Between May 20 and June 1, I hit Claude's five-hour session limit 12 times on Pro. After moving to Max 5x, I hit it 3 times in the next 29 days. I wanted to know what was actually happening, so I mined 10 weeks of my own logs (the JSONL files Claude Code keeps under ~/.claude/projects). I found 18 session-limit hits across 10 weeks and 148 sessions: 12 on Pro, 3 around the upgrade, and 3 on Max 5x. A quick note: I was using subscriptions (like most people I assume), so these are not actual money I paid. I price the token fields in the logs at the API rates from the day they ran. That gives me one consistent unit for comparing very different models and token types, but it is still only a proxy for Anthropic's unpublished limit accounting. On Pro, 11 of the 12 hits happened after roughly $7.60-$16.80 of visible API-equivalent usage in that five-hour window. One outlier reached $24.40. The median was about $11. The reset countdowns added up to about 32 hours. That is time remaining until reset when each hit occurred, not a claim that I spent all 32 hours staring at the timer. In June 10, I started using Fable like every one else! I hit the limit three more times over the next 12 hours, and I upgraded. I treat those three hits as an ambiguous transition period rather than assigning them to either plan (I don't remember whether my limits reset or not). On Max 5x, the three hits landed at $58, $76, and $93 of visible API-equivalent usage. Anthropic says Max 5x provides five times Pro's per-session capacity. My API-value medians are closer to 7x. The part I did not expect was what happened to the distribution. My visible API-equivalent usage went from about $13 a day on Pro to $52 a day on Max, roughly 4x as much usage. With a plan offering 5x the per-session capacity, the naive expectation is that I should still hit the limit almost as often. I did not. The reason is that my usage is not spread evenly. The observed Pro hit level sat around the 57th percentile of my reconstructed Pro windows, so an ordinary busy window could cross it. The Max hit level sat around the 94th percentile of my Max windows. I generally needed one of my rare, bursty five-hour stretches to get there. That is the distinction that stuck with me: the limit itself is a quota, but whether I keep feeling it is a percentile question. The bigger plan did not just raise the ceiling. It moved the ceiling from the middle of my personal usage distribution into its tail.

Hello together, I have finished my Day1 task. The first time I setup with Claude Code a (more or less) complete Workflow. Super interesting to see how Claude Code works, and a lot of things I learned beside like "how do I connect gmail with my workflow (was a nightmare)", "how do I define a design for the newsletter",... and so on. Perplexity is a really super tool for searching, kie.ai/nano banana doesn't convinced me so far because the diagrams or graphs can not express what is the real key message of chapter (or I was not able to tell clear enough what I need 😀). Maybe somebody has a best practice or tool "how to create the right graph" and can share with me. Thank you very much. Because I'm not an IT guy I learnt beside "what is git and how can I use it?" and how do I trigger workflows. But what really enjoyed me was to create stepwise a flexible workflow with adjustments of newsletter customer, language en/de, research topic and so on. Here is my second try/run of my newsletter workflow with tables and no graphs/diagrams anymore (I have still to clarify with Claude Code how to do this better🙄) - but I can use the research results for my other business...