Every day someone here asks why their usage has vanished. I’ve been logging every request against what Claude Code’s own meter reported on an Ultra plan (formerly Max 20x), and fitted a model to it. Weekly totals land within about 2 points of the live meter. Here’s what came out.
What 1% of an Ultra week buys in each cost:
What one Opus turn costs (2,000 tokens out)
What that means in practice:
Cold cache is the drain.
On a plan, the main chat’s cache lasts an hour; subagents and background work get five minutes *
by default
**.
- Go past that, compact, or switch model, and the whole context is written again. At 800k, that one turn costs about 23× a warm one. Cache reads cost the same whichever TTL you’re on; only how often you go cold changes. Output is the dearest token. One output token costs as much as 160 to 263 cache reads. On Ultra, the week is the only meter. It has had no five-hour limit since 31 Oct, so pacing within a day no longer matters there; the weekly total does - (Previously: The 5 hour window was 25% of the X20 week’s total usage) Sonnet stretches the week. An Ultra week holds about 110M Sonnet output tokens against 66M for Opus. A full Ultra week is worth roughly $1,200 to $3,700 of Opus 5.5 at API list prices , (depending on what you spend it on, per the table above) A full Ultra week is worth roughly $2,400 of Opus 5.5 at API list prices. That’s an example mix, it’s not a measured week: a 94% cache hit rate and about 1 output token per 100 of context. Even then, cache reads are only about a sixth of the meter; output (44%) and cache writes (31%) are what drain it. The range here is wide though, depending on how you spend it, on opus 5.5 the range is approximately $1,200 to $3,700. The full page in the link below has the plan comparison (Pro and Max are derived from Ultra and labelled that way) and a calculator: https://atlas-ade.dev/docs/plan-usage-burn-data/ The per-token rates the fit starts from are the ones u/flobernd measured; my fitting to the live meter adjusts them. If your numbers look different, post them! Disclosure: I build Atlas ADE, a small agentic dev environment so your usage goes on progress, not re-deriving, regression and fighting your own agentic support apparatus. The data page is free and needs no signup. submitted by /u/perfektcrash
Originally posted by u/perfektcrash on r/ClaudeCode
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