Were Opus 4 Usage Limits Lowered Recently?
Status Fixed / completed
Maintainer reply ✓ Yes — dicksontsai
Activity 9 comments · opened Jul 10, 2025 · closed Jul 11, 2025
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (dicksontsai, collaborator)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
A few days ago I finally decided to upgrade to the Max plan ($100/mo) after hearing all the praise about the massive usage limits and Opus access. From my experience, Sonnet's allowance feels generous, but Opus seems limited to ~20% of my total quota, and I've been able to burn through that in just one or two prompts in large codebase.
For anyone on the $200/mo Max plan:
- Does Opus get more than that 20% slice, or is the cap the same?
- Have the quotas been adjusted recently as Claude Code's popularity has surged? If so, are these changes permanent or just temporary while the infrastructure scales?
I'm debating whether or not to upgrade, but IMO a 4x overall limit won't help much if the Opus ceiling stays put. Appreciate any clarifications!
9 Comments
Have you tried manually setting the model to Opus? This will bypass the "20%" limit where it will automatically fallback to Sonnet. This will cause you to exhaust your full overall limit faster however.
I swear the 20% limit was actually 40-50% a month or two ago, but maybe I'm imagining things...
I also thought manually setting would bypass the limit but it just dropped back to Sonnet immediately, so I figured their quotas must be separate. Is that not supposed to happen?
It was initially 40-50%, and they did drop it to 20%. I got confirmation from Boris on Threads about that. I think he said it was to stop people hitting their account's limit too easily.
I've got my model set to
claude-opus-4-20250514. I didn't realise I could just set it toopus. Anyway, on the $200 Max plan I never hit rate limit with Opus, while using Claude Code all day, each workday.opusis an alias for the latest Opus model, e.g. if we release the next one you won't stay stuck with the existing one./model opusbypasses the fallback, but you will reach your limit ~5x faster compared to Sonnet.This sounds unexpected. What did you see when it "dropped back to Sonnet immediately"? Do you have a screenshot?
I'm on the 100$ plan and can confirm: i hit the limit within minutes of starting my day, every day.
I think this was not so bad a few weeks ago. But without ANY actual usage data, I guess we just have to accept what ever we get
Not able to replicate this anymore, so maybe I misremembered or my Claude Code subscription just hadn't caught up with the upgrade yet.
@holstvoogd I confirm! But there's absolutely no official communication about it — it's extremely, massively frustrating not knowing what's going on! The quota is almost maxed out within just a few minutes!! And beyond the drop in response quality, there’s been a huge regression in quota availability.
happening to me too, on the $100 Max plan i used opus all day yesterday then hit the limit and reverted to sonnet, said limit will reset at 11am my time i swapped back to opus and the limit was hit with 1 query, now it resets at 4pm my time. Sonnet still run so far but Opus is far superior.
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