Plan usage burn data
Generated from model a5v3 · Last checked against a live meter 29/10/2026
Claude Code plans don't give you a token allowance. They give you two meters that run from 0 to 100%. This page shows what moves those meters, and what the same usage would cost at API prices. Every reading here was taken on a Max 20x plan; the other plans are derived from it.
Model a5v3 · last checked against a live meter on 29/10/2026 · measured on a Max 20x plan
What a week holds, by plan#
| Plan | Price a month | Opus output tokens a week | In one five-hour window | Week's output at API prices, a month | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pro | $20 | 4M | 840k | about $344 (17×) | derived from Max 20x |
| Max 5x | $100 | 33M | 5M | about $2,900 (29×) | derived from Max 20x |
| Max 20x | $200 | 66M | 17M | about $5,700 (29×) | measured |
Only Max 20x is measured. Pro and Max 5x are derived from it using the ratios between plans that shellac published on 25/01/2026, so treat them as estimates. Note the shape: Max 20x has about four times Max 5x's five-hour window but only twice its week. Plan prices checked 29/10/2026.
The two meters#
- Weekly: the budget. 100% is one week's allowance, and it resets once a week.
- Five-hour: a speed limit inside the week. The same work moves it about 3.96× as far, so a full five-hour window is about 25% of a week.
What 1% of a Max 20x week buys#
Every request spends four kinds of token, and the meter weighs them very differently. Each row is how many tokens of that kind alone would move the weekly meter by 1%.
| What you spend | Opus tokens per 1% | Sonnet tokens per 1% | Those Opus tokens at API prices |
|---|---|---|---|
| Output | 660k | 1.1M | about $13 |
| Input | 3M | 5M | about $12 |
| Cache read | 170M | 290M | about $35 |
| Cache write | 4.6M | 7.7M | about $37 |
Two things stand out. Output is the dearest token: 1% of a week buys only 660k of them. And the plan is most generous on cache: 1% spent on cache reads would cost about $35 at API prices, against $13 spent on output. A full Max 20x week is worth roughly $1,200 to $3,700 of Opus 5.5 at API list prices, depending on what you spend it on.
What a turn costs#
| One Opus turn, 2,000 tokens out | Share of a week | Turns like it in a week |
|---|---|---|
| 200k context, warm cache | 0.004% | about 24,000 |
| 200k context, cold cache (rewritten) | 0.046% | about 2,200 |
| 800k context, warm cache | 0.008% | about 13,000 |
| 800k context, cold cache (rewritten) | 0.176% | about 570 |
A warm turn reads the conversation from cache. A cold turn has to write it all again, after a long pause, a compaction or a model switch. At 800k context that one turn costs about 23× a warm one. What a cold cache costs explains why, and setting the cache TTL how to have fewer of them.
Try it#
- Share of a week
- -
- Share of a five-hour window
- -
- Turns like this in a full week
- -
Max 20x. Where two figures show, the model can't yet tell which of two readings of cache writes is right.
Where these numbers come from#
We cross-analysed our own OpenTelemetry records of every request against the usage Claude Code reported, and fitted a model that turns token counts into meter points. It is checked against the live meter, and weekly totals land within about 2 points. It isn't exact: it comes from one account's long agentic coding, the Sonnet weight is an estimate, and whether small cache writes count is still open. The per-token rates the fit starts from are the ones u/flobernd measured; our fit to the live meter adjusts them. API prices are list prices, checked 29/10/2026.
Codex numbers will follow once we have a clean measured week.