Claude Code weekly rate limits

Hi there,

Next month, we're introducing new weekly rate limits for Claude subscribers, affecting less than 5% of users based on current usage patterns.

Claude Code, especially as part of our subscription bundle, has seen unprecedented growth. At the same time, we’ve identified policy violations like account sharing and reselling access—and advanced usage patterns like running Claude 24/7 in the background—that are impacting system capacity for all. Our new rate limits address these issues and provide a more equitable experience for all users.

What’s changing: Starting August 28, we're introducing weekly usage limits alongside our existing 5-hour limits: Current: Usage limit that resets every 5 hours (no change) New: Overall weekly limit that resets every 7 days New: Claude Opus 4 weekly limit that resets every 7 days As we learn more about how developers use Claude Code, we may adjust usage limits to better serve our community. What this means for you: Most users won't notice any difference. The weekly limits are designed to support typical daily use across your projects. Most Max 5x users can expect 140-280 hours of Sonnet 4 and 15-35 hours of Opus 4 within their weekly rate limits. Heavy Opus users with large codebases or those running multiple Claude Code instances in parallel will hit their limits sooner. You can manage or cancel your subscription anytime in Settings. We take these decisions seriously. We're committed to supporting long-running use cases through other options in the future, but until then, weekly limits will help us maintain reliable service for everyone.

We also recognize that during this same period, users have encountered several reliability and performance issues. We've been working to fix these as quickly as possible, and will continue addressing any remaining issues over the coming days and weeks.

–The Anthropic Team

"Most Pro users can expect 40-80 hours of Sonnet 4 within their weekly rate limits."

Guess the reason why they recently introduced agents? ;) This is not a great change if you ask me. I will have to figure out how badly this affects and if needed just cancel the subscription and find an alternative.

It was always too good to last. I assume this is the end of the viability of the fixed price options.

Seems like their business plan is unsustainable. What's a sustainable cost model?

Say an 8xB200 server costs $500,000, with 3 years depreciation, so $166k/year costs for a server. Say 10 people share that server full time per year, so that's going to need $16k/year/person to break even, so ~$1,388/month subscription to break even at 10x users per server.

If they get it down to 100 users per server (doubt it), then they can break even at $138/month.

And all of this is just server costs...

Seems AI coding agents should be a lot more expensive going forward. I'm personally using 3-4 agents in parallel as well..

Still, it's a great problem for Anthropic to have. "Stop using our products so much or we'll raise prices!"