Hit Your Claude Code Usage Limit? How to Keep Coding

Claude plans have a five-hour limit and a weekly limit, and when you hit one you can keep coding by running Claude Code on an OpenRouter API key, which has no such windows and bills per token instead. The setup uses three environment variables (ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL, ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN, and an empty ANTHROPIC_API_KEY) placed in a shell function so plain `claude` still uses your plan, and you switch back by typing `claude` when the plan resets. The article reports median session costs of $0.305 on Opus 5.5, $0.155 on Sonnet 5.5, and $0.007 on Haiku 5.5, and warns that Claude Code's printed cost is unreliable because it prices OpenRouter models with Anthropic's table.