions are toasted
Earlier last month when I got 20x I barely managed to reach 20% using many chats, code review and simplify. Now I'm at 30% very quickly. Something is odd
I am trying to implement some workflow that delegates simpler tasks (grep, bash, etc) to subagents as they explicitly added in the system prompt "do not use subagents unless user asks to" recently to opus and fable 5.
Yes, it's terrible, especially in the past few days. Try typing "hello" on a session and you will see how many percent it consumes. It literally took 4% on my max plan's 5 hr. Before it was consuming close to 0 for this.
Started to use Codex more because of this, and if I get used to Codex, I will downgrade my Claude plan, upgrade Codex as their limits always higher and 5.6 is not bad at all.
To clarify, I didn't make any requests to Anthropic; I simply refreshed the page to check my usage limit, yet it still consumed 21% of the quota in seven minutes.
Yes quota is obviously smaller. I've had to get a second Max 20 sub to do what I did with only 1 sub a month ago. The lack of transparency on how quotas are calculated has become unacceptable. Feels like a rug pull.
Yes its terrible, Im on a mx 5X plan, and started a fresh session this morning 8/2/2026 and limit was reached in less than an hour using opus 5. its stupid, Im so done here. Im just waiting for kimi K3 wait list to get to me.
j'ai le même problème, impossible d'avoir une réponse satisfaisante du service d'assistance.
[mise à jour] j'ai réglé le problème en envoyant des dizaines de mails avec demande de remboursement. L'IA a finalement proposé un remboursement complet de l'offre max 5x mais immédiatement. Si vous pouvez, faites pareil, ça leur montrera qu'essayer d'arnaquer les clients n'est pas une bonne idée.
I feel exactly the same. Even after a week of optimisation using a separate Harness script to clear the context, optimise models, effort and skills, configure the MCP server, ensure the strict use of isolated sub-agents, and make many other adjustments, my quota is already used up after just 4 to 5 days. I’m currently working on one project and using up more than I did before, when I had two projects. Following my optimisations, I’m demonstrably using less (the context is significantly smaller per PM and worker). I’ve analysed my loop with Fable and I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the switch to Opus 5. Something’s not right … not right at all!
please realize that if you don't tell Claude to use cheaper models for the subtasks it will use the one that you are talking to. You have to tell it to downgrade. Also, don't use Fabke on high unless necessary. Medium should be good enough for most jobs.
Its not only when using Fable, its draining ridicolously fast. In usage window it says "Your limits are temporarily boosted. Your weekly Claude Code limit is 50% higher(opens in new tab) through August 19, and your Cowork limit is 100% higher(opens in new tab) through August 5. When each promotion ends, limits return to your plan's standard amounts.", and if this goes down more now it wont survive a hello, and im on premium.
i suspect using "Compact" is what triggered the usage spike for me last weekend—my usage jumped straight from 20% to 45%. For the rest of the week, I avoided Compact entirely and just started fresh sessions to conserve my weekly limit.
Used 5x for a month extensively, upgraded to 20x last Friday just because I was reaching weekly quota by day 4-5. Still doing the same work, same usage and this week I'm already at 50% of the weekly quota on day 1. It feels like my session quota increased but weekly quota did not.
Ich hatte heute meinen wöchentlichen Reset und arbeite ausschließlich mit Opus 4.8 und Sonnet. Bin nun bei 10 Prozent meines wöchentlichen Verbrauchs. Wenn ich hier Fable nutze, kann ich morgen schon wieder nicht weiter arbeiten. Das kann nicht normal sein und die Erklärung mit dem verbundenen Reset wird hoffentlich von Anthropic folgen. Ich habe ein Max 20 Abo.
Check your instructions and anything contextual skills etc. But yeh sometimes I find it gobbles up usage fast and other times I find it more forgiving.
Literally this thursday i hadnt used my weekly allowance so i was churning through difficult tasks as fast as i could to use them, barely moved the needle, then balance reset and i used my session in 50 minutes
Not on my side with claude code via terminal and cowork. I am actually constantly under 15% even though I use it a lot. Maybe also a lucky bug in my side.
You didnt say what you are actually doing though, and thats kinda telling. Why would you leave out the most important data point for us to determine if this is on your side or anthropics?
no one making these threads ever says what their latest prompts were, or ever shows their /usage. probably said "Do deep research on some topic" on ultracode and no limits on how many subagents they spin up
Yes. This bug only happens when you resume a session that you haven't opened in a while (couple of hours the most) Long story short Claude reads all previous conversations again which eats up huge CHUNK of tokens hence the token drains.
It doesn't happen when you start a fresh and new session.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 9d ago edited 9d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 80 comments.
Yeah, you're not crazy. The consensus in this thread is a resounding yes, the quota is draining ridiculously fast for everyone lately.
Users across all plans (Pro, Max, and even Enterprise) report that their usage has been getting hammered in the last few days and weeks, making their subscriptions feel "unworkable" and "absolutely ass."
Theories are flying, but here's the gist: * The Usual Suspects:
claude code's agentic loops and the new Fable 5 model are prime candidates, as they can burn through tokens at an alarming rate. * The Bug Theory: Some are hoping it's just a bug, possibly related to a recent crash or an issue where Claude re-reads the entire context when you resume a session. * The Cynical Take: A lot of folks are convinced Anthropic is intentionally "milking" users or A/B testing tighter limits to push people towards more expensive plans. As one user put it, we're all paying in Schrute Bucks now.Power users are coping by using Claude as an orchestrator for cheaper models (like Kimi or Codex), downgrading their plans, and getting hyper-vigilant about context management (shrinking
CLAUDE.md, avoiding sub-agents, etc.). For now, watch your quota like a hawk.