What to do when Claude Code hits its usage limit: 9 ways to keep coding in 2026

Disclosure: Enjoy is our product. We checked every price and limit below against Anthropic’s, OpenAI’s, Moonshot’s, OpenCode’s and Ollama’s own pages on November 11, 2026, and we say where another way is the better pick, including the free ones that don’t need Enjoy.

The ways to keep coding, compared

When Claude Code stops with “You’ve hit your session limit” or “You’ve hit your weekly limit,” the message says when the limit resets. Anthropic’s help center says “Pro and Max plans have a five-hour session limit and a weekly limit,” that “verified Ultra accounts don’t have a five-hour session limit,” that “Max and Ultra plans also have a separate weekly limit for Fable,” and that “all activity in both tools counts against the same limits,” Claude and Claude Code. Before anything else, look in Settings > Usage: until December 10, 2026, Anthropic has given every Pro, Max, Ultra and Team account a free reset of every limit. After that, what to do depends mostly on how far away the reset is.

Way	Cost, checked November 11, 2026	How soon you’re back	Best for
Use a limit reset	Free: one full reset for Pro, Max, Ultra and Team, until December 10	Right away	Anyone with one in Settings > Usage
Wait for the reset	Free	At the reset: hours for a session limit, up to a week for a weekly one	A session limit that resets soon
Pay as you go	Standard API rates: Opus 5.5 is $4 in and $20 out per million tokens; bundles cost up to 30% less	Right away	Finishing the task in front of you
Upgrade to Max or Ultra	Max $100 a month; Ultra, formerly Max 20x, $200	Right away	Running out most weeks
A second Claude account	Another plan: Pro is $20 a month, Max from $100	Right away	A weekly limit days from resetting
Codex, on a ChatGPT plan	Free; Go $8 a month; Plus $20; Pro from $100	Right away, in a new conversation	A second lab’s agent
Kimi, inside Claude Code	Kimi Plus, $15 a month billed yearly or $19 monthly	Right away, after changing settings	Keeping Claude Code’s tools
A local model, through OpenCode	Free, on your own computer	Once it’s downloaded	Routine work with no limit at all
Enjoy	A monthly subscription, free for 7 days, with your phone and one computer (pricing)	Right away, in the same conversation	Moving a conversation to another account or agent

Prices are each company’s US list prices, before tax. A limit reset, waiting, Codex on ChatGPT’s Free plan and a local model cost nothing extra; the other ways add to what you pay for Claude.

Use your free reset first

Best for: anyone on Pro, Max, Ultra or Team before December 10, 2026, and anyone else Anthropic has given a reset.

On November 10, 2026, Anthropic’s @ClaudeDevs account posted: “We’ve given all Pro, Max, Ultra, and Team users one free full reset, across all models and limits. Use it anytime before December 10 at 2:00PM PT.” It’s already in your account, with nothing to claim. Anthropic gives other resets now and then too, and its help center describes three: a five-hour reset, a weekly reset, and a Fable limit reset, which gives back “the weekly usage you’ve spent on Fable models.” Its Fable 5.2 launch offers gave accounts that were paying before November 9 Fable resets too: one on Pro and standard Team seats, which expires on November 16, 2026, and one to three on Max, Ultra and premium Team seats, until March 8, 2027. Our memo on the free reset has which plans got what.

To use one, go to Settings > Usage “in Claude on the web, Claude Desktop, or Claude Mobile,” select Reset for free under Limit resets, and confirm. The same button “appears on the message you see when you reach a limit.” Your limits are shared across your account, so Claude Code has its usage back too. If Claude Code is waiting in an open session, send it a message to carry on: when you send a prompt, its docs say, “Claude Code sends your prompt instead of waiting.”

Price: free.

Watch for: the button “isn’t currently available in Claude Code in your terminal or IDE,” and “Once you use it, you can’t undo it.” A reset puts your limits back to full rather than adding to them, and “Your weekly limits still reset on their usual day and time,” so it’s worth most when your weekly limit runs out with days to go, and least just before your weekly reset. On Pro, if Fable is most of what you’ve spent, use the Fable reset first, since it expires sooner. And “If you downgrade or cancel before using your reset, it’s no longer available.”

