Anthropic Raises its Prices
New weekly limits on Claude usage
The following email arrived from the Anthropic team. It doesn’t appear as if their pricing change will increase the cost of using Claude for many users, but it’s not surprising that they’ve discovered a few bad apples are gaming the system in various ways.
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 Pro users can expect 40-80 hours of Sonnet 4 within their weekly rate limits. This will vary based on factors such as codebase size and user settings like auto-accept mode. Users 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.
I haven’t seen any real problems with Claude other than an occasional inability to handle long documents. It’s easy to work around the problem by breaking it up into sections under 10k words, but it is a little strange that it’s sometimes necessary to do so instead of being able to tell it to simply address whatever chunks it’s capable of handling.
But its performance has been, in my experience, absolutely superlative.
I use Claude for coding, and it's performance is usually very good, sometimes having a 10-20s lag, but usually sub-1s.
It's total accepted file sizes is a huge problem in coding. Most of my files are beneath 30k, but generated ones are too big for it to look at, and even adding 20 files uses a lot of it's total token so there are only a few questions capable each session.
I assume they keep reseting these in the non-chat versions, but since AI is the worst programmer out of all programmers alive, it will never touch my code again.
Overall, Claud is the best I found. I used the https://t3.chat/ wrapper to test all the different models, and still use it when I want to see what a different model things, but Claude seems to respond the best, even though it's awful and makes me hate using it more every time I do.
Worst phrase in the AI universe: "You're absolutely right!"
I’ve also found Claude to work quite well. Some hallucinations aside, it does a good job assimilating project knowledge I’ve thrown at it. Though, it seems to suffer some random inability to handle something it was able to handle last week with no problem at all. Opus seems to suffer this hindrance most often.