Four Claude Max plans, a Team detour, and an AI that moves my team between accounts

I use Claude for a lot of things at once. My own projects, plus work for several businesses, much of it running at the same time. (Here's how that work is set up.) Right now that takes four Max 20x accounts.

I've written before about what all that usage costs: where my AI budget actually goes, and the agent loop that ate 62% of a day. This post is about a different problem. Not what the tokens cost, but what I do when an account runs out of usage and the work isn't finished.

Why not just use the API

The obvious answer is the API. It would simplify a lot of what follows.

For my volume, though, API tokens are exceptionally more expensive than Max 20x plans. The one time I turned on API credits as a fallback, they lasted about half an hour.

So it's subscriptions. And once you need more than one, you need a way to move between them.

The Team experiment

For about a week I ran Claude Team subscriptions. The main reason was my phone. At the time, the Claude phone app only let you switch between accounts tied to the same email address, and I wanted several accounts on my phone.

Here's how I set it up. A Team's owner email has to be on an organization's domain, not Gmail. Each team needs at least two users. So each team had one standard seat, a dummy I didn't use, and one premium seat that I did use. I invited my Gmail address as the premium member on two different companies' teams. Add my personal Gmail account, and I had three accounts on one email address.

It worked, sort of.

The premium seats felt much smaller than my usual 20x, and the numbers explain why. Anthropic's Team plan help article says a premium seat gets 6.25x the Pro plan's per-session usage, with a weekly limit across all models, and a standard seat gets 1.25x. (I checked that on October 6, 2026. Plan details change.) That's a long way from 20x, and in practice the usage windows ran out fast. Still, it was a way to expand capacity.

Then the phone app caught up

The Claude phone app added multiple accounts with different email addresses. That took away the reason I needed Team, so I discontinued them.

The teams left some loose ends behind. My Gmail address is still a member of both organizations, so my phone still has those two Team accounts on it, even though neither is subscribed anymore. I haven't figured out how to get them off yet. I think I need to remove myself from each organization first.

I also want to close both teams. The company email addresses that own them are still tied up as Team owners, and once the teams are closed I want those addresses to become personal Max 20x accounts.

What I run now

Now each business gets its own personal Max 20x account on its own email address. My phone is logged into several accounts at once. Right now that's three personal accounts plus the two leftover Team accounts I can't get rid of yet. I'm not sure whether the limit is three email addresses or five accounts.

On my Mac, one business runs on two Max accounts. Each company has its own startup script, and each script is tied to its own Claude config directory. Getting more than one Claude login onto the same Mac took some work, and I wrote up how the config directories work in three Claude accounts, one Mac. This post is about what happens when one of those accounts runs out.

Running several accounts in the desktop app at once

Terminal windows were never the problem. I run lots of them, and the per-company config directories work fine there. The Claude desktop app was harder. It connects to only one account and one config directory, so I couldn't reach the other companies' Claude Code sessions from it.

I built a fix with Claude's help. There's one Claude app installed. My Dock has one small wrapper icon per account (personal plus one for each company), each with a different logo color. Each icon runs a small script with a profile name, and that script starts another copy of the same app with its own data folder. Each copy has its own sign-in, chats and settings, and they can all be open at once. Clicking the icon for a copy that's already open brings that window to the front instead of opening a duplicate.

The tricky part was the first sign-in. The login link returns to whichever copy of the app happens to be running. So there's a login mode that quits every copy and opens only the one I'm signing into.

One annoyance is left. Once they're open, the running copies all show the same icon, not their own color, so I have to remember which one I opened in which order.

It's worth it, though. Every team member's session shows up in the sidebar of the app copy signed into that company's account. Each company's people appear in their own window, and I can read or answer any of them there or from my phone.

The HR agent

My work runs as a team of Claude Code sessions, each with its own job. One of them I call HR.

When usage runs out on the first account, I go to the HR session, run /login and log into the second account. The login is stored per config directory, so every session using that directory is now on the new account. Then I tell HR: we're on the new account, inform the whole team to continue where they left off. Claude Code sessions can message each other, so HR broadcasts it to the team.

In practice, a switch goes like this. Everyone finishes their current task, saves state and reports ready. HR restarts them one at a time. The first restart is a pilot, and I confirm it shows up in my Claude app before HR does the rest.

There's one downside. Connections like MCP servers are tied to the account, so I have to set them up in both accounts, ideally identically, so switching doesn't get confusing. It's minor, and I expect it'll get worked out eventually.

It works the other way too. When we're running low, or before I shut down the computer, I tell HR to have the team finish up and report back. HR closes the processes down and restarts the team when it's needed.

It's all very, very fun.

Switching accounts is the small part of HR's job, though. Why my Claude Code agent team needed an HR department in the first place is its own story.

How fast I actually run out

As I write this, the account that does most of my programming says "approaching weekly usage limit." Its weekly limit reset the day before. The next reset is a week away.

That business already runs on two Max 20x accounts, and I still burn through usage faster than I have it. To keep up with how much I'm building, I'd really need three. For now it's two. When I run out, I run out, and I wait.

I try not to hit zero, though. Part of the team does ongoing work, like checking support tickets, and I want that to keep running. So as the second account gets low, I wind development down and let it wait, and the rest keeps going.

Is $800 a month worth it?

Four Max 20x plans come to $800 a month. That's a lot. It's about half a truck payment, and honestly it's a little more than I want to pay. In my opinion it's necessary anyway.

It's hard to explain how much Claude has changed my life. There's life before I started using Claude, and life after, and pretty much everything changed: how I think about automation, how things run, how I program. Before, I was a programmer. I programmed at work, and then I programmed after work. Apart from watching a show or hanging out with my wife, it was PHP, PHP, PHP. Now it's Claude, Claude, Claude.

Today I'm running companies of Claudes that run teams of Claudes that run the developers building the software. For the amount we're actually getting done, I feel like a wizard, and $800 a month seems okay.

New models also keep coming out cheaper. Opus 5.5 is already cheaper than what came before it. Hopefully the next ones do more on less usage. We'll see.