Docs Concepts

Pooled 5-hour budgets

Anthropic enforces rate limits on a per-account 5-hour rolling window. Each account has its own budget that resets independently. When you stack accounts under one proxy, the budgets pool — but the pooling is offset in time, not summed.

The naive expectation (wrong)

If one account gives you 5 hours of work between resets, five accounts must give you 25 hours, right? No. Each account's window resets independently, so what you actually get is continuous coverage: at any moment, â‰¥1 account has headroom, so the proxy can always serve a request.

The actual math

For each account, the 5-hour window starts the moment of the first request in that window. If you registered five accounts at different times (or used them at different times historically), the windows are staggered. The proxy LRU-orders by headroom, so traffic naturally lands on the freshest account, which causes its window to start later than the others — distributing reset times across the day.

After ~1 day of use, your five accounts settle into a roughly evenly-spaced rotation:

account-1  â–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘  reset at 14:00
account-2  â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘  reset at 17:30
account-3  â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆ  reset at 21:00
account-4  â–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆ  reset at 09:00
account-5  â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–ˆâ–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘â–‘  reset at 12:30

At any clock time, at least one (often two) accounts are mid-window with budget remaining. The proxy never has to wait for a reset.

The 7-day window still bounds you

Each account also has a 7-day rolling budget. Pooling 5-hour windows doesn't escape the 7-day cap — every request still counts against the originating account's weekly budget. To sustain a heavy workload long-term, you need enough accounts that the sum of 7-day budgets exceeds your weekly token throughput. Five Pro accounts is generally enough for one engineer; ten is enough for a small team.

Why we don't sum the windows

Some users initially propose "let me consume two accounts' budgets in parallel during one window." We don't do this because:

The proxy serves one request to one account at a time. Parallelism is governed by your client, not the proxy.
Cross-account request mixing would create cross-billing semantics that we deliberately avoid (no fan-out, no aggregation, no surprise on the account holder's invoice).
Anthropic's TOS expects one user per account; Power Claude assumes you own all accounts you've registered.

How to size your pool

target_throughput_tokens_per_week / pro_account_weekly_budget = accounts_needed

For a single engineer running Claude Code 6 hours a day at moderate intensity, 3-5 accounts is the sweet spot. Heavy autonomous jobs (overnight runs) push toward 5-7. The math in The math of pooled 5-hour budgets on the blog walks through the calculation with real numbers.