Claude Ultra drops the 5-hour cap but keeps the weekly one

Anthropic renamed its two top Claude plans on October 30 and, in a post on the Claude account, said verified subscribers on the $200 tier, now called Ultra, will stop running into the rolling five-hour usage limit, starting with most existing accounts. If you keep stalling mid-task with weekly usage to spare, Ultra removes that stall. If you already run out before the week ends, you get no extra included usage, because the weekly allowance stays at 10 times Pro’s.

The rename doesn’t change the bill. Max 5x becomes Max at $100 a month, Max 20x becomes Ultra at $200, and current subscribers don’t need to do anything. Claude Code creator Boris Cherny also pointed to the limit change in a post of his own.

Claude plans run on two meters. The first is the rolling five-hour session window. The second is a weekly limit across all models, which resets at a fixed day and time assigned to each account. A demanding Claude Code task could use up the session allowance long before the window rolled over, so people hit it halfway through debugging or a large refactor and had to wait for the reset with weekly usage still left.

Verified Ultra accounts now have only the weekly meter, and it is the same size as before. Ultra stays at 10 times Pro’s weekly usage, while Max gets five times. Without the five-hour pause, an Ultra subscriber can spend the week’s allowance sooner, even all in one long session. Chats on the web, desktop and mobile draw from the same pool as Claude Code and Cowork, and Ultra still caps Fable at half of the weekly limit. Once the weekly allowance is gone, usage credits keep you working at standard API rates, billed on top of the subscription.

Ultra’s 10x figure sits awkwardly next to the 20x in the plan’s old name, and the two can read like a cut by half. They measure different meters. Back in August, the 20x in Claude’s top plan applied to the five-hour limits, while the weekly allowance already worked out at 10x. The rename drops the multiplier for a window that verified Ultra accounts no longer have.

The extra $100 a month for Ultra over Max now covers three things: twice the weekly allowance, no session cap once the account is verified, and $200 a month in Claude Platform API credits instead of Max’s $100. The credits matter if you use Claude Code while building applications against the API. Ultra is sold only as a monthly subscription. The $200 price is for web subscriptions, and pricing in the mobile apps may differ. In Europe, Max and Ultra cost €90 and €180 a month.

Some Ultra subscribers will have to wait. Newer accounts keep a temporary five-hour limit until Anthropic verifies them, a step the company says helps prevent fraud and abuse. Verification runs automatically, based on account and payment history, and there is no way to request it or speed it up. Anthropic will email users once their cap is lifted.

OpenAI changed its own limits the day before. On October 29, OpenAI’s Thibault Sottiaux announced higher usage limits for Pro subscribers and Business Premium. OpenAI also dropped a planned cut for existing $200 Pro subscribers after customers objected. In a separate pricing decision, it abandoned an idea to replace token-based billing with flat per-job fees after developers pushed back.