With Anthropic's Claude subscriptions - while many people appear to use tokens as an idea of the usage limit, I doubt that's what is really used by Anthropic. Why do I say this? Well, there are multiple models, Haiku, Sonnet and Opus, we all know that Opus is the most expensive and burns through the usage limit of the subscription the fastest of all. I'd theorise that Anthropic have some kind of internal credit value (perhaps as simple as $ USD) which they allocate with some variance based on things like overall system load.
Anyway, my personal experience on Max 20x is that, with Opus at least, on a busy day in the past I can burn through between 150 to 200 million tokens in a day using Claude Code for development stuff. Split that up into 5 hour windows, and assume I'm possibly using 2 or 3 windows in a day, that still works out to a lot of tokens, well into the millions. So, the 88k tokens per 5-hour window on Max 5x, I'm not sure if it's really as small as that. Maybe the apparent reductions recently in usage limits have made it drop to around that ballpark. Originally I saw Max 5x as a heavy usage Sonnet plan, with Max 20x being a heavy usage Opus plan, however with the new and additional weekly usage limit happening on August 28th I think I'd see the plans as potentially moderate to heavy usage Sonnet for Max 5x, and heavy usage Sonnet with multiple concurrent agents for Max 20x.
TLDR: I strongly imagine that Claude subscription usage limits are based on some kind of internal credit value, perhaps $ USD, not specifically tokens, and depending which model you use is how fast this "credit" will be depleted.
The usage limits are currently for an account, based on a 5-hour window, from the first message that was sent in a new 5-hour window. From August 28th there's an additional weekly limit which looks like it will primarily make Opus usage restricted.
It's probably best to look at it as credit based, which map to a certain scale of particular tokens (ie. an Opus token takes 5x the credits of a Sonnet token).
Anyway, my personal experience on Max 20x is that, with Opus at least, on a busy day in the past I can burn through between 150 to 200 million tokens in a day using Claude Code for development stuff. Split that up into 5 hour windows, and assume I'm possibly using 2 or 3 windows in a day, that still works out to a lot of tokens, well into the millions. So, the 88k tokens per 5-hour window on Max 5x, I'm not sure if it's really as small as that. Maybe the apparent reductions recently in usage limits have made it drop to around that ballpark. Originally I saw Max 5x as a heavy usage Sonnet plan, with Max 20x being a heavy usage Opus plan, however with the new and additional weekly usage limit happening on August 28th I think I'd see the plans as potentially moderate to heavy usage Sonnet for Max 5x, and heavy usage Sonnet with multiple concurrent agents for Max 20x.
TLDR: I strongly imagine that Claude subscription usage limits are based on some kind of internal credit value, perhaps $ USD, not specifically tokens, and depending which model you use is how fast this "credit" will be depleted.
The usage limits are currently for an account, based on a 5-hour window, from the first message that was sent in a new 5-hour window. From August 28th there's an additional weekly limit which looks like it will primarily make Opus usage restricted.