For the folks asking what is the point of Sonnet 5.5 when Opus 5.5 is better in every way, Sonnet is now the new default in the free tier and now people using Claude Web in the free tier get access to an almost close to the frontier model.
I've been using the Claude free tier (browser chat) for awhile and never seem to hit restrictions anymore. There used to be many more restrictions a year ago. At the same time, if they enforce a minimum paid tier I'd probably just switch to Gemini/ChatGPT or whatever other free model is around at the time.
Hello fellow copy-paster. I hit them regularly when asking for medium refactors with higher effort. I have ChatGPT in another tab for when that happens, but to me it's awful for anything non-trivial. Gemini I don't even consider unless I'm just asking "what would Gemini do"
I've never hit anything with Qwen. Very rarely it will silently switches from 3.8 to 3.7 (which makes it notably dumber) but you just click the drop down at the top to switch back. It's rare though. I have >week convos with no switching