Claude Ultra dropped its 5-hour cap on Friday. Codex Pro dropped its cap months ago. Both still have a weekly one. Here's how the two compare, and how to budget a week so you don't run dry by Wednesday.
The gates are gone. The wall at the end of the week isn't.
TL;DR
- On Friday 30 Oct, Anthropic renamed Max 20x to Ultra ($200) and removed the 5-hour limit for verified Ultra accounts. Max 5x is now just Max ($100) and keeps both limits. Weekly limits didn't change. Codex Pro plans have had no 5-hour window since July, and OpenAI doubled most Pro allowances on Thursday.
- On the top plans of both tools, the weekly cap is now the only cap. The 5-hour window used to pace you. Without it, one long agent day can eat half a week, and neither company publishes the weekly size in absolute numbers.
- Budget the week yourself. Know your reset time, give each working day a slice, and watch weekly use against that slice. A 19-line status line script for Claude Code does this, and Codex shows the same numbers in
/status. A checklist for both tools is at the end.
On Saturday morning someone in r/ClaudeCode posted Usage is going super fast now. On the old Max 20x plan, they wrote, a week of usage lasted "bare minimum 4 days". Now: "This is the 2nd day of the exact same workflow & amount of agents I've been using for months and I'm at 73% usage."
That was less than a day after the announcement that sounded like the opposite. Another thread title summed up the first reaction: "Daddy Amodei said no more limits". A third asked "So we've been getting scammed on 20x? It's only actually been 10x?"
Both readings miss the same thing. The 5-hour limit is gone on Ultra, but the weekly limit is still there, and it's now the only thing between you and a locked account. Codex users on Pro have lived like this since the summer, so the two tools are worth looking at side by side. Then I'll show how I budget a week so the wall doesn't come on day three.
What changed on Friday
The announcement came from the official Claude account on Friday 30 Oct at 18:29 Berlin time:
"We're renaming our Max plans: Max 5x → Max, Max 20x → Ultra. Max is still $100/month, and Ultra is still $200."
The same post says Anthropic is "removing the 5-hour limit for verified Ultra accounts, starting today with most existing subscribers. Newer accounts keep a temporary limit until they're verified." It ends with the line that matters most for budgeting: "Weekly limits remain unchanged."
The Ultra help article, updated again on Saturday, fills in the details:
- Ultra includes 10 times the Pro plan's usage every week, plus a separate weekly limit for Fable.
- Verification is automatic. Anthropic checks "factors like your account and payment history". You can't ask for it, and verifying your phone number at checkout doesn't count.
- To check, open Settings > Usage. If there's no "Current session" bar, your account is verified. Anthropic also sends an email when the limit is lifted.
The pricing page puts the two plans next to each other. Max gets "5x Pro usage every 5 hours and every week". Ultra gets "10x Pro usage every week" and "No 5-hour limit" for verified accounts. Both plans can use Fable for up to half the weekly limit, and both now include monthly API credits ($100 on Max, $200 on Ultra). Per the API credits article, they work with the Claude API and the Agent SDK, but not with interactive Claude Code, and they "don't change your usage limits".
So what about "20x is now 10x"? The new pages describe Ultra's weekly allowance as 10x Pro and Max's as 5x Pro, so Ultra's week is twice Max's. Anthropic says the weekly limits didn't change, only the names. I can't measure the allowance from outside, and neither can the people in those threads. What I can say is that the per-week number is now written down, and it's the one to plan around.
The 5-hour limit is gone on Ultra. The weekly limit is now the only thing between you and a locked account.
Codex got here first
OpenAI ran this experiment over the summer, and it's useful to see how it went.
Four months, two companies, one direction: the 5-hour window goes away on the top plans, and the weekly cap stays.
On 12 July, OpenAI paused the 5-hour Codex limit. An OpenAI support reply on the developer forum put it plainly: "As announced on July 12, 2026, the 5-hour Codex usage limit has been temporarily lifted for Plus, Pro, and Business users."
On 25 August, Codex lead Thibault Sottiaux announced that the 5-hour limit would come back the next day for Plus, and explained why. The window smooths the load on OpenAI's compute, which lets them keep weekly usage generous. And Plus users, he wrote, are often casual or new and "accidentally eat through their whole weeks usage and then are confused". Pro 100 and Pro 200 stayed without it.
On 29 September he went further for Pro 200: OpenAI was "committing to not reintroducing the 5h limit, so that you can fully use the weekly usage when you want." The same day, an email announced a reduction to the Pro 200 allowance.
