ItInsightsWorld: The Claude Plans Renamed to Max and Ultra — $100 and $200 a Month, and a 5-Hour Cap That No Longer Applies
If you are the person in your team paying $200 a month for the largest Claude plan, the interruption that used to stop you mid-task every 5 hours is being switched off. Anthropic has just reshuffled its top two subscriptions: the former Max 5x is now Max, the former Max 20x is now Ultra, and the price stays at $100 and $200 a month respectively. Only one tier gained anything functional, and it is the $200 one.
Anthropic's own phrasing is that verified Ultra accounts can run Claude continuously inside their weekly allowance starting today, rather than waiting for a 5-hour window to reset.
That rollout is already under way: currently most existing Ultra subscribers have begun to see the change land, while newer accounts must clear verification first.
The one figure that did not move is the weekly allowance, which stays at 10x that of a Pro subscriber.
Online reaction was not uniformly warm. Commenters were quick to line the announcement up against a rival that had doubled the allowance for its own Plus users only yesterday, and one left a blunt message: “That's it? Go study the 28-day reset model. (laughs)”
Another user translated the move into plain speech: “Our Fable 5.5 allowance burns down absurdly fast. So the only solution is to hand over $200 for Ultra, right? (Well, that tracks.)”
Inside the reshuffled top tier: what Ultra now delivers
Taken apart, the revision touches only the two premium tiers.
| Former tier | Renamed as | Monthly price | What actually changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Max 5x | Max | $100 | Name simplified; price and usage rules unchanged |
| Max 20x | Ultra | $200 | 5-hour cap lifted for verified accounts; weekly allowance still 10x Pro |
No manual switch is needed on the subscriber side: existing plans migrate automatically to the new names.
For Max 5x holders, the update is close to cosmetic — a shorter name, an unchanged price, and no visible change in usage rules.
The real focus is the crowd that used to buy Max 20x. Per the latest official description, Ultra members now get:
- No 5-hour cap: verified accounts skip the window reset and keep working until the weekly allowance runs out.
- 10x the weekly usage of Pro.
- Priority access to new models, features and products.
- Claude Code support for running development tasks in the terminal.
- Long-running task support, so Claude can keep handling reports, spreadsheets and slide decks in the background.
Stripped of jargon, the benefit of this limit-lifting is pace: once verification is complete, the weekly allowance can be spent on the user's own schedule.
There is a gate on that benefit, however. Anthropic says most current Ultra members are being released from the restriction progressively, and new accounts have to pass account verification first. The check runs automatically from account and payment-history signals, so there is nothing extra to do; users simply wait for the notification email.
Confirming it worked is straightforward: open Claude's Settings → Usage. If the familiar 5-hour progress bar has disappeared, the account has been unblocked.
Why the 20x label disappeared, and the old quota accounting behind it
Notice that the multiplier simply vanished from the $200 tier's name.
Mike Overell, who handles the Claude subscription product at Anthropic, posted an explanation.
The original 20x described usage inside a single 5-hour window — 20 times a Pro user's allowance. Weekly caps arrived afterwards, and the mismatch surfaced: 20x per 5-hour window, yet only 10x per week. Many people paying $200 read the name as 20x across the board, then found a second calculation waiting on the weekly side.
Overell conceded that this naming invited misreading and apologised for the earlier communication. Retitling the tier Ultra effectively drags that old quota accounting back into the open.
Claude has faced this before. This June, The Wall Street Journal reported a consumer lawsuit against Anthropic over limits on its premium subscriptions, alleging that the way allowances were marketed was misleading; the real usage attached to Max 5x and Max 20x was one of the contested points. On that reading, the current rename plus limit-lifting is at least partly a response to long-standing user feedback.
The calendar is awkward, though. Just yesterday, OpenAI's Tibo — the person devoted users ceremonially call “godfather” — doubled the allowance for Pro.
So the open question for ItInsightsWorld readers is whether a cleaner name plus a removed cap is enough to win approval, or whether the 10x weekly ceiling is what people actually price. Watch the Usage screen in your own account settings: whichever direction verification rolls out next, that is where the answer shows up first.