Wait for the reset

Best for: a session limit a few hours off, when you can step away.

You may not need to do anything. Claude Code’s docs say: “When a claude.ai usage limit stops Claude mid-task, Claude Code waits in the open session and continues the task on its own after the limit resets.” It’s on by default in interactive sessions signed in with a Claude plan, from version 2.1.234. The foot of the session shows a line such as Usage limit reached · limit resets 3:45pm, and at the reset Claude Code “prompts Claude to pick the task up where it stopped.” In the Code tab of Claude Desktop, the session-limit card offers an Auto-continue when limits reset checkbox instead, though “The weekly-limit card doesn’t,” per Claude Code’s error docs.

If a session limit arrives mid-answer, you may see Usage limit reached · wrapping up first: Claude Code “may keep working briefly so it can finish the step in progress,” says Anthropic’s help center. On Pro, that “applies up to once per weekly usage period,” and it’s “rolling out gradually, so it may not be available on your account yet.”

To see when your limits reset, run /usage in Claude Code, or open Settings > Usage. Anthropic’s Max plan page says the weekly limit “resets at a fixed time each week that is assigned to your account,” and “You can see your next reset time in Settings > Usage.”

Price: free.

Watch for: “Keep the session open.” Claude Code doesn’t start the wait by itself for “A reset more than 24 hours away: a weekly limit can reset days out,” though you can still pick it from /rate-limit-options. If your computer sleeps for more than about 30 minutes through the reset, you press Enter to continue, and the task “can stop on a prompt while you’re away,” because permissions still apply. “After three automatic continuations, automatic continue stops.”

Pay as you go: usage credits or an API key

Best for: finishing the task in front of you today, without changing plans.

Usage credits “let you keep working past your plan’s usage limit,” say Claude Code’s docs. On Pro, Max and Ultra, they “apply to both Claude conversations and Claude Code terminal usage,” per the help center. Turn them on in Settings > Usage, or run /usage-credits in Claude Code, and set a monthly spend limit there if you want one. “You’ll then need to purchase credits to cover usage beyond your plan’s limits.” When you add them with /usage-credits while Claude Code is waiting, it checks again and continues right away, but “It doesn’t check after an upgrade or purchase you make in a browser on your own.”

Buying ahead costs less. Anthropic’s usage bundles “save up to 30% compared to standard usage credit rates”: $50 of credit costs $45, $250 costs $200, and $1,000 costs $700, up to $2,000 of bundles a month on Pro, Max and Ultra. You need usage credits turned on first.

The other route is a Claude Console account, which bills per token. Anthropic’s help center suggests you “Switch to a Claude Console account and purchase API usage credits for intensive coding sprints.”

Price: “Usage credits are billed at standard API rates.” Claude’s pricing lists Opus 5.5 at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens, and Sonnet 5.5 at $2 and $10.

Watch for: “Usage credit purchases are non-refundable,” and credits bought “on or after December 7, 2026 expire 12 months after the purchase date.” The monthly API credits that come with Max “can’t be used in Claude Code or the Claude apps, including for usage credits.” And a long session costs more than it looks: Claude Code sends the whole conversation with every request, so “a one-line question in a session that has been open all day still draws usage for the whole conversation.” If you switch to an API key, remember that “If you have an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY environment variable set on your system, Claude Code will use this API key for authentication instead of your Claude subscription.”

Upgrade to Max or Ultra

Best for: running out most weeks, not once in a while. Anthropic’s own advice is to upgrade “if you consistently hit limits.”

“The Max plan includes five times the Pro plan’s usage every five hours and every week,” says Anthropic’s Max page, and “The Max 20x plan is now called the Ultra plan,” which “includes 10 times the Pro plan’s usage every week and has no five-hour limit, for verified accounts,” per its Ultra page. If you upgrade while Claude Code is waiting, it checks again and continues right away when you “sign back in after /upgrade.”