On Thursday 29 Oct, OpenAI changed course again. The Pro tiers help article now says: "Pro 100 and Pro 500 now include twice their previous Work and Codex allowance. On Pro 200, only the lower allowance doubled". It also says "The reduction announced in our September 29 email is canceled." Plus is unchanged.
Today OpenAI's usage guide says "Pro 100, Pro 200 and Pro 500 currently have no five-hour usage limit in Work and Codex." Where both windows apply, as on Plus, "you need allowance remaining in both to continue."
Sottiaux's reason for bringing the window back is the most useful sentence in this whole story. The 5-hour limit wasn't only there to protect the provider. It was also a speed bump that stopped people from spending a week in a day. Take it away and you need a speed bump of your own.
Claude and Codex, side by side
Here's how the two compare as of Saturday 31 Oct, from each company's own pages.
| Claude | Codex | |
|---|---|---|
| $20 plan | Pro: 5-hour and weekly limits | Plus: 5-hour and weekly limits |
| Middle plan | Max, $100: 5x Pro every 5 hours and every week | Pro 100: no 5-hour limit, weekly limit may apply |
| Top plan | Ultra, $200: 10x Pro per week, no 5-hour limit once verified | Pro 200 and Pro 500: no 5-hour limit, weekly limit may apply |
| No 5-hour limit since | 30 Oct 2026, rolling out | 12 Jul 2026 (pause), kept off for Pro since 26 Aug |
| What shares the pool | Web, desktop, mobile and Claude Code | ChatGPT Work and Codex |
| Switching models | Doesn't get you past a weekly limit | "does not restore allowance" |
| Weekly reset time | Fixed time for your account | Shown in Usage; a reset can move it |
| When you run out | Wait, usage credits at API rates, or a limit reset (not from the Claude Code terminal) | Wait, credits, or a banked or paid reset (a paid reset moves your weekly date) |
| Check it in the CLI |
/usage, status line rate_limits.seven_day
|
/status, /usage
|
| Published weekly size | Only as a multiple of Pro | Only per-5-hour message estimates |
Three things in that table matter for planning.
The middle plans differ the most. Claude's $100 plan still has a 5-hour window. Codex's Pro 100 doesn't. If you move between them, your pacing habits don't carry over.
Neither company tells you how big a week is. Anthropic gives multiples of Pro. OpenAI gives ranges of local messages per 5 hours on Plus, and the Codex pricing page only says "Weekly limits may also apply" for Pro. You find out how big your week is by watching your own percentage.
Resets behave differently. Anthropic's usage limit guide says the weekly limit resets at a fixed time assigned to your account, and a limit reset doesn't move that day. OpenAI's paid reset "pulls your normal weekly allowance forward rather than adding a separate usage entitlement", and the new week starts at your next request. Its resets guide says to "Check Usage for your next refresh time rather than calculating it". On Codex, buying a reset on Tuesday shortens the next week. It doesn't add one.
Why the weekly cap bites harder now
With a 5-hour window, a heavy afternoon ran into a wall after a few hours. You stopped, did something else, and came back to a fresh window. You couldn't spend more than a few windows' worth in a day, so the week mostly took care of itself.
Without the window, a single day has no ceiling. A session that runs agents from morning to midnight can spend what used to take three or four days. Nothing stops it until the weekly bar hits 100%, and then the stop lasts until your reset, which could be five days away.
Illustrative shapes, not measurements. The weekly size is the same in both charts. Only the pacing is different.
This is also why the Saturday thread doesn't prove that the weekly allowance shrank. I can't tell from outside what changed on that person's account. But "the exact same workflow" on a plan with no 5-hour pause isn't the same as before. Before, the window forced breaks. Now the agents can keep going until the week runs out.
The fix isn't to wish the window back. It's to pace the week on purpose.
What burns a weekly cap
A percentage bar doesn't tell you why it moved. These are the drivers that each vendor's own docs name, and they matter more without a 5-hour window, because nothing pauses them.
Each card is from the vendor's own docs. The bottom row applies to both.
On Claude, the biggest hidden cost is the prompt cache. Anthropic's cost docs say that on a subscription, the main conversation uses a one-hour cache, but subagents and compaction use five minutes. Come back to a large session after more than an hour and the whole history is processed again at full rate. A /compact after a long break is the same: it reads the history cold before it summarises. Switching model or effort, toggling fast mode or changing MCP servers in the middle of a session invalidates the cache too. On Pro and Max, Claude Code (since v2.1.304) warns you when resuming an inactive conversation would use "a noticeable share" of your 5-hour limit, and offers a fresh start instead. On verified Ultra there's no 5-hour limit to warn about, so you have to remember this yourself. I went through how to read these costs in Where Did My Claude Usage Go?
