tracked every api call across two max 20 accounts. the older one gets 50% less quota on weekly limits.
i run two claude max 20 accounts ($200/mo each) on the same machine with the same workload. one is ~5 months old, the other is brand new in its 1st month.
with the recent weekly limit reset, i had a lot of credits to burn through. so i got to work. after switching back to my old account though, i noticed the weekly limit was draining much faster than the new account.
good thing i was already logging every trace file, and polling anthropic's usage endpoint every 5 minutes. so i had claude check the data. looking at the api equivalent cost using anthropic's published token pricing...
- new account: $37.01 of compute per percentage point of the 7d limit
- old account: $22.10 per percentage point
- ratio: 1.67x
literally the same machine. same agents. same model distribution. cost per session was nearly identical ($1.84 vs $1.73). and yet the budget just seems to stretch further on the new account. even if i account for ~10% of my personal claude.ai usage bleeding into the old account's numbers, the gap is still 1.5x.
anthropic is quietly giving new accounts more headroom than loyal customers paying the same price.
not trying to rally the pitchforks, but if you've been on max for a while and your limits feel tighter than when you signed up, the data suggests you're right. something people should know about before they commit to a $200/mo subscription.
sample size: 2 accounts, 2561 trace files, 143k messages, 404 usage polls over 4 days.
edit: formatting + prose