Reverse-engineering Claude's subscription limits from unrounded floats: Max 5× is the real sweet spot
RexDouglass · x · 2026-09-19
Blogger shellac extracted Claude's exact subscription quota values from two unrounded floats, revealing counterintuitive results:
- Max 20× underdelivers: its 5-hour session limit is 20× Pro's, but weekly limit is only 2× Max 5× — the asterisk does heavy lifting.
- Max 5× is the sweet spot: 6× Pro's session limit (overdelivering) and 8.33× the weekly limit, more than its namesake five.
- All plans beat API pricing massively (lower-bound Opus-rate estimates): Pro $20/mo ≈ $163 of API (8.1×), Max 5× $100 ≈ $1,354 (13.5×), with caching making effective value even better.
Exact numbers: Pro 550k credits/5h and 5M/week; Max 5× 3.3M/5h and 41.7M/week; Max 20× 11M/5h and 83.3M/week. Verdict: prefer plan pricing over API whenever possible. The post also explains the float-precision reverse-engineering technique.
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