In what many users are calling a silent betrayal, Anthropic has quietly rolled back usage limits for Claude Code Max subscribers, leaving developers blocked mid-task with no warning. The $200/month power tier now appears throttled—without any email, notice, or changelog.
Until last week, subscribers to Claude Code Max believed they were buying stability: 20× more usage than Pro, designed for high-frequency development workflows.
But by mid-July 2025, many began encountering a system message:
"Claude usage limit reached. Try again at 7:43pm."
And that was it. No official update. No warning. Just silence.
Users report hitting usage ceilings within 30 minutes—a far cry from the multi-hour sessions the tier once enabled.
The tipping point came from user reports across Reddit, GitHub, and Discord. Developers, startup teams, and prompt engineers began noticing that their productivity suddenly nosedived.
"Used to get four hours of uninterrupted coding. Now? I'm rate-limited in under an hour."
—r/ClaudeAI
“There was no notice. Nothing. Just limits that kill your workflow and leave you guessing.”
—GitHub issue
Some even compared it to being rug-pulled by your own SaaS provider.
What’s most frustrating to users isn’t just the new limits—it’s the lack of transparency:
The Max plan still advertises high throughput. But in practice, requests are throttled or blocked outright without clarity on daily/hourly caps.
The Claude Code Max plan costs $200/month, originally marketed toward developers building tools, writing long sessions of code, and exploring AI-assisted automation at scale.
But for users:
As one Hacker News commenter put it:
“You’re effectively paying $6/day to be rate-limited worse than a free-tier OpenAI account.”
Speculation suggests Anthropic is struggling with GPU capacity or inference cost per user. Instead of raising prices or redesigning plans, it quietly cut access to reduce backend load—hoping few would notice.
But power users did notice. And they’re angry.
"Feels like bait and switch. Charge more if you must. Don’t ghost your paying customers."
Claude’s user base includes founders, researchers, AI engineers, and early adopters. These aren’t passive consumers—they’re platform amplifiers.
By introducing breaking changes without disclosure, Anthropic triggered:
This incident has prompted some to cancel plans, others to migrate workflows to OpenAI, xAI, or Hugging Face.
When asked for comment, Anthropic offered a one-line response:
"We’re aware that some Claude Code users are experiencing slower response times, and we’re working to resolve these issues."
No mention of limits. No admission of changes. Just a soft deflection.
To many users, that silence speaks volumes.
Anthropic is at a crossroads:
If it chooses the third path, its most engaged tier may become its most alienated one
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