Claude’s $200 plan is now Ultra. The five-hour cap goes. The weekly cap does not

Claude’s account posted the change on 30 October, and the prices did not move. Max 5x is now Max, still $100 a month. Max 20x is now Ultra, still $200. Subscribers are told there is nothing to do. The usage sentence is the one that matters, and it is narrower than “the limits are gone.” Anthropic is removing the five-hour limit for verified Ultra accounts, “starting today with most existing subscribers,” and rolling it out in stages. Newer accounts keep a temporary limit until they are verified, which the post says is to prevent fraud and abuse. An email follows when that temporary limit comes off. “Weekly limits remain unchanged.” The $100 plan is not in the sentence that drops the five-hour cap.

The reason the old name misled people is in a note the same afternoon from Mike Overell, who leads product for Claude subscriptions. The top plan launched in April 2025 with a single limit, five hours, set at 20 times the Pro allowance, so it was called Max 20x. When a weekly limit was added, it was set at 10 times Pro. The five-hour window stayed at 20 times. Some subscribers read 20 times as both. He wrote that the company could have done better, and apologised. Ultra keeps that weekly 10 times, and drops the five-hour window so a long session is not cut off in the middle. The help page says verification is automatic, from account and payment history, and that an unverified account keeps the temporary limit until it clears. The $200 figure is the web price. The same page says mobile prices may differ.

A second purse of money arrived with the rename, and it is not the chat allowance. Anthropic’s help centre says Max includes $100 a month of credits for the Claude API, and Ultra $200. New subscribers can claim them after seven days on the plan. Team seats pool credits, with a cap of $500 a month. The credits are for building against the API. The help page on the agent tools says that when you are signed in on the subscription, that use still draws on the plan limits. A credit and a weekly multiple are two meters. Spending one does not, on these pages, refill the other. Neither page prints a count of messages or tokens behind the “10 times.”

This is not a new model, and it is not a cut dressed up as a gift. The weekly ceiling stays where Overell says it already was. What changes, for a verified $200 account, is that the work no longer has to fit inside five hours. The day before, OpenAI’s note on the $200 Codex allowance said both that limits were doubling and that the allowance would stay the same, after a planned reduction was dropped. Those two sentences still do not agree with each other. Anthropic’s are easier to check: the name changed, the price did not, the five-hour cap is leaving verified Ultra accounts, and 10 times a week is what remains. A benchmark score quoted beside the announcement is not in the post or the help page.