How do you keep using Claude after Fable 5.1 eats your plan's usage?
Turn on usage credits in Settings, then Usage, and Claude keeps going at standard API rates once your plan's usage is spent. The included limit still resets every five hours, and you can cap the monthly spend.
Checked against the lab's own pages on September 21, 2026. Limits change often, so the date matters.
People keep asking what to do after Fable 5.1 empties a week's usage in an afternoon. Anthropic's help center does answer it, and the answer is a billing switch rather than a bigger allowance.
Usage credits let anyone on Pro, Max 5x or Max 20x carry on once the plan's included usage is gone, billed at standard API rates. You turn them on in Settings, then Usage.
- Plans
- Pro, Max 5x and Max 20x
- After the limit
- Standard API pricing rates
- Included limit resets
- Every five hours
- Daily redemption limit
- $2000
- Turn it on
- Settings, then Usage
- Japan
- Credits expire six months after purchase starting September 10, 2026
Where the Fable 50% fits
On Max plans, and on premium seats for Team and seat-based Enterprise, you can spend up to 50% of your weekly usage limits on Fable models at no extra cost. That's a ceiling inside the weekly limit. Anthropic's own wording is that you can never use more than your weekly limit, and Fable draws it down faster than other models do.
Once you reach that share, the help center gives two ways on: keep using Fable models with usage credits, or switch to another Claude model and stay inside the plan. On Pro, and on standard Team and Enterprise seats, Fable runs on usage credits from the start. Our page on Fable 5.1 limits on Pro and Max goes through that split.
What turning credits on does
You get a notification when you reach the session usage limit, and if credits are enabled and funded you can choose to carry on. Everything after that is billed at standard API pricing rates, and it lands on your bill separately from the subscription.
Your session limits reset every five hours as usual.
The money side is prepaid. You add funds, you can set a monthly spending cap or choose no restriction at all, and auto-reload tops the balance up when it falls below a threshold you set. There's a daily redemption limit of $2000.
Credits cover the terminal too. Anthropic's line is that they apply to both Claude conversations and Claude Code, with combined usage across the two counting toward your limits. Research mode gets a warning of its own, because those sessions can burn tokens faster.
Two things that catch people
If you bought the plan inside one of the Claude mobile apps, you can only enable and buy usage credits on the web, and the payment method has to go in there first.
Credits mostly don't expire. In some places they do (Japan is the one Anthropic names): six months after purchase, starting September 10, 2026, with an email seven days ahead and the expiry dates shown on the Usage page in Settings.
You can turn credits off again in the same place, which puts you back on the plan's included usage and nothing else.