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Comment by sneilan1 | Hacker News Reader

1,000 messages per day should be plenty as a daily development driver. I use claude code sonnet 4 exclusively and I do not send more than 1,000 messages per day. However, that is my current understanding. I am certainly not pressing enter 1,000 times! Maybe there are more messages being sent under the hood that I do not realize?

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The issue is not about whether the limit is too high or too low. What turned me back was that they claimed "no weekly limits" as a selling feature, without mentioning that they change it to a "daily limits".

I understand it's a sale tactics. But it seems not forthcoming, and it's hard for me to trust the rest of the claims.

I don't see what's hard to understand about this.. other providers have weekly limits and daily limits. If you max out your daily every day you might still hit your weekly after 3-4 days of usage, meaning you cannot send more for the rest of the week. This is saying that no such weekly limit exists on top of the daily. E.g. see https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/28/anthropic-unveils-new-rate...

Claude Code does not have a daily limit, it has 5 hour windows that reset. On the $100 plan it's pretty hard to hit a window limit w/ Sonnet unless you're using multiple/subagents. The $200 is better suited to those who do that or want to use a significant amount of Opus.

Also the weekly limit selling point is silly - it almost certainly only impacts those who are abusing, ie. running 24/7.

At this point I'm afraid to ask, but I will do I anyways:

How do Claude's rate limits actually work?

I'm not a Pro/Max5/Max20 subscriber, only light API usage for Anthropic - so it's likely that I don't really understand the limits there.

For example, community reports that Anthropic's message limit for Max 5 translates to roughly 88k token per 5-hour window (there's variance, but it's somewhere in this 80-120k ballpark based on system load; also assuming Sonnet, not Opus). A normal user probably won't consume more than 250k token per day with this subscription. That's like 5M token for a month of 20 active days - which doesn't justify the 100 USD subscription cost. This also doesn't square with Anthropic's statement that users can consume 10000+ USD of usage on the Max 20 tier.

I'm clearly misunderstanding Claude's rate limits here. Can someone enlighten me? Is the 5-hour window somehow per task/instance and not per account?

With Anthropic's Claude subscriptions - while many people appear to use tokens as an idea of the usage limit, I doubt that's what is really used by Anthropic. Why do I say this? Well, there are multiple models, Haiku, Sonnet and Opus, we all know that Opus is the most expensive and burns through the usage limit of the subscription the fastest of all. I'd theorise that Anthropic have some kind of internal credit value (perhaps as simple as $ USD) which they allocate with some variance based on things like overall system load.

Anyway, my personal experience on Max 20x is that, with Opus at least, on a busy day in the past I can burn through between 150 to 200 million tokens in a day using Claude Code for development stuff. Split that up into 5 hour windows, and assume I'm possibly using 2 or 3 windows in a day, that still works out to a lot of tokens, well into the millions. So, the 88k tokens per 5-hour window on Max 5x, I'm not sure if it's really as small as that. Maybe the apparent reductions recently in usage limits have made it drop to around that ballpark. Originally I saw Max 5x as a heavy usage Sonnet plan, with Max 20x being a heavy usage Opus plan, however with the new and additional weekly usage limit happening on August 28th I think I'd see the plans as potentially moderate to heavy usage Sonnet for Max 5x, and heavy usage Sonnet with multiple concurrent agents for Max 20x.

TLDR: I strongly imagine that Claude subscription usage limits are based on some kind of internal credit value, perhaps $ USD, not specifically tokens, and depending which model you use is how fast this "credit" will be depleted.

The usage limits are currently for an account, based on a 5-hour window, from the first message that was sent in a new 5-hour window. From August 28th there's an additional weekly limit which looks like it will primarily make Opus usage restricted.

It's probably best to look at it as credit based, which map to a certain scale of particular tokens (ie. an Opus token takes 5x the credits of a Sonnet token).

Claude now does have a weekly limit so if you are able to hit your weekly (undisclosed, dynamic) limit in 2 days, you're unable to use the services for the next 5 days. That is what Cerebras is referencing with no weekly limits. Claude has session count limits, dynamic limits within each session, and now weekly limits on top of all that.

Please read my full comment.

Cerebras is jumping on a marketing faux-pas by Anthropic. I say this for the point you bring up about monthly session limits - no one on the Claude subreddit has yet to report being hit by this despite many going way over that. These are checks to deal w/ abusive accounts.

> no one on the Claude subreddit has yet to report being hit by this despite many going way over that

Because it hasn't gone into effect yet: "From August 28, we’ll introduce new weekly limits that’ll mitigate these problems while impacting as few customers as possible." [0]

[0] https://xcancel.com/AnthropicAI/status/1949898514844307953#m

I already explained why it's not a legitimate market differentiation.

It's not hard to understand, but I think there's a compelling argument to be made that the "daily AND weekly" limits is surely user hostile and differing limits across different pricing tiers can make it harder to tell at a glance what you actually need. It's not that Cerebrus has a feature worth advertising, it's that everyone else has introduced an anti-feature that has become the norm.

I don't know, I thought it was useful info given the context of the market. When I buy any service in general (e.g. a phone line) I'd like to know the highlights that differentiate that particular provider from others. And it didn't seem to me like this was front and center to their marketing, it sure seems like their output speed is the killer feature. This was just another item mentioned at the end of a sentence which also says a number of other things and just provides additional clarity about the endpoint.. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

Your “one enter” press might generate dozens or even hundreds of messages in an agent. Every file read, re-read, read a bit more, edit, whoops re-edit, ls, grep, etc etc counts as a message.

Still not sure if it's 1000 messages or calls though, if messages that's good.

Neither, it seems. The blog post says "Send up to N messages per day", but the FAQ (https://cerebras-inference.help.usepylon.com/articles/346886...) says:

> How do you calculate messages per day? Actual number of messages per day depends on token usage per request. Estimates based on average requests of ~8k tokens each for a median user.

So seems there is a token limit? But they're not clear what exactly that is? Haven't tried to subscribe, just going by public information available.

Logically it can only be API call based, as you bring your own IDE plugin. So there's no possibility it's based upon any UI level concept such as top level messages. The subscription wouldn't even necessarily know.

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