alt Hacker NewsHow much does it cost to run Claude Code 24 hrs/day like this. Does the $200/month plan hold up? My spend on Cursor has been high... I'm wondering if I can just collapse it into a 200/month CC subscription.
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If you're using it 24h/day you probably will run into it unless you're very careful about managing context and/or the requests are punctuated by long-running tool use (e.g. time-consuming test suites).
I'm on the $200/month plan, and I do have Claude running unattended for hours at a time. I have hit the weekly limits at times of particularly aggressive use (multiple sessions in parallel for hours at a time) but since it's involved more than one session at the time, I'm not really sure how close I got to the equivalent of one session 24/7.
There's a daily token limit. While I've never run into that limit while operating Claude as a human, I have received warnings that I'm getting close. I imagine that an unattended setup will blow through the token limit in not too much time.
I built a similar autonomous loop using LangGraph for a publishing backend and the raw API costs were significantly higher than $200. The subscription model likely has opaque usage limits that trigger fairly quickly under that kind of load. For a bootstrapped setup I usually find the predictability of the API bill worth the premium over hitting a black box limit.
I have no first-hand experience with the Max subscription (which the $200 plan is) but having read a few discussions here and on GitHub [1] it seems that Anthropic has tanked the usage limits in the last few weeks and thus I would argue that you would run into limits pretty quick if you using it (unsupervised) for 24h each day.
This guy tested it: https://she-llac.com/claude-limits
"Suspiciously precise floats, or, how I got Claude's real limits" 19hs ago 25 points https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46756742
OTOH, with ChatGPT/Codex limits are less of a problem, in general.