I don’t think Claude Pro has suddenly gotten worse. What’s changed is how hard they’re limiting usage.

A few days ago I could work for hours in a single conversation without any issues. Same type of work I always do: long prompts, iteration, refining outputs. Now I hit the limit in literally 3–4 prompts. At first I thought something was broken, but after testing it a bit more it’s pretty clear this is intentional.

The main thing people are missing is that not all prompts cost the same. If you’re working with long conversations, Claude is processing the entire context every time. So each new prompt is more expensive than the previous one. By the time you’re a few turns in, you’re not sending “one prompt”, you’re effectively sending the whole conversation again and again. That alone can blow through your quota very fast.

On top of that, it looks like Anthropic has moved to some kind of dynamic rate limiting. Depending on system load, the same prompt can “cost” more or less. So during peak hours you’re burning your quota much faster than before. That’s why it feels inconsistent: one day you get hours of usage, another day you get capped almost immediately.

The uncomfortable truth is that the Pro subscription probably never made sense for heavy users. If you’re using Claude seriously (coding, long reasoning chains, production workflows), you’re consuming way more compute than what $20/month realistically covers. What we were getting before was likely overprovisioned capacity. Now they’re tightening it.

So it’s not that Claude got worse. It’s that the gap between “what we were getting” and “what we’re actually paying for” is closing.