Model choice is the other big one. Anthropic's guide to models, usage and limits in Claude Code say Opus "costs several times more per turn than Sonnet", and Fable can use up to half your week on its own. The same page calls /clear between unrelated tasks "the single most effective lever."
On Codex, the usage guide makes model choice concrete. On Plus, OpenAI estimates 5 to 45 local messages per 5 hours on GPT-6 Astra and 350 to 3,000 on GPT-6 Luna. Higher reasoning effort uses more, and OpenAI notes that "Astra at Low effort can outperform Sol at High effort." The pricing page lists Fast mode at 2.5x included usage and Ultrafast (Pro 500 only) at 8x. Cloud tasks can use more than local ones, and image generation uses limits about 3 to 5 times faster. Its tips are the same ones that work on Claude: keep prompts and source material small, keep AGENTS.md short, and only turn on the MCP servers you need.
On both, every turn re-sends the conversation, so a long session gets more expensive per turn as it grows. And anything that keeps taking turns while you're not watching, like a polling loop or a background goal, keeps spending. I covered the polling part in Stop Paying Your Agent to Wait.
A weekly budget that works
Here's the routine I use. It takes about a minute a day.
1. Find your reset time. On Claude, Settings > Usage shows your next reset time, and Anthropic says the reset day and time stay the same every week. On Codex, read it from Usage, and read it again after any reset you redeem or buy.
2. Pick a daily slice. Divide 100% by the days you actually work in that week. Five working days is 20% a day. Seven days is about 14%. If you know Thursday is a big refactor, give Thursday 35% and take it from somewhere else.
3. Watch weekly use against the slice, not the 5-hour bar. If you're on verified Ultra or Codex Pro, there is no 5-hour bar. The number to watch is how far the weekly percentage is ahead of where an even pace would be.
For Claude Code I put this in the status line. The status line docs expose rate_limits.seven_day.used_percentage and rate_limits.seven_day.resets_at for Pro, Max and Ultra subscribers, after the first response in a session. Either window may be absent, and on verified Ultra the 5-hour one usually is. This script compares weekly use with an even pace through the week:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Claude Code status line: weekly usage vs. an even pace through the week.
input=$(cat)
used=$(echo "$input" | jq -r '.rate_limits.seven_day.used_percentage // empty')
reset=$(echo "$input" | jq -r '.rate_limits.seven_day.resets_at // empty')
five=$(echo "$input" | jq -r '.rate_limits.five_hour.used_percentage // empty')
[ -z "$used" ] || [ -z "$reset" ] && exit 0
now=$(date +%s); week=$((7 * 24 * 3600)); start=$((reset - week))
pace=$(( (now - start) * 100 / week ))
[ "$pace" -lt 0 ] && pace=0; [ "$pace" -gt 100 ] && pace=100
used_i=${used%.*}
flag=""; [ "$used_i" -gt $((pace + 10)) ] && flag=" AHEAD"
out="week ${used_i}% / pace ${pace}%${flag}"
[ -n "$five" ] && out="5h ${five%.*}% | $out"
echo "$out | resets $(date -d "@$reset" '+%a %H:%M' 2>/dev/null || date -r "$reset" '+%a %H:%M')"
Save it as ~/.claude/week-pace.sh, make it executable, and point statusLine at it in your settings. It needs jq.
Output from the script with test input. AHEAD means more than 10 points over an even pace.
On Codex, the CLI slash commands give you the same numbers by hand. /status shows "context usage, and rate limits", and /usage shows daily, weekly or cumulative token activity and lets you redeem a reset. Run /status when you start and before you hand a long task to the agent.
4. Decide in advance what you do when you're ahead. When I'm 10 points over pace, I stop starting big jobs and do three things:
- Move routine work to a cheaper model. On Claude that's Sonnet instead of Opus or Fable. On Codex it's a lighter model or lower effort. Make the switch at the start of a new session, not in the middle of a long one, because a switch mid-session throws away the cache.
- Start fresh more often.
