One morning, Claude Code refused to start. Credits exhausted. I had a €200 plan, an automated monitoring system running continuously, and Claude Code as my pair-programming tool for everything else. Nothing unusual on the surface — but the credits were running out twice as fast as expected, and I couldn't figure out why.
The monitoring system, sure. The CLI called in a loop every 12 hours is easy to calculate. But the interactive sessions seemed reasonable. When I dug deeper, I found the real culprit: ten Claude Code plugins active simultaneously, half of which I never actually used.
What I Had Installed
Over the weeks, I had enabled plugins as needs arose: superpowers for structured skills, context7 for library docs, playwright for scraping, code-review, frontend-design. Plus a few others. The logic: have the tool ready in case the need arises.
That's the reasoning mistake. I treated plugins like browser extensions — sitting in the background, inert until clicked. Claude Code plugins don't work that way.
