Claude Usage Limiter

claude-usage-limiter

Per-project weekly usage limits for Claude Code.

Claude Code's built-in weekly limit is account-wide. If you want to cap how much of that quota a single side project can consume — "project A gets at most 20%, project B gets at most $50/week" — this plugin does it. When a project hits its cap, new prompts and mid-turn tool calls are blocked until the week resets.

$ /claude-usage-limiter:status
Claude Usage Limiter — weekly status
Account: 41.2% / 100%   resets 2026-04-26 09:00 (3d 5h)

Projects:
  /Users/you/code/side-project
    12.4% / 20%   ($7.32, 58 assistant messages)
  /Users/you/code/work-repo
    $42.10 / $50.00   (311 assistant messages)
  /Users/you/code/experiments
    25.3% / 20%   ⛔ OVER   ($14.91, 102 assistant messages)

Install

/plugin marketplace add TakalaWang/claude-usage-limiter
/plugin install claude-usage-limiter@takalawang

Restart Claude Code. On first session the plugin auto-patches ~/.claude/settings.json to wire its statusline (with a timestamped backup); run /claude-usage-limiter:install-statusline manually if you'd rather override an existing one.

Configure

Create ~/.claude/usage-limiter/config.json:

{
  "version": 1,
  "projects": {
    "/Users/you/code/side-project": { "weeklyPercent": 20 },
    "/Users/you/code/work-repo":    { "weeklyBudgetUSD": 50 }
  }
}

Or from inside Claude Code:

/claude-usage-limiter:set 20%
/claude-usage-limiter:set $50

• Key = the absolute path you open Claude Code at.
• Each project picks exactly one of weeklyPercent or weeklyBudgetUSD.
• weeklyPercent = cap on this project's share of your weekly account quota.
• weeklyBudgetUSD = hard $ cap (priced per model via src/lib/pricing.ts).
• Projects not listed are unlimited (covered only by Claude Code's global cap).
• Projects are keyed by cwd, not git root.

Slash commands

• /claude-usage-limiter:status — show account + per-project status this week.
• /claude-usage-limiter:set <value> — set the current project's cap. Accepts 20%, $50, or 50usd.
• /claude-usage-limiter:install-statusline — (re)wire the plugin statusline into settings.json.

The three commands above are always allowed through — you can never block yourself out of managing your own limits.

How it works

1. Statusline reads Claude Code's rate_limits payload and writes it to ~/.claude/usage-limiter/cache.json every render.
2. UserPromptSubmit hook runs before each prompt, scans ~/.claude/projects/<cwd>/*.jsonl for this project's tokens this week, compares to the limit, and blocks via {"decision":"block","reason":…} if over.
3. PreToolUse hook catches mid-turn agentic overshoot. Emits hookSpecificOutput.permissionDecision = "deny" with a "DO NOT retry" reason so the model ends the turn cleanly after 1–3 adapt cycles.
4. SessionStart hook auto-wires the statusline into settings.json on first install and refreshes the path after plugin upgrades.

Scans are incremental — per-file offsets live in scan-cache.json, so a heavy-user JSONL dir stays under ~50 ms per hook even past 100 MB.

Statusline

Shows {project}: X% / Y% (or $X.XX / $Y.YY) with green/yellow/red at <80 / 80–95 / ≥95. Blank when the current project isn't configured.

Requirements

• Claude Code ≥ 2.1 (plugin system)
• Claude.ai Pro or Max — weeklyPercent needs the rate_limits payload, which is only emitted for subscribers. weeklyBudgetUSD works without.
• Node.js ≥ 20

Troubleshooting

Hooks aren't firing after install. Plugin hooks only register on new Claude Code sessions. Quit Claude Code fully and reopen.

Statusline shows stale values / wrong reset date. Someone populated cache.json with fake data (eg. during testing). Clear it: rm ~/.claude/usage-limiter/cache.json and restart Claude Code — the statusline will repopulate on the next render.

I hit my own limit and can't unblock. The three /claude-usage-limiter:* commands are always whitelisted. If that doesn't work, remove the config: rm ~/.claude/usage-limiter/config.json.

After upgrading the plugin, the statusline breaks. SessionStart auto-refreshes the path, but you need a new session for it to run. If something went wrong run /claude-usage-limiter:install-statusline manually.

CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR is set. The plugin respects it and uses the same directory Claude Code uses.

Develop

pnpm install
pnpm typecheck
pnpm test
pnpm run build
pnpm e2e

plugin/bin/ is the distributed artifact and IS committed — marketplace installs copy the repo as-is. Rebuild before committing source changes.

License

MIT