What a week of Claude Code holds: the usage meter, per token type

Atlas ADE has published a field guide that converts Claude Code's plan usage meters into token counts and API-price equivalents, according to atlas-ade.dev's report on plan usage burn data. Claude Code plans don't come with a token allowance; they come with two meters running from 0 to 100%, and the guide's model, labelled a5v3, was last checked against a live meter on 29/10/2026.

This piece covers what a week holds on each plan, how the weekly and five-hour meters behave, what 1% of a week buys per token type, what a single Opus turn costs, and where the numbers come from. It is written for Claude Code subscribers deciding between Pro, Max and Ultra, and for heavy users trying to stretch a week.

01Weekly allowance by plan: Pro, Max and Ultra

Every reading was taken in interactive Claude Code sessions on an Ultra plan, formerly Max 20x, at $200 a month. Ultra's week holds about 17 billion Opus cache-read tokens with no five-hour limit, while Max, formerly Max 5x at $100 a month, holds about 8.7 billion a week and 1.1 billion per five-hour window.

Pro at $20 a month holds about 1.7 billion a week and 220 million per five-hour window. Only Ultra is measured; Pro and Max are derived using the plan-size ratios in u/flobernd's subscription cost model, and earlier versions of the page used limits shellac published on 25/01/2026.

Ultra's week is about twice Max's, and before 31/10/2026 its five-hour window was about four times Max's. Cache reads are the figure the model pins down best, while output figures are the least certain part of the fit.

02Two meters and headless claude -p metering

The weekly meter is the budget, resetting once a week. The five-hour meter is a speed limit inside the week on Pro and Max; Ultra has had no five-hour limit since 31/10/2026, and before that the same work moved it about 3.96 times as far as the weekly meter, so a full window was about 25% of a week.

Claude meters a request by where it came from, a finding the guide credits to u/flobernd. Headless runs through claude -p or the Agent SDK use up the five-hour window faster on Pro and Max while moving the weekly meter much less, and one public measurement across three Ultra accounts found about 1.5 times the five-hour movement.

Atlas ADE found no weekday peak-hours effect for interactive work. Its weekly figures include some headless use, so purely interactive numbers may read slightly low.

03What 1% of an Ultra week buys per token type

Each row below is how many tokens of one kind alone would move the Ultra weekly meter by 1%. The Fable column is an estimate for Fable 5.1; Fable 5.2, released 9 Nov 2026, is 20% cheaper at API prices, but its plan weight isn't measured yet.

Output is the dearest token, and the plan is most generous on cache reads. A full Ultra week is worth roughly $1,200 to $3,700 of Opus 5.5 at API list prices, depending on the mix.

04Warm and cold cache turns at 200k and 800k context

On a plan, Claude Code keeps the main conversation's cache for an hour, but subagents get five minutes unless their TTL is set. On an API key it uses five minutes by default, and five-minute writes cost less.

A warm turn reads the conversation from cache, while a cold turn rewrites it after a long pause, a compaction or a model switch. At 800k context a cold turn costs about 23 times a warm one. The page includes a calculator for Opus, Sonnet, Haiku and Fable that takes context size, cache state, output tokens and turns.

claude -p

That headless invocation is the one the guide flags as metered differently from interactive sessions.

05OpenTelemetry fit and its known limits

Atlas ADE cross-analysed its own OpenTelemetry records of every request against the usage Claude Code reported and fitted a model that turns token counts into meter points. Checked against the live meter, weekly totals land within about 2 points, starting from per-token rates u/flobernd measured.

The fit comes from one account's long agentic coding, the Sonnet weight is an estimate, and whether small cache writes count is still open. API list prices were checked 03/11/2026, plan prices 31/10/2026, and Codex numbers will follow once Atlas ADE has a clean measured week.