I still hit Claude's usage limits every now and then, even doing everything in this list. So this isn't a magic fix, but hopefully it’ll be helpful for you.

I'm on the $20 Pro plan most of the time. I've bumped up to the $100 Max plan twice when I was deep in a coding project and didn't want to wait on the 5-hour reset window, then downgraded a couple weeks later. That's the cost of playing right now, and if $20 a month feels like a lot, the amount of stuff I've automated with it has paid for that many times over.

Here are my top 4 tips followed by the full video with the other 7…

If you're not using Projects yet, this is the one thing on the list that matters most.

A project is the folder, your chats are the files inside it — and every chat in there reads the project instructions before it starts working. That means separate topics get separate chats instead of one giant sprawling thread that's part Google Sheets question, part business plan, part "wait what was I asking again."

I attach PDFs to projects all the time; I've got one with franchise documentation I reference constantly. But every time the model has to parse a PDF, it’s very expensive.

If you can, use a markdown file, a Word doc, or copy-pasted text…same information, way cheaper to read. I still use PDFs when I need to, just know what it's costing you.

Opus is the expensive thinking model. Sonnet is the one I use for almost everything. Haiku is the cheap one. People sleep on it, but it’s great for a quick formula tweak or a single code snippet.

You can also swap models and dial the "effort" level mid-chat, which I do constantly. Just check what's selected before you hit enter. I've fired off a simple prompt on high-effort Opus left over from the day before more than once.

One more thing worth knowing: your usage pools across the web app, desktop, Cowork, and Claude Code — it's all coming out of the same bucket. And if you're regularly bumping the ceiling, there's a pay-as-you-go credits option buried in Settings → Usage that gives you wiggle room without committing to Max.

Here’s the full video walkthrough with the rest of my tips: