Claude opus 4.5: Max vs Default mode

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1

Hi!

According to documentation and other replies on the forum, there should be basically no difference between turning on and off the “Max mode” switch when using claude-4.5-opus-high. However, somehow for this “no-difference” I end up paying 10x more money. Could you tell me what do I actually pay for? I’ve accidentally forgot to turn off the max mode switch during my experiments and ended up paying way more money for Cursor then I used to.

Here are the screenshots from my Cursor dashboard as an example of 10x costs on quite similar chats (the rightmost side shows number of “Requests” which I believe I am being billed by):

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image240×167 5.98 KB

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image259×174 5.76 KB

3

Hi there!

On Request-Based Plans, Max Mode has a few benefits over non-max mode.

  • Max Mode is required for image generation on request-based plans
  • To use subagents with models other than Composer-1, Max Mode must be enabled

In all cases – Max Mode will bill differently than non-max mode, by converting the API cost of the conversation into an equivalent number of requests.

If you’re not using either of these features, it probably doesn’t make sense to leave Max Mode enabled.