Know before you hit a usage limit
Usage Forecast watches how fast you use your Claude plan and estimates how long your 5-hour and weekly limits will last.
Your Claude plan has two usage limits: one that refills every 5 hours and one per week. Usage Forecast watches how fast you are using them and tells you, ahead of time, whether you will run out before they reset.
See how much room you have#
Look at the account button at the top of the window. It shows how many accounts are in use and a green, amber or red mark: green means at least 2 hours of room, amber running low, red almost out.
Click it. Above your accounts, a line says whether you will run out, for example "Won't run out before reset", or "Running low" and roughly how long is left until your 5-hour or weekly limit.
Hover the small info icon on that line for What this banner means.
If you turned off Distribute Sessions Across Accounts (in Settings > Accounts), the button shows a percentage instead: how much of your busiest account's limit is used.
The two limits#
The 5-hour limit refills every 5 hours. Reaching it only pauses that account for a while.
The weekly limit is the one that can pause you for days. That is the one to watch.
Under the forecast you may also see coverage (how much of your usual use the remaining room covers; over 100% is comfortable) and a rough count of how many more sessions you could start now.
How the forecast is worked out#
Yardmaster checks each account's usage with Anthropic regularly. It compares your pace over the whole window with your pace over the last 90 minutes, and uses whichever runs out sooner, so a burst after a quiet spell is not hidden. If the latest check is old, the line says how many minutes stale it is. A pace far above normal (another computer on the same account, or a runaway agent) is marked "unusual rate".
It also learns when in the day and week you usually work. Until it has about 7 days of history, it says "Learning your patterns" and how many more days it needs.
See the charts#
Open Stats > Usage for four charts: Pool Trajectory (the last 7 days and the next 7), Burn Rate Heat-Map (by hour and weekday), Per-Account Pool Contribution and Daily Pool Projection. See Stats.
When you are close to a limit#
Add another Claude account and keep Auto-Switch Account on Rate Limit on: sessions move to an account with room. See Connect your Claude account.
Pause work that can wait, so the urgent sessions get what is left.
Do nothing. When every account is at its limit, sessions turn orange and wait, then carry on by themselves when a limit resets.
Turn the forecast off#
The forecast is on at first. The switch is in Settings > Notifications:
The forecast covers Claude login accounts. Other engines have their own usage tabs in the same account window.
An API-key account has no plan limits, so it is billed per use instead; see Stats for what that costs.
Related
- Connect your Claude accountYour agents run on your Claude plan. Log in with Anthropic once, add more accounts if you have them, or add an API key.
- A session will not startWhat to do when a new session turns red straight away, a model is greyed out, a session sits on Starting, or it says Rate Limited.