Price: Max is $100 a month and Ultra $200, against Pro’s $20, or $17 a month billed yearly.

Watch for: both still have a weekly limit. “Max plans have a five-hour limit, a weekly usage limit that applies across all models, and a separate weekly limit for Fable,” and Anthropic doesn’t publish their size. Ultra’s lack of a five-hour limit waits on verification: “If your account isn’t verified yet, a temporary limit applies.” Both pages add: “we may limit your usage in other ways, such as weekly and monthly caps or model and feature usage, at our discretion.” On November 10, Anthropic said it had “recently fixed a few small issues that used more limits than intended,” and our memo on Claude’s limits follows what users have measured since mid-October.

A second Claude account

Best for: a weekly limit that’s days from resetting, when a flat monthly price beats paying per token.

Having more than one is allowed. In February 2026, Thariq, of Anthropic’s Claude Code team, wrote that “it’s not against terms of service to have multiple MAX accounts,” and that using them to resell tokens is. Run /login and sign in with the other account. To keep both signed in, Claude Code’s authentication docs say to “give each account its own configuration directory” with CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR, as in alias claude-work='CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR=~/.claude-work claude'. Our guide to multiple Claude Code accounts compares the ways.

Price: a second plan at full price: Pro at $20 a month, or Max from $100.

Watch for: switching with /login ends Claude Code’s wait for the reset, so send a message to carry on. With separate directories, “Each directory has its own settings, session history, and claude.ai login or API key,” so a conversation started under one account isn’t in the other’s history. Anthropic’s terms for Claude Code say “Advertised usage limits for Pro, Max, and Ultra plans assume ordinary, individual usage of Claude Code and the Agent SDK,” and its wrap-up allowance terms say it may withhold that allowance for “an attempt to get around usage limits (for example, through multiple accounts or automation designed to exploit the allowance).”

Codex, on a ChatGPT plan

Best for: a second lab’s agent, often on a plan you already have.

OpenAI’s Codex has limits of its own, separate from Claude’s, so it keeps working when Claude Code can’t. Codex’s pricing puts it in every ChatGPT plan, from Free. To bring the work across, OpenAI’s Codex plugin for Claude Code has /codex:transfer, which “Creates a persistent Codex thread from the current Claude Code session,” and in the Codex CLI, /import brings in recent Claude Code chats: “Codex CLI imports up to 50 chats from the last 30 days,” per OpenAI’s guide.

Price: Free is $0, Go $8 a month, Plus $20, and Pro “Plans at $100, $200, or $500 USD per month.”

Watch for: Free and Go get “GPT-6 Luna at Standard speed in the desktop app, subject to rollout,” not OpenAI’s top models, and “Weekly limits may also apply.” From December, OpenAI’s help center says, “Plus, Pro, and Business plans’ usage allowance will be shared across ChatGPT and Codex,” so ChatGPT work, other than Instant chats, will draw on it too, as our memo explains. Without a transfer, Codex doesn’t see what Claude Code was doing, so start it with where things stand.

Kimi, inside Claude Code

Best for: keeping Claude Code itself, with its commands and settings, while Anthropic’s limit resets.

Claude Code can send its requests to another company’s model. Kimi’s guide sets ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL to https://api.kimi.ai/coding/, ANTHROPIC_API_KEY to your Kimi Code key, and ANTHROPIC_MODEL and Claude Code’s other model variables to k3.1-pro. Moonshot says that on Terminal-Bench 4.0, Kimi K3.1 Pro “scores 65.7%, ahead of GPT-6 Astra (58.2%) and narrowly behind Claude Opus 5.5 (66.4%).”

Price: Kimi Code comes with Kimi’s memberships from Plus, at $15 a month billed yearly ($180) or $19 monthly, up to Ultra at $159 a month billed yearly.

