[BUG] ' Approaching 5-hour limit'
Status Fixed / completed
Maintainer reply ✓ Yes — ThariqS
Workaround ✓ Mentioned in thread ↓
Activity 12 comments · opened Aug 21, 2025 · closed Aug 22, 2025
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (ThariqS, collaborator)
responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.
Environment
Terminal (wsl)-> Claude Codee -> version: 1.0.86
Bug Description
The yellow text: ' Approaching 5-hour limit' remains even if I restart Claude Code. I tried both restarting it and closing the terminal and restarting it. Is the same.
Steps to Reproduce
I don't know, it is the first time
Expected Behavior
I expect that if I close Claude (by typing exit) and restart it, the text will disappear.
Actual Behavior
The text remains
Additional Context
<img width="1483" height="392" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/7621a641-51f7-4e68-9d85-17b099c7f24b" />
12 Comments
(sorry if tone is rude) Is there any reason to believe this warning is appearing when it should not? When using Claude Code with a subscription instead of per-message using an API key, there is a limit to how many messages you can send within 5 hours.
Hi, this is expected behavior. We have rate limits that you may run into during heavy usage.
This is one-sided contract performance where we as users have no visibility. No usage dashboard, tuning of product for perverse outcomes, etc. Was there an expectation of contract performance to those limits? Yes there were and are economic realities and agreements we both commit to. Did we expect to know what those are and how they perform? Yes we did and Anthropic is not doing it's part. So an ambiguous "Approaching 5-hour limit" interferes with our use of the service and fails to communicate what is being conveyed about that. This is the issue, it is not that there are limits or what problems Anthropic is optimizing for. If you cared about our business the only option would not be warning of unknown service non-performance and upsell 5x or more. This is a problem and "Approaching 5-hour limit" next to "Subscribe to Max" for 5x the cost with no visibility into the meaning of the message is deleterious to the nature of the contract and it's performance.
We have rate limits that you may run into during normal usage.
There fixed it
Yes, I saw the message and didn't know what it meant.
So I asked Claude Code for an explanation and he told me that there was a limit per session.
He explained that I just needed to restart the console to make it disappear, so that's what I did.
But the message remained, and I thought it was a bug.
I understood that there was a limit to the number of questions that could be asked in a single session,
but I knew that there was a limit to the number of tokens that could be used every few hours.
Now I was wrong, but I was also given bad advice. There was no controversy.
I just used it for 10 minutes - You are approaching the 5 hour limit - this is BS.
I’ve started hitting that cap too with my normal usage. And that’s with ChatGPT having cranked the limit up seven times (SEVEN, Carl!). No transparent info about the actual limits, just some cryptic warning (so how much do I have left - tokens? requests? requests per hour?), and then upselling a 5× plan for 5× the cash - that’s just scummy.
My work-around when I hit this is:
I'm confused, we are paying for a service and get capped in just an hour or two usage. I'd get it on the free plan but why am I paying for a Pro plan if I can only work for an hour?
저도 간헐적으로 발생하는데 원인이 불명이네요
The same issue here. Where is transparent metric related to this message?
Tried to find any info about that in account page but nothing there.
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