Doubled Claude Code rate limits today are great, but watch your bill next week

The Anthropic Claude Codes rates have been doubled for all Pro/Max/Team/enterprise plans effective from May 6, 2023. In addition, peak hour rate reductions for Pro/Max tiers were removed, and API limits have been increased on Opus models. The change reflects the company's new compute agreement with SpaceX which allows Anthropic to add 220K GPUs in the Colossus 1 cluster.

That's great. But there's also a secondary consideration that we shouldn't miss.

Previously, the limiting factor that kept costs under control was the actual limit on the number of requests. Your session on Anthropic was limited in terms of how many queries you could send, and therefore it was automatically limited in what it would cost you in practice.

Now, with doubled request limits, you can make way more calls. Which means that aggressive agents and coding sessions (parallel execution of the tools, retry loops, multiple reasoning steps) can go on spending much more than before without hitting any limits. It's up to you to keep the spending down.

What to check out this week if you've been an intense user of Claude Code

• Add a monthly spending alert in the Anthropic dashboard. There is such a feature there. Most likely, you have it turned on. However, the limit should be adjusted in case your consumption behavior has changed.
• Look into the retry mechanism. If the agent tries three times to run every query that fails, a doubling of your error rate will double your monthly spending regardless of the amount of traffic.
• Check everything that follows the "loop until done" pattern. It used to be limited by the rate limits of Anthropic, now it's your own responsibility.

In case you're routing through the gateway, it's time to take care of configuring spending limits in per-key mode for Bifrost/LiteLLM/Cloudflare AI Gateway proxies. It was okay when the service itself imposed spending limits. Not anymore.

Increased spending limits are definitely better. They do require a rethinking of your cost controls.