Claude Ultra drops the 5-hour limit, keeps the $200 price

Anthropic renamed its two Max tiers on October 30. Max 20x becomes Ultra and Max 5x becomes plain Max, and verified Ultra accounts lose their 5-hour limit, the company said in a post on X. Prices stay at $200 and $100 and weekly limits don’t change. A heavy day on Ultra no longer stalls at the 5-hour mark, but the week’s total is the same as before: 10x Pro usage, according to the pricing page.

Most existing subscribers get the change the same day. Newer accounts keep a temporary 5-hour limit until they’re verified, which Anthropic says helps it prevent fraud and abuse, and their owners get an email when the limit is lifted. The pricing page has the same condition in a footnote: “No 5-hour limit for verified accounts.”

Max usage has run on two meters. The first is a rolling 5-hour session allowance, set at 5x or 20x Pro depending on the plan. The second is a weekly limit across all models that resets on a fixed day and time assigned to each account. The 20x in the old name only ever described the first meter. The second is now the only one on Ultra. Claude on the web, desktop and mobile apps and Claude Code all draw on the same allowance, and Anthropic publishes the multipliers, not message counts.

One developer tracked two weekly cycles and wrote on DEV Community that filling the 5-hour bucket once used about 15.1% of the weekly budget on the $200 plan, against roughly 8 to 9% on the $100 plan. On those figures, a week on the higher tier holds about six and a half full sessions. The same author found that the weekly limit was what actually capped sustained use: someone could manage every 5-hour window perfectly and still hit the weekly ceiling by Wednesday. With the 5-hour cap gone, that weekly ceiling is the one Ultra subscribers will hit.

Once the weekly limit runs out, there are two options: wait for the reset, or turn on usage credits billed at standard API rates. The monthly API credits that Max plans have included since October 7 don’t help here. Ultra now lists $200 a month, up from $100 on Max, but those credits don’t cover Claude Code or extra usage in the Claude apps, and they expire at the end of each billing cycle. They are for building on the Claude Platform.

The renamed Max keeps 5x Pro usage every 5 hours and every week, plus priority access at high-traffic times, which Ultra also lists. Both tiers include Fable up to half the weekly limit, while Pro pays for it with usage credits. Both bill monthly only. Pro can also be billed annually.

Current subscribers on either plan are moved to the new names automatically. “If you’re a subscriber, there’s nothing you need to do,” Anthropic wrote.