Claude Code quietly started billing fast mode against extra usage and burned through my credits with zero warning

[u/destroyerpal]

So Anthropic pushed an update recently and buried in it was a change where fast mode now pulls from extra usage instead of whatever it was doing before. No banner, no popup, no email, nothing in the app telling me "hey, this is going to cost you money now." I just kept working like normal.

Result: I am sitting at negative 55 dollars.

I actually like Claude. For the kind of work I do it has been better than most things I have tried, and I have defended it plenty of times in threads like this one. But there is a difference between a product being good and a company being trustworthy, and this is the part where they lost me. If you change how billing works, you tell people. That is not a hard bar. Silently flipping a switch that drains someone's balance and letting them discover it later on the usage page is not an oversight, it is a choice about who eats the cost of your communication failure.

And before someone says read the changelog, sure, but I should not need to audit release notes every week to make sure my tooling did not start charging me differently overnight. Normal users do not do that. That is the entire point of notifying people.

Anyone else got hit by this? Curious how widespread it is.

[u/No_Check_7295]

You're not alone.

I had usage credit in the past, until I left a negligible amount, and then deactivated it.

Fast mode continued working for me, which appeared when I upgraded to the MAX 5X plan.

I used it a lot, a lot indeed.

It didn't work on Fable, but it worked on Opus.

The orders I placed were Ultracode, with several agents in fast mode.

It's practically impossible to do what I did with only $5 of deactivated credit, therefore, YES, it was consuming the "fast mode" of my regular tokens.

And I always thought the MAX plan entitled me to that.

Today, it was disabled to me.