Claude Ultra Replaces Max 20x and Drops the 5-Hour Limit

Anthropic has renamed both tiers of its Max subscription, and for the more expensive one it has removed the limit that heavy Claude users run into most often. In a post on X on Friday, 30 October, the company said the $100-a-month Max 5x plan is now simply called Max and the $200-a-month Max 20x plan is now called Ultra. Neither price changes. Its help article on the new plan says existing Max 20x subscribers have been moved to Ultra automatically, and that verified Ultra accounts no longer have a five-hour limit. The change started rolling out the same day to most existing subscribers.

Until now, every Claude plan has metered usage twice: in a rolling five-hour session and in a weekly allowance. The session limit is the one that stops a long coding run or research task in the middle of the afternoon and sends the user away until the window resets. On Ultra that window is gone, but only once Anthropic has verified the account. Verification is automatic and based on account and payment history, which Anthropic says helps prevent fraud and abuse, and until it happens a temporary limit applies. Confirming a phone number at checkout is a separate step and does not lift it. Users can check their status under Settings > Usage: a verified account no longer shows a “Current session” bar. According to The Next Web, Anthropic emails subscribers when the limit is removed and told them, “If you’re a subscriber, there’s nothing you need to do.”

The weekly cap stays. The help article describes a weekly limit across all models and a separate weekly limit for Fable, Anthropic’s most capable model; the pricing page caps Fable at half of the weekly allowance on both Max and Ultra. Anthropic also reserves the right to add other limits, such as weekly or monthly caps or limits on particular models and features, to manage capacity. Usage is shared across the Claude web and desktop apps and Claude Code, and how fast it runs out depends on the model, the length of the conversation, attached files and the effort setting, as MIXED notes from Anthropic’s usage guide.

The pricing page holds the other details. Max is listed at five times Pro usage, counted per five hours and per week, with $100 a month in API credits for building on the Claude Platform. Ultra is listed at ten times Pro usage per week, with no five-hour limit for verified accounts and $200 a month in API credits, double what Max 20x carried. Both plans are billed monthly only, and the $200 price applies to web purchases; mobile prices may differ by app store. One detail went unmentioned in the announcement, as The Next Web pointed out: the old name promised twenty times Pro usage, while the page now describes Ultra as ten times Pro usage a week. Anthropic has not said whether the weekly allowance itself changed or only the way it is described.

For the people who bought the top plan to keep agents running, the five-hour window was the real constraint. Earlier in October Anthropic had already given Claude Code a grace period so a task could finish after hitting the limit. Removing the window for Ultra moves the pressure to the weekly cap instead. A user can now spend a week’s allowance on one long day of autonomous work, which suits bursty workloads and punishes anyone who does not pace themselves. The new name also puts Anthropic’s top consumer tier next to Google’s AI Ultra, at least in name.