Short version first, for anyone who just wants the outcome: I run Claude Code on a flat monthly subscription, not pay-as-you-go. For months that plan never gave me a reason to look closely at it, so I stopped looking. Then an overnight automation burned through a week's worth of it in two days, the account locked with four days still to go, and I bought my way out at list price. That cost enough to make me build a small usage meter that now tells me, in plain language, whether I can spend more or need to slow down. The rest of this post is the four attempts it took to get that meter right, and why the wrong ones were each wrong in an instructive way.
Now the actual story. I run about ten projects at once, mostly alone. Client work, my own products, email, all of it moves through Claude Code sessions, one per project, in their own terminal tabs. Keeping track of what needs attention across ten folders got old, so I built a small side project, a "master supervisor" that walks every project's todo queue and picks off whatever it can do without me. I put it on a loop so it would work through the night.
It worked beautifully. For two nights.
On the third day I opened my laptop and Claude Code answered every prompt with the same message: I had hit my weekly limit. Not low, not close. Hit. And the account told me the reset was four days out.
