Claude Code on the Max plan

Max is Anthropic’s individual plan above Pro, sold in two tiers. Max 5x is $100 a month and gives five times the per-session usage of Pro; Max 20x is $200 a month and gives twenty times. Both include Claude Code alongside the Claude apps under one subscription, with usage limits shared across everything — a long Claude Code session and an afternoon of chat draw from the same pool. Max also carries priority access to new models and features.

The model defaults differ by plan, per Anthropic’s model configuration docs: on Max the default model is Opus, while Pro and Team standard seats default to Sonnet. Opus with the 1M-token context window is included on Max and requires usage credits on Pro. Either tier can switch models mid-session with /model.

Two clocks run at once. The session limit resets every five hours; the weekly limit applies across all models and resets on a fixed day assigned to your account, and the usage screen also shows a separate weekly reset for Opus. What counts is the work, not the message count: conversation length, tool use, model choice, and effort level all draw on the allowance, and Claude Code sends the whole conversation with every request, so a one-line question in a session that has been open all day still costs the whole history. Prompt caching softens that on a subscription — the cache lives an hour — which is why the first message after a long break is the expensive one.

When you reach either limit, Claude Code tells you which and when it resets. A model-specific message such as “You’ve hit your Opus limit” means switching to another family with /model keeps you working; a session or weekly limit does not. From v2.1.234 Claude Code can wait and continue the interrupted task on its own after the reset. Beyond that, Pro and Max can turn on usage credits, which bill anything past the included allowance at standard API rates under a monthly spend cap you set.

Inside Claude Code, /usage (its alias is /cost) shows the plan usage bars for the session and the week, and a breakdown of what drew on them — skills, subagents, MCP servers, long context, cache misses. The Session block at the top prices your tokens at API list rates; Anthropic’s cost docs note it is for API users and not relevant to a subscriber’s bill. The figures come from this machine’s history, so other devices and claude.ai are not included; Settings > Usage on claude.ai has the account-wide view and the next reset time.

/status answers the other question: what you are paying with. Its Login method row shows the subscription account, and an API key row appears when a key is in use. If ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is set in your environment, the key outranks your subscription once approved and every token is metered — unset ANTHROPIC_API_KEY puts you back on the plan.

The levers are all about context. /clear between unrelated tasks, because stale history is resent on every turn; /compact with instructions when the history matters; Sonnet for routine work and Opus for the hard decisions, switched with /model; a lower /effort for simple tasks, since thinking tokens are billed as output. Keep CLAUDE.md under 200 lines and move workflow detail into skills that load on demand; disable MCP servers you are not using; push verbose operations — test runs, log reads — into subagents so only a summary comes back. On Pro and Max, resuming a large session after an hour offers a summary instead of the full history, and taking it is usually right.

One lever is structural. The plan is per account, not per machine: sign in on the workstation, the build box, and the laptop and all three draw on the same allowance. With spawnd that is the whole billing story — the Claude Code CLI logs in on each host as it always does, so one subscription serves every machine you own from any device, with no API key in the middle and no markup on top. spawnd holds no provider credentials; your plan is used exactly as the vendor’s CLI uses it. If you are choosing between tiers, the plan calculator does the arithmetic; if you are asking whether you need a plan at all, start with is Claude Code free.