No provider sells literally unlimited AI tokens — every plan marketed as unlimited meters something. Claude and ChatGPT plans use 5-hour session windows plus weekly caps; GitHub Copilot meters AI credits; OpenCode Go and NanoGPT cap by usage windows; Featherless limits concurrency instead of tokens; Standard Compute gives a fixed monthly compute budget with no per-request windows. The honest question is never 'is it unlimited' — it is 'which limit fits how I work'.
| Plan | Price | The real limit |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Pro / Max | $20 / $100 / $200 per mo | 5-hour session windows + a weekly cap across all models; chat and Claude Code share one pool |
| ChatGPT (Codex) | $8 / $20 / $100–200 per mo | Rolling 5-hour windows; per-model message estimates; credits for overage |
| GitHub Copilot | $10 / $39 / $100 per mo | AI credits (1 credit = $0.01) meter chat, agent mode and CLI; completions stay unlimited |
| Featherless | $10–200 per mo | Concurrency (2–8+ parallel requests), open-weight models only — tokens genuinely unmetered |
| OpenCode Go | $10/mo | Usage caps reported at 5-hour/weekly/monthly level; open-weight models only |
| NanoGPT | $12/mo | Usage limits added Feb 2026; open-model catalog |
| Standard Compute | $19–249+/mo | Fixed monthly compute budget, visible live — no session or weekly windows; extreme sustained load is paced smoothly, not cut off |
Inference costs the provider real money per token, and one runaway agent loop can consume more compute than a thousand normal users. So every flat plan either windows you (5-hour and weekly caps), meters you in disguise (credits), limits your parallelism (concurrency caps), or gives you a defined budget. Plans that promised more have repeatedly repriced or added caps mid-2026 — Copilot switched to credits June 1, NanoGPT added limits in February, Chutes rewrote its quota semantics.
The practical difference between the models is failure mode. Windows fail suddenly: your agent stops mid-task until the window resets. Budgets fail predictably: you can see the remaining budget and pace it. Concurrency caps never stop you, but they slow parallel work permanently.
Marketing has converged on 'unlimited' meaning 'we will not bill you extra', not 'we will not stop you'. Read the limit mechanics before buying: 'unlimited tokens' with a weekly cap is a weekly token allowance with better branding.
Standard Compute's version of the truth: a fixed monthly compute budget at a flat price from $19/mo, visible live in the dashboard, no per-token billing, no 5-hour or weekly windows. Sustained extreme load gets paced smoothly rather than cut off mid-task. It is not infinite — it is honest about being a budget, which is the thing every 'unlimited' plan actually is.
No. Every flat plan on the market limits sessions, weeks, credits, concurrency, or budget. The only genuinely token-unmetered plans (like Featherless) limit concurrency instead and serve open-weight models only.
For open-weight models: Featherless from $10/mo or OpenCode Go at $10/mo. For frontier-class quality: flat-rate smart routing from $19/mo, which stretches a fixed budget by matching each request to the cheapest model that handles it well.
You hit a hidden window — most commonly a 5-hour session cap or a weekly cap. This is the #1 complaint pattern across Claude, Codex and Copilot plans in 2026. If your work is agentic, prefer plans whose limit is a visible budget rather than a clock.