Many people buy two separate Claude pro subscriptions and that makes the limit become a non-issue. It works surprisingly well when you tend to hit the 5 hourly limit after a few hours, and hit the weekly limit after 4-5 days. $40 vs $100 is significant for a lot of people.
I hit limit of Pro in about 30 minutes, 1 hour max. And only when I use a single session, and when I don't use it extensively, ie waits for my responses, and I read and really understand what it wants, what it does. That's still just 1-2 hours/5 hours.
You're probably having long sessions, i.e. repeated back-and-forth in one conversation. Also check if you pollute context with unneeded info. It can be a problem with large and/or not well structured codebases.
The last time I used pro, it was a brand new Python rest service with about 2000 lines generated, which was solely generated during the session. So how I say to Claude that use less context, when there was 0 at the beginning, just my prompt?
So you had generated 2000 lines in 30 minutes and ran out of tokens? What was your prompt?
I’d use a fast model to create a minimal scaffold like gemini fast.
I’d create strict specs using a separate codex or claude subscription to have a generous remaining coding window and would start implementation + some high level tests feature by feature. Running out in 60 minutes is harder if you validate work. Running out in two hours for me is also hard as I keep breaks. With two subs you should be fine for a solid workday of well designed and reviewed system. If you use coderabbit or a separate review tool and feed back the reviews it is again something which doesn’t burn tokens so fast unless fully autonomous.
Thanks for the tip, didn’t think of using 2 subscriptions at the same company.
When reaching a limits, I switch to GLM 4.7 as part of a subscription GLM Coding Lite offered end 2025 $28/year. Also use it for compaction and the like to save tokens.
