At work
Claude's new usage limits will catch you mid-project
The heaviest users are burning through a week's allowance in a few sessions — and most of them didn't see it coming.
If you've started using Claude for the long sessions — where it writes, edits, and rebuilds things for you across an afternoon — the new usage tiers are going to surprise you. Gael Breton did the math out loud this week, and the numbers are worth sitting with.
His anchor: one full working session eats about 10% of your weekly usage on the 5x tier — ten of those and the week is gone. By the same math it runs around 20% a session on the 20x tier, so you'd burn through it in five. (The 5x and 20x here are Claude's Max subscription levels, the people already paying for the most expensive plans.)
There's a quieter trap inside that. Resuming a Claude Code session — just picking up where you left off — can cost a real chunk of your limits on its own. Leave a session running in the background, come back to it a few times, and you've spent more than you'd guess without producing anything new.
Some of the very heaviest users estimate they're burning the equivalent of $500 to $1,000 a day in tokens. Most people will never get near that. But it tells you which direction the math runs once you lean on Claude all day.
If you use Claude a lot, you'll hit the weekly cap sooner than you expect, and it tends to happen in the middle of something you care about. So treat the long, heavy sessions like a budget item. Plan the big one for when you'll actually be at the keyboard for it, finish it, and close it — instead of leaving a session open all afternoon quietly spending your week.