On October 30, 2026, Anthropic renamed its two top Claude plans and removed the limit that annoys heavy Claude Code users the most. Max 5x is now just Max. Max 20x is now Ultra. And verified Ultra accounts no longer have the five-hour session limit.
The prices did not change. Max is still $100 a month and Ultra is still $200. If you already pay for one of them, you don’t need to do anything.
The headline sounds like “unlimited Claude for $200”. It isn’t. The weekly limit is still there, and that detail decides whether this change is worth anything to you. Here is what actually changed, what didn’t, and how I would decide between the two plans.
What Anthropic announced
The announcement came as a short post from the @claudeai account on X. It has three parts:
- The renaming. Max 5x becomes Max. Max 20x becomes Ultra.
- The prices stay. Max costs $100 a month, Ultra costs $200 a month. Current subscribers move automatically.
- The five-hour limit goes away for verified Ultra accounts. It starts with most existing subscribers. Newer accounts keep a temporary limit until they are verified, which Anthropic says helps prevent fraud and abuse. You get an email when your limit is removed.
The same post ends with the sentence that matters most: weekly limits remain unchanged.
The Ultra plan now has its own support article, and the pricing page shows the new lineup.
Why the five-hour limit hurt
If you only chat with Claude, you may never have noticed the session limit. If you use Claude Code for real work, you know it well.
The five-hour limit worked as a rolling window. A heavy task could use that allowance long before the five hours were over. Then you had to stop and wait for the reset, even with plenty of weekly usage left.
The worst part was the timing. You don’t hit a limit like this during easy work. You hit it in the middle of a long debugging session, or halfway through a refactor that touches many files. The agent has the full context loaded, you have the whole problem in your head, and then everything pauses.
For anyone who uses an agent as part of the daily workflow, that interruption is not a small annoyance. It changes how you plan your day. You start splitting work around the limit instead of around the problem.
The weekly limit is the real budget
Here is the part that the “no more limits” reading misses.
Removing the session limit does not give you more usage. It changes when you can spend it. On Ultra, you can now burn through a long session without a forced pause. But your weekly allowance is the same as before, so you can also reach the end of it sooner.
According to the pricing page:
| Plan | Price | Weekly usage | Five-hour limit | Monthly API credits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pro | $20/month (monthly billing) | 1x (baseline) | Yes | Not listed |
| Max | $100/month | 5x Pro | Yes (5x Pro) | $100 |
| Ultra | $200/month | 10x Pro | None for verified accounts | $200 |
A few details are worth knowing:
- Chats and Claude Code share the same weekly limit. Your conversations on the web, desktop or mobile count against the same allowance as your coding sessions, as The New Stack points out.
- Fable has its own cap. On Max and Ultra, the pricing page says the top model is included up to 50% of weekly limits. The support article mentions a separate weekly limit for Fable on Ultra.
- When the week runs out, you can pay to continue. Usage credits are available on Pro, Max, Ultra and Team. The New Stack reports they are charged at standard API rates, on top of the subscription.
- The “20x” was never a weekly number. Coverage of the old pricing, like this guide, describes Max 20x as 20x Pro per five-hour session. Anthropic never published the weekly multiple, and users who measured it reported that Max 20x had only about twice the weekly allowance of Max 5x (ITNEXT). Now the pricing page shows the weekly figure: 10x Pro for Ultra, 5x for Max. Anthropic says weekly limits did not change, so 10x is not a cut. It is the same weekly budget, now made public.
So the honest summary is this: Ultra now lets you spend your week the way you want. It does not make the week bigger.
How verification works
The five-hour limit only goes away on verified Ultra accounts. This is the part that will confuse people, so here is what the support article says:
- Verification is automatic. Anthropic looks at factors such as account history and payment history.
- When your account is verified, the temporary limit is removed on its own. You don’t need to do anything.
- Adding a phone number at checkout is a separate step. It does not remove the limit.
- To check your status, open Settings > Usage. If there is no “Current session” bar, your account is verified.
The New Stack adds that there is no way to request verification or speed it up. If you just upgraded, you may need to be patient.
This makes sense from Anthropic’s side. A $200 plan with no session limit is an attractive target for account sharing and abuse. Tying the benefit to account history is a simple way to protect it. It also means a new subscriber should not upgrade expecting the benefit on day one.
The API credits most people will miss
There is another detail on the pricing page that got less attention. Max includes $100 a month in Claude Platform API credits, and Ultra includes $200. In both cases, the credits match the monthly price of the plan.
For developers, this is relevant. Many of us use Claude Code to build things that also call the Claude API: an internal tool, an automation, a prototype for a client. Without included credits, those are two separate bills. With them, the subscription covers part of that development work too.
I would not choose a plan only because of the credits. But if you are already paying for API usage during development, put that number in your comparison.
Max or Ultra: how I would decide
The decision is simpler than it looks. Ask yourself one question: what usually stops you, the session limit or the weekly limit?
If you keep hitting the session limit, and you still have weekly usage left at the end of the week, Ultra fixes your exact problem. You keep working without the forced pause, and the extra $100 a month buys you continuous sessions plus double the weekly usage of Max.
If you usually run out of weekly usage before the week ends, removing the session limit will not help much. You will just reach the weekly wall faster. In that case, the question is whether 10x Pro instead of 5x Pro is worth $100 more, or whether paying for usage credits in your heaviest weeks is cheaper.
If you rarely hit any limit on Max, stay on Max. Nothing in this announcement changes your situation.
One more thing: look at the price per unit. Pro is $20 for 1x. Max is $100 for 5x. Ultra is $200 for 10x. The weekly usage scales in line with the price. So the real extra you get on Ultra is not cheaper usage. It is the freedom to use it without the five-hour pause, and the larger API credit.
The bigger picture
This announcement didn’t happen in a vacuum. The New Stack reports that, one day earlier, OpenAI announced higher usage limits for its Pro subscribers and Business Premium, and dropped a planned cut for existing $200 Pro subscribers after customers pushed back.
The pattern is clear. The top AI plans are now competing on limits, not only on models. For people who work with these tools all day, that is good news. The tools are becoming infrastructure, and nobody wants infrastructure that stops every five hours.
But the competition also makes the plans harder to compare. Session limits, weekly limits, model-specific caps, verification rules, usage credits, API credits. Each of these changes what you actually get for your money. Reading the headline is not enough. You have to read the pricing page and know how you use the tool.
What to do now
If you are on one of these plans, here is a short checklist:
- Check your usage page. Go to Settings > Usage and see whether you still have the “Current session” bar.
- Look at your last few weeks. Did you hit the session limit, the weekly limit, or neither?
- Count your API spend. If you pay for API usage during development, compare it with the included credits.
- Watch Fable usage. If you rely on the top model, remember it has its own cap within the weekly limit.
- Don’t upgrade for the headline. Upgrade if the session limit is what actually stops your work.
My view is simple. Removing the five-hour limit is a real improvement for people who use Claude Code as a daily work tool. It removes friction in exactly the moments when you are most productive. But it is a change in rhythm, not in quantity. The weekly limit is still the budget.
So, which limit stops you more often: the five-hour session or the weekly cap?
Sources
- Claude (@claudeai) on X, plan renaming and five-hour limit announcement, October 30, 2026
- Anthropic, What is the Ultra plan?, Claude Help Center
- Anthropic, Claude pricing
- Amanda Caswell, Anthropic just removed one of Claude’s biggest usage limits — but not for everyone, The New Stack, October 30, 2026
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