This cost 20% of the daily plan limit with Claude

9 November 2025

You know like, I be vibing.

I reached my limit for the day using Claude so here i am writing a blog until the limit resets again!

But what is a limit and how is it calculated? It's quite complicated as it works out.

There are many factors at play such as the size of the current context it has, the size of the code base it's updating, the complexity of the request and so on.

It's almost impossible to work out how much a feature will cost or how many tokens it took to execute your shiny new feature.

That being said, this is what cost me 20%.

Prompt wrangling

At the time, I had a one-thousand-line-long markdown file listing of the features and instructions of my app.

I have a context at the top outline various strategies that i want it to adhere to. Such examples would be to:

  • Use the shared http client for all api calls
  • Save all DB migrations to database/migrations
  • Ensure every endpoint has a permissions check
  • etc etc

I usually start a fresh context every day or for a new feature where it doesn't need to know about any existing logic.

At the start I command the LLM to understand the context section before anything.

Then we are away and this is the minimum context i start with. No idea how much this costs?

The Output

There are quite a lot of file changed and updated here.

The Display

Note: this is a picture after i also added 'set a main image' and 'ordering of image' prompts.

The End (Almost)

This prompt was more on the larger side to what i usually do but the result was good.

It almost worked fully. There was one tweak required to display the image from the server in the front end but a minor fix.

In total there are about nine new files and around the same number of edited files, so a big chunk to review.

Knowing the size of the context, number of token required is nearly impossible to predict.

Checking the usage before and after tallied up to be a whopping 20% of my daily plan - i'm on the cheapest paid plan - £20pm.

Am i happy with the result? Yes. It saved me a load of time and now have image uploads working. 'Working' meaning i have manually tested it, so that's good enough, ship it!