First of all, this is not a post to defend Anthrophic, although they are aware of it, they should still address this problem. I've constantly seeing limits post over and over again, the patterns are the same, so the purpose of this post is to address why you are getting message limits

It is obvious that both OpenAI and Anthropic have implemented different strategies to manage operational costs for their AI assistants. These approaches significantly impact the user experience, particularly for those who require extensive AI interactions.

If you have tried using API services, you will understand the majority cost of your API usage, will be on the INPUT tokens, NOT the output tokens. Because the cost of putting your entire conversation history for the AI to understand the context is much more expensive than the AI giving its answers after its reasoning process. Hence all AI companies will utilize methods to reduce their cost, and the easiest method is to limit the context you are posting. Because less context = less computation power needed to understand your conversation.

ChatGPT Plus (Subscription service, not API) restricts users to a 32k context window (Again, NOT API) to save its operational costs, this means that it is essentially limiting how much text the AI can "remember" during a conversation. Claude Pro, conversely, offers a substantially larger 200k context window but have a tighter and less transparent quota limit.

These business decisions have proven financially beneficial, particularly for OpenAI. According to analysis by Tanay Jaipuria, OpenAI's Plus subscription plan generates approximately 73% of their revenue, while Claude Pro accounts for only about 15% of Anthropic's revenue. This disparity suggests that OpenAI's context restriction strategy has been really effective from a cost management perspective.

So why a 32k Context Window Is always bad?

Here is a post that explains it, for example, the average coding file contains approximately 150-300 lines. At this size, the 32k context window becomes exhausted after only 5-12 files. That's why for software development, research, or document analysis involving, or basically literally any tasks that needs knowledge and context that requires multiple files or extended discussions, ChatGPT will just forget everything.

So unless you subbed to ChatGPT Pro with the 200$ pricing, it is objectively not worth to subscribe for Plus

The 32k context limitation of ChatGPT Plus is not prominently communicated during the subscription process, it is not really obvious in the pricing page. Many users subscribe without understanding this fundamental constraint, only to discover it when they encounter the limitation during complex tasks. This lack of transparency regarding a core technical limitation could reasonably be viewed as misleading marketing.

So why are we hitting our limits easily?

While Claude's 200k context window is vastly superior for complex tasks, its quota system creates a different challenge, although good at hindsight, users who utilizes fully the expanded context window could lead to users rapidly exhaust their limit quota. This creates a perception that Claude is less useful or reliable, when in fact, it's simply that users are fully utilizing its capabilities until they reach predetermined limits.

A lot of people does not realize they are sending their conversation with a length that is equivalent to a 400 page long novel to Claude, that it is the reason why you will be hitting limits with just 3-4 messages

You can refer to this extension on tracking your Claude usage to better understand how close to limits you are

ChatGPT Plus have web search, but Claude does not

This is not really within our topic, but it is a common feature that it that Claude does not have native web search implemented but it is a feature that deemed as "mandatory" for a lot of users

But did you know? Claude has these features to enable web search, it includes
Browser use, Fetch, arxiv research paper searches, and you can see more of them at here

imo once you have enabled these, it's a lot better than what plus can offer, and these are FREE. You do not need to subscribe to Pro plan to use these

Here are some more features that I think, makes Claude a better choice, regardless you are subbed to Pro:
- I can access my Postgres database, let Claude understand it (schemas, your data rows), select, read and execute queries
- I can enable Deepseek R1 reasoning, with Claude (merge them together)
- I can have Claude to read though my Obsidian / Notion notes
- Claude can have memory
- I can have Claude to retrieve and understand docker logs / server logs
- I can have Claude to directly write files in my computer

How to avoid hitting the message limits quickly?

1. Do not fill up your Projects, I personally think that it should never be over 10%. I highly recommend to use some RAG MCP, such as Obsidian, ChromaDb, or Qdrant to enable these RAG behavior. For programmers, there's an alternative approach that you use a bash script, convert your project directories into a single txt file and then feed it to Claude, adjust the directories whether you need those context or not to lower your usage
2. Start new chats when context are not needed / irrelevant. As long as you don't need the context for your questions, just start a new chat
3. Avoid follow ups, prioritize editing your previous prompt. Claude gave you an unsatisfactory answer? Instead of follow up, which could end up sending its previous answer to the servers that could potentially take away more of your usage quota, edit your message, identify which part of your communication is unclear, vague, or lack of context, put the items that Claude needs, clarify stuff, pinpoint issues and make it straight to point.

I hope this can be helpful for newer users to understand what is going on. Feel free to share your opinions around this

EDIT: Revenue standpoint observation by me was wrong, as a user below had mentioned

EDIT 2: A lot of people seem to confused about API pricing vs Subscription pricing, API pricing does not limit your context window, but the subscription service, which is what i am referring to ChatGPT Plus here, restricts you at 32k context window

EDIT 3: fix grammar and added some more tips