/clearbetween unrelated tasks on Claude,/newon Codex. When a task has to continue, I write a handoff instead of compacting a cold session. Compact, Clear or Hand Off? has the decision rule, and Your Handoff Doc Isn't Working has the template. - Trim the subagents. Claude Code v2.1.316, released Saturday, added
CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_EFFORT, which sets the effort level subagents use when nothing else names one, instead of inheriting the session's. Running subagents at a lower effort than the main session is an easy saving.
5. Know your way out before you need it. On Claude, usage credits keep you working at API rates once you hit a limit, and a limit reset gives you capacity back without moving your weekly day, but you can't use one from the Claude Code terminal. On Codex, a banked reset restores your weekly allowance on Pro. A paid reset is available on personal Plus and Pro plans. Remember that it pulls the next week forward, so the week after it is shorter.
6. Look back once a week. On reset day, look at where the week went. If you always run out on the same day, your daily slice is wrong or something in your setup is wasting usage. On Claude, /usage breaks down what used your limits. OpenAI's own advice on the pricing page is to "Check the dashboard every week or two". If you use both tools, compare them in one unit, as I described in Claude Code, Codex and Gemini CLI Just Started Speaking the Same Cost Language.
Put it in AGENTS.md
The agent can't see your weekly bar, but it can follow rules that keep it from spending without asking. Keep this short, since every line in AGENTS.md costs context on every turn.
## Usage budget
- We have a weekly usage cap and no 5-hour pause. Treat usage as scarce.
- Before any task you expect to take more than ~30 minutes or to start
more than 3 subagents, say so and wait for a go-ahead.
- Subagents: use the cheapest model that can do the job; low effort for
search, file reading and summaries.
- Don't poll. Wait for long jobs with one blocking command.
- When the task changes, suggest a fresh session with a short handoff
instead of carrying the whole conversation along.
If you keep a CLAUDE.md, put @AGENTS.md at the top so Claude Code reads the same rules.
Checklist
-
Check your plan's limits today. Claude: Settings > Usage, and look for the "Current session" bar. Codex:
/statusin the CLI. - Write down your weekly reset time. On Codex, check it again after any reset.
- Set a daily slice. 100% divided by your working days, weighted for the heavy ones.
-
Put weekly pace where you'll see it. The status line script above for Claude Code,
/statusat the start of each Codex session. - Pick your "ahead of pace" moves now. A cheaper model, fresh sessions, subagents at lower effort.
- Avoid cold restarts. Don't come back to a huge session after more than an hour. Hand off instead of compacting cold.
- Know your way out. Usage credits and limit resets on Claude, credits and resets on Codex, and what each one does to your weekly date.
- Review on reset day. Same day every week, two minutes.
Threads that prompted this
- r/ClaudeCode: "Usage is going super fast now", 73% of the weekly allowance on day two of an unchanged workflow.
- r/ClaudeAI: "Max 20x is now 'Ultra' and verified Ultra accounts have no 5-hour limit", a clear summary of the pricing page and help article.
- r/ClaudeCode: "they finally did it. 20x is now 10x", "Preached 20x, but sold 10x for a whole year" and "So is claude ultra actually 2x of max weekly limit now?"
- r/ClaudeAI: "So we've been getting scammed on 20x?"
Sources
- Anthropic: announcement on X (30 Oct 2026, 17:29 UTC), What is the Ultra plan?, Plans & pricing, Understanding usage and length limits, limit resets, Models, usage and limits in Claude Code, Monthly API credits (all read 31 Oct 2026).
- Claude Code: Manage costs (cache lifetimes, what invalidates the cache), status line (
rate_limitsfields), changelog v2.1.304 and v2.1.316. - OpenAI: Managing usage in Work and Codex, About ChatGPT Pro tiers, How resets work in Codex, Paid weekly resets, Codex pricing, Codex CLI slash commands (all read 31 Oct 2026); forum thread on the July pause; Thibault Sottiaux on X, 25 Aug, 29 Sep and 29 Oct 2026.
- Coverage: The New Stack and The Verge, 30 Oct 2026.
- Previous articles: Where Did My Claude Usage Go?, Compact, Clear or Hand Off?, Your Handoff Doc Isn't Working, Claude Code, Codex and Gemini CLI Just Started Speaking the Same Cost Language, Stop Paying Your Agent to Wait
If this was useful, subscribe to Agents in Practice for one practical note on AI coding agents a week. Helping your team adopt Claude Code or Codex safely and without the surprise bill? I consult on exactly that: andre-burgstahler-9n5.pages.dev.
This article was written with AI assistance and reviewed by the author.
Top comments (0)