A man with brown buzzed hair and stubble, in a backwards olive-green cap with sunglasses pushed up on it, a black t-shirt, blue-and-black camo pants and grey Puma sneakers, sits hunched on a white marble bench with his hands clasped at his chin, looking worried at a glowing amber holographic dashboard of bar charts and dollar signs. Beside him a figure with a flame-orange sunburst head, in a white coat with a sun badge, rests a hand on his shoulder and smiles gently. — Illustration.

Houston, We Have a Problem

September 29, 2026Updated September 29, 2026

My $100 Claude plan did about $1,077 of work this month. That's the problem. Maybe.

Tela says my last 31 days of Claude Code came to 2.03 billion tokens, as of September 29. At Anthropic's list prices, that's about $1,077. I pay $100 a month for Max 5x, the cheaper of the two Max plans.

1. Why I should and shouldn't be scared

Should.

Anthropic lost $42 billion in 2025 on revenue of nearly $4.6 billion, per the IPO prospectus Reuters saw. About $34 billion of that was an accounting charge on financing that could turn into shares, not money spent running the business. The operating loss was $8.06 billion, up from $2.98 billion in 2024.
It expects to spend at least $518 billion on infrastructure over a decade, and about 80% of that is non-cancelable or owed whether anybody uses it or not.
The limits on Max have moved before. The weekly caps came after Max launched, and a class action now claims Max 5x "delivers just three-and-a-half times the usage of Pro (not five times)" — the complaint's words, not a ruling.

Shouldn't.

On September 22, Anthropic raised the five-hour limits on Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise, and cut Opus prices. Nobody opens the tap a week before shutting it off.
98% of my tokens are cache reads, Claude re-reading context it already has. That's the cheapest token there is, and on Opus 5.5 it went from $0.50 to $0.20 per million.
$1,077 is what an API customer would pay. It's not what my month cost Anthropic to serve, and nothing Reuters reported out of the prospectus says what a subscriber costs.

2. How much value is in the plan

About $1,077 of list-price work for $100. Almost 11 to 1.

About $725 of it is cache reads alone. And the 31 days aren't a steady month: every token landed between September 14 and September 29, on one machine, split across two models — Opus 5 until September 23, Opus 5.5 after.

3. What if it went tokens only

The same month, billed entirely at Opus 5.5 rates: about $711. Seven times what I pay now.

Part of that already exists. Hit the cap and the pricing page lets you turn on usage credits "to keep working at standard API rates." Tokens only just makes the overflow the whole plan.

4. When do they cut the flow

This part's a guess.

Not soon. The last move was up, and they're walking into an IPO with a class action over exactly this. When it comes, I don't think the flat plan dies — the lever they've pulled before is the limit, and the overflow is already metered. My bet is tighter weekly caps and heavy use pushed onto credits, some time after the IPO, when that loss has to start shrinking in public.

Until then, I'm using it.

I feed from the bottom you feed from the top