I tried to reverse engineer Claude Code usage limits
I hit my Claude Code usage limit yesterday in the middle of regular work. Not doing anything unusual - just a couple of coding sessions. It felt like it came out of nowhere. Then today Anthropic announced they're tightening 5-hour limits during peak hours. It feels like a rug pull is coming and we're all just supposed to accept "you've used too much" with no explanation of what "too much" means. Usage limits have always been opaque. A vague percentage bar. No dollar figure. No formula. No way to plan your work around it. So I built a proxy that captures the rate-limit headers Anthropic sends…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
I hit my Claude Code usage limit yesterday in the middle of regular work. Not doing anything unusual - just a couple of coding sessions. It felt like it came out of nowhere. Then today Anthropic announced they're tightening 5-hour limits during peak hours. It feels like a rug pull is coming and we're all just supposed to accept "you've used too much" with no explanation of what "too much" means. Usage limits have always been opaque. A vague percentage bar. No dollar figure. No formula. No way to plan your work around it. So I built a proxy that captures the rate-limit headers Anthropic sends back on every response — headers that exist but Claude Code never shows you. Here's what my data looks like for the last 2 days: My 5h budget is worth ~$78–$282 Estimated 5h Budget (11 sessions observed) Range: $34 – $399 Median: $164 p25-p75: $78 – $282 Estimated 7d Budget Estimate: ~$1,949 I'm paying $200/month for Max 20x. My estimated weekly budget is ~$1,949 in API-equivalent usage. The quota is price-weighted, not token-based 95.1% of my input tokens were cache reads (427M tokens). They barely moved the quota. The 5.5M fresh input and 1.8M output are what actually burned through the budget (as expected). If you're on Pro or a different Max tier, your data would help a lot. It’s open source so more people can run it and we can figure out the real numbers together. https://github.com/abhishekray07/claude-meter
Does the same job
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- CFClaumon – forecasting Claude Code usage limits with a Gamma processJun 2026 · github.com · ▲7
Anthropic's usage analytics dashboard is only available to Team and Enterprise org admins. On a Pro or Max plan all you get is /usage and the claude.ai usage page, which show where you stand right now but not where you're heading. I looked at various open-source projects but none quite matched what I had in mind: an all-round control panel for Claude Code that's also a single binary, with no dependencies and no install steps. The other thing I cared about was forecasting the usage limits. Existing tools do burn-rate projections (ccusage) or percentile heuristics…
- IBI built new type of dev environment for agentic coding2025 · github.com · ▲6
The main goal of this was to be able to not just run multiple Claude Code sessions at once, but actually manage them and keep track of what I was doing. Sometimes this is multiple attempts on the same task, sometimes I work several tasks at once. Really I was just sick of twiddling my thumbs waiting for the coding agent to finish, and I wanted it to be easy to work on/review/test another change while I waited.
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