Watch for: Kimi has limits too. Its membership guide says that for new members “the weekly quota limit is removed, and only the rolling 5-hour rate window remains,” with a monthly total on top, and when that runs out, “Kimi Code quota is frozen” until it resets. Kimi’s Claude Code guide warns that “protocol conversion through proxy tools may cause behavior to vary,” and every request goes to Kimi instead of Anthropic until you remove the settings.

A local model, through OpenCode

Best for: routine work with no limit and no bill, on a computer with plenty of memory.

OpenCode is an open-source coding agent, and its docs say: “Start Ollama and pull a model. OpenCode probes http://127.0.0.1:11434, discovers completion models, and adds them to /models without an account connection.” One to try is Recursive’s Flint, “a 39.8 billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model from Recursive, built for coding agents,” free under Apache 2.0, which ollama run flint downloads. Our Flint memo covers what it needs, and our guide to running a coding agent on a local model compares the other ways.

Price: free, on your own computer.

Watch for: the download is 23 GB, and “OpenCode only adds models whose Ollama metadata includes the completion capability,” so a model that’s missing from /models may not qualify. OpenCode is a different agent from Claude Code, so it starts a new conversation too.

Enjoy

Best for: moving a conversation to another account or agent without starting over.

Enjoy runs Claude Code, Codex, Grok Build, Antigravity, Muse Code, and local models through OpenCode, on Mac, Windows and Linux, on the plans you already have. When an agent runs out of usage:

• It moves to another account. If you’ve signed in to a second Claude account, Enjoy switches to it and the conversation keeps going. For Claude Code, Enjoy first copies Claude’s history of the conversation to that account, “so Claude carries on where it left off.”
• Or it waits and carries on. With no account left, the conversation waits for the reset, a weekly one included, then continues where it stopped. If you use Anthropic’s free reset in Claude’s own app, select Resume now on the waiting card and it tries again right away.
• Or another agent picks it up. Select Stop waiting, choose Codex or another agent, and it gets the conversation so far.

It also shows every signed-in account’s usage and when it resets, and on Max it says when a smaller plan would have been enough.

Price: Enjoy is one monthly subscription, and the first seven days are free, with a card to start. It includes your phone and any browser and one computer; each other computer is $9.99 a month, and each teammate you invite needs a subscription of their own. See pricing.

Watch for: Enjoy doesn’t change Anthropic’s limits, and each account is a plan you pay for. It uses free resets only for Codex, so Claude’s reset button stays in Claude’s apps. Waiting needs “Your computer must be on, with Enjoy open, when the usage resets,” and “Waiting doesn’t keep the computer awake.” Saved accounts work for Claude Code, Codex and Grok Build. Enjoy isn’t open source, and it’s a monthly subscription on top of your AI plans once the free week ends.

When to stay on your plan and wait

If the reset is an hour or two away, waiting is free and Claude Code does it for you. If you run out once a month, a bigger plan is money spent for a rare afternoon: use your free reset while you have it, wait, or pay for that day with usage credits. Upgrade when it happens most weeks.

Spending less helps too. Claude Code’s cost guide says Sonnet “handles most coding tasks well and costs less than Opus,” and suggests /clear “when switching to unrelated work,” and for subscribers /usage shows “plan usage bars, activity stats, and a usage breakdown.” Switching models after you hit a limit works only for a model’s own limit: session and weekly limits are “shared across all models, so the developer can’t restore access by switching models with /model,” while after “You’ve hit your Opus limit,” a model outside that family keeps you working.

How we compared

We read Anthropic’s @ClaudeDevs post, help center, pricing and Claude Code’s docs, OpenAI’s Codex pricing, help center, import guide and Codex plugin, Moonshot’s pricing and guides, and OpenCode’s and Ollama’s pages on November 11, 2026, and every one is linked below. We quote each company’s own words for its limits and leave out what it hasn’t documented. Plans and limits change often, so we recheck this guide against its sources at least once a month, and the date at the foot of the page says when we last did.