Claude's $200 plan is now called Ultra, and it drops the 5-hour limit that cuts off long work sessions

What happened

On October 30, Anthropic’s official Claude account announced new names for its two top personal plans (Claude on X):

• Max 5x → Max, still $100 a month
• Max 20x → Ultra, still $200 a month

”If you’re a subscriber, there’s nothing you need to do,” the post says.

The bigger change: Anthropic is “removing the 5-hour limit for verified Ultra accounts, starting today with most existing subscribers.” Newer accounts keep a temporary limit until they’re verified, which Anthropic says “helps us prevent fraud and abuse”, and you’ll get an email when it’s removed. Weekly limits remain unchanged (Claude on X).

For context: Claude’s usage normally runs on a rolling five-hour window plus a weekly cap, and everything you do in Claude on web, desktop, mobile and Claude Code draws from the same pool (Claude pricing). The five-hour window is the one that stops you mid-task and tells you to come back later.

What each plan now includes, according to Anthropic’s pricing page (Claude pricing):

• Pro: $20 a month ($17 a month billed annually).
• Max ($100): 5x Pro usage every 5 hours and every week, Anthropic’s top model Fable for up to half your weekly limit, priority access at busy times, and $100 a month in Claude Platform API credits.
• Ultra ($200): everything in Max, no 5-hour limit for verified accounts, 10x Pro usage every week, and $200 a month in API credits.

By Saturday morning (Amman time) the post had more than 5 million views and over 28,000 likes on X.

It lands a day after OpenAI went the other way on its own top plans: on October 29 it doubled the Work and Codex allowance on ChatGPT Pro 100 and Pro 500, and canceled a cut to Pro 200 it had announced in September (ChatGPT release notes).

Our take

This is a fight over heavy users, and you win either way. Both big assistant makers spent the week giving their $100–200 customers more room. If you pay for one of these plans, check what you actually have now before you renew or switch.

For founders and business leaders: the five-hour limit was the annoying one. It’s what kills a long afternoon of work: a big research job, a 40-page proposal, a pile of contracts to compare, or an agent cleaning up your CRM export. On Ultra that wall is gone, but the weekly cap isn’t, so a few long, uninterrupted days could use up a week’s allowance. Plan your big jobs around that. And note the plan is personal: for a team, Claude’s Team plan with Premium seats is usually the better buy; we break that down in ChatGPT vs Claude for business.

Is $200 worth it? Only if you regularly get cut off on Max or Pro in the middle of real work. If you hit limits once a week, stay on Max at $100 and buy usage credits when you need them; Anthropic lets paid plans keep working at API rates after a limit (Claude pricing). If you’re comparing all the options side by side, our How much does an AI agent cost? page is updated with the new names.

For everyday users: nothing changes on Free or Pro. Your $20 plan still has both limits. If you’ve never hit a limit, you don’t need either of the big plans.

One thing to watch: “verified” isn’t explained in the post. If you just signed up for Ultra and still see a 5-hour limit, that’s expected; Anthropic says you’ll get an email when it’s lifted. These are Anthropic’s claims; we haven’t run a long session on Ultra yet.

Disclosure: AgentStackWatch is run with help from AI assistants, and we test ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok Bot. Nobody named here paid for or reviewed this post.