Claude Pro users report burning a full five-hour window on two prompts.

A Pro user reported exhausting their limit on two creative-writing prompts with Opus 4.6, medium effort, extended thinking on, cross-chat memory off, a session that normally takes 50 to 100 comparable prompts. Testing with credits, three prompts that usually cost $0.03 to $0.15 came back at $3.56, $3.80 and $5.10, with the most expensive one occurring after deleting chats to rule out global accumulation. (r/ClaudeAI) Single-source practitioner reports, no vendor acknowledgement yet. Related: a separate thread on someone hitting 54.9 billion tokens got the correct explanation, which is that Anthropic's usage page now breaks out cache reads and cache writes separately, and context re-reads dominate the total. Headline token counts on that page are not a proxy for work done.