Anthropic and OpenAI plan changes this week - what limits and usage credits mean for your budget

Anthropic and OpenAI have both changed how their AI plans limit usage. Although neither change is a price rise, both change how you should budget for AI.

This article is for finance leaders and business owners. If your business pays for Claude or ChatGPT subscriptions, this affects your budget.

News in summary - There is a new shift from limits per hour to per week

The limit is moving from the hour to the week. A five-hour cap stopped a heavy user for an afternoon. A weekly cap lets them use a week’s allowance in a few days. After that, they either wait or pay. Few busy teams will choose to wait.

The subscription is becoming a starting point, not the full cost. With Anthropic, use beyond the weekly limit is billed at API rates. With OpenAI, a busy coding week can use up the allowance your team also needs for chat. Either way, your heaviest users are the most likely to need extra spend. That spend often sits outside the subscription line in the budget, where it is easy to miss.

Details as follows

What Anthropic changed

On 30 October, Anthropic renamed its two Max plans. Max 5x is now Max, at $100 a month. Max 20x is now Ultra, at $200 a month. The prices have not changed, and existing Max 20x subscribers move to Ultra automatically.

The bigger change is the limit. Verified Ultra accounts no longer have the rolling five-hour cap. Verification is automatic and based on account and payment history. You cannot ask for it. Until an account is verified, it keeps a temporary limit.

The weekly limit stays. Ultra gives 10 times the weekly usage of Pro, and Max gives 5 times. When the weekly allowance runs out, usage credits keep the work going at standard API rates, billed on top of the subscription.

What OpenAI changed

From December, the Plus, Pro and Business plans will share one usage allowance across ChatGPT and Codex. Prices are not changing. OpenAI has not yet published how big each allowance will be. It says it expects most users will not have to wait for their usage to reset more often than they do now.

This follows OpenAI’s change at the end of September, when it cut the $200 Pro plan from 20 times to 10 times Plus usage and launched a $500 plan.

Neither change is a price rise. For many users, both will feel like an improvement. So what is the problem? The problem is that a fixed monthly fee no longer tells you what AI costs your business.

The lesson for finance: treat the subscription as the floor of your AI cost, not the ceiling.

What to do now

1. Find out who your heaviest users are, by plan and by tool.
2. Track usage credits and overage as a separate budget line from subscriptions.
3. Set alerts or a monthly cap on extra usage before OpenAI’s change starts in December.
4. Check whether your heaviest users are on the right plan, or would cost less on the API.

We learned this in the age of BI. The organisations that got value from new technology were the ones that measured it. AI is no different. Know what you are spending, know who is spending it, and know what you get back for it.