I'm getting rate limited.

Two different rate limits can hit you.

**1. LADLE's per-plan cap (rolling 24h).** At ~85% of your plan's rolling-24h token cap, send latency increases by 500ms per message as a soft signal. At 100%, sends slow further (2-5s per message) and you see the banner "RATE-LIMITED · RESUMES IN N MIN" in the composer. You're NOT blocked — requests queue and process as your rolling window advances. See /docs/usage-limits for the specific caps per plan.

**2. Anthropic's model-level 429s.** Occasionally Anthropic returns a "High demand right now" error during a peak-load spike across the entire platform. This is unrelated to your account's cap — it affects everyone. LADLE shows the copy "High demand right now — try again in a moment." Wait 15-30 seconds and retry; these usually clear fast.

**How to tell which one you're hitting:** - LADLE's cap: banner reads "RATE-LIMITED · RESUMES IN N MIN" with a specific countdown. - Anthropic's 429: the reply just says "High demand right now — try again in a moment" without a countdown.

**Reducing your cap usage:** - Attach files to Projects rather than individual chats. A project file is stored once and re-processed on every chat in the project; a chat-attached file is re-processed on every message in that chat. - Interrupt bad responