In my first post about the new Claude Projects, I promised to share what Playbook usage looks like on the Pro plan. Here it is.
What a usage limit is
Every paid Claude plan comes with a set amount of use. Claude calls this a usage limit. The Pro plan, the $20 a month plan the Playbook calls for, has two:
- A session limit, which resets every five hours.
- A weekly limit, which resets once a week.
Both show as bars on the Usage page in Claude’s settings, labeled Current session and This week. If a bar fills up, you wait for it to reset before continuing.
Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, says the new Claude Projects can use up those limits faster.
What effort means
Effort is a setting that controls how much thinking Claude does before it answers. Lower effort is quicker. Higher effort takes longer, and the research and thinking go deeper.
Higher effort uses more of your session and weekly limits. That’s why a lot of online advice about usage recommends Medium effort. That advice is written for people who use Claude all day for everything. A recruiting family’s workload is different.
Why the Playbook recommends High effort
The Targeting Brief and Athlete Dossier, the two files the Playbook builds about the athlete, are the foundation for the school list and every email that follows. School research comes back all season too. That’s work worth doing on High effort every single time.
What I tested
I ran the entire Playbook setup on the Pro plan, using High effort, immediately followed by building an initial list of 15 schools and drafting a first email to each one. This entire process fit easily within the Pro plan’s session and weekly limits.
I also built the same school list on Medium effort to compare the results. Generally speaking, the list of schools curated on High was noticeably better. Claude looked at more schools before narrowing the list to 15 and did a better job finding the academic details.
What a normal week looks like
The setup and the starting list are the most important jobs, and they happen once. What repeats is tournament weeks: checking which programs will be there, researching the schools, helping draft personalized emails for the athlete to review and send, and updating the tracker.
If a big tournament week quickly uses your session limit, simply wait for your session to reset.
My take: the $20 plan is more than enough for most families.
Set it once
In the new Claude Projects, each task gets its own conversation, called a thread. You can set the effort level for every thread in your project settings. Go to General and set Thread effort to High. Every new thread uses it, so there’s nothing to remember after that.
One more thing that helps
During the Playbook setup, you add the Playbook files to your project’s Library. That also saves usage. Anthropic says files in a project count less against your limits when Claude uses them again.
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Sources: Projects redesigned: from folder to conversation (Anthropic, September 17, 2026), How do usage and length limits work? and Usage limit best practices (Claude Help Center).