Is this one of those, Hey turn off the overcharge protection because you can go $50 into debt for free, and then maybe you'll just keep going and not notice you owe us an extra $500 type of situations?
I was worried about this when I turned it on myself, but under the usage panel it shows that it limited my spending to just the $50 and that auto-reload is off, so it doesn't seem this would be the case.
Considering all the problems they've been having with over-charging Claude Code users over the past few weeks it's the very least they could do. Max subscribers are hitting their 5 hour usage limits in 30-40 minutes with a single instance doing light work, while Anthropic have no support or contact mechanism for users that they respond to.
That would be heartening, if I wasn’t consuming tokens 10x as fast as expected, and they just had attribution bugs.
Do you have references to this being documented as the actual issue, or is this just speculation?
I want to support Anthropic, but with the Codex desktop app *so much better* than Anthropic’s combined with the old “5 back and forths with Opus and your quota is gone”, it’s hard to see going back
You hit a vague, never-quite-explained 5h window limit that has nothing to do with what you're doing, but with what every user is doing together. It's totally not downtime, you're just "using it too much" and they're telling you to fuck off until the overall usage slows down.
The order of priority is: everyone using the API (you don't want to calculate the price) → everyone on a $200/month plan → everyone on a $20/month plan → every free user.
I mean, it's a nice gesture. I use extra usage a little bit when the quota runs out and I'm still in the middle of a task. (Afterwards I switch to other agents that track limits monthly instead of by 5 hour window.) This $50 credits should last a while.
16 comments:
Meanwhile codex is running a free tier for a month right now for anyone who wants to experiment with it: https://openai.com/index/introducing-the-codex-app/
Doesn't appear to include the new model though, only the state-of-yesterdays-art (literally yesterdays).
Is this one of those, Hey turn off the overcharge protection because you can go $50 into debt for free, and then maybe you'll just keep going and not notice you owe us an extra $500 type of situations?
I was worried about this when I turned it on myself, but under the usage panel it shows that it limited my spending to just the $50 and that auto-reload is off, so it doesn't seem this would be the case.
There is also an Auto-reload option, I think it is off by default.
You guys are putting a lot of trust into vibe-coded software...
The underreported story is how we over-trust human-coded software.
Considering all the problems they've been having with over-charging Claude Code users over the past few weeks it's the very least they could do. Max subscribers are hitting their 5 hour usage limits in 30-40 minutes with a single instance doing light work, while Anthropic have no support or contact mechanism for users that they respond to.
It hadn’t occurred to me this was a billing bug.
That would be heartening, if I wasn’t consuming tokens 10x as fast as expected, and they just had attribution bugs.
Do you have references to this being documented as the actual issue, or is this just speculation?
I want to support Anthropic, but with the Codex desktop app *so much better* than Anthropic’s combined with the old “5 back and forths with Opus and your quota is gone”, it’s hard to see going back
Wait, if it burns through a $200/mo allotment that fast, what are all these people who “barely wrote code anymore” doing?
You hit a vague, never-quite-explained 5h window limit that has nothing to do with what you're doing, but with what every user is doing together. It's totally not downtime, you're just "using it too much" and they're telling you to fuck off until the overall usage slows down.
The order of priority is: everyone using the API (you don't want to calculate the price) → everyone on a $200/month plan → everyone on a $20/month plan → every free user.
You can use this if you started your Pro or Max subscription before Wednesday, February 4, 2026 at 11:59 PM PT.
Go to https://claude.ai/settings/usage, turn on extra usage and enable the promo from the notification afterwards.
I received €42, top up was not required and auto-reload is off.
I mean, it's a nice gesture. I use extra usage a little bit when the quota runs out and I'm still in the middle of a task. (Afterwards I switch to other agents that track limits monthly instead of by 5 hour window.) This $50 credits should last a while.
Expires after 60 days per the link. In case you're thinking of stretching it out beyond a couple of months.
They are trying to breed more whales
So much cynicism here, I for one am loving Opus and appreciate this
You started your Pro or Max subscription before Wednesday, February 4, 2026 at 11:59 PM PT.
Ah well. Back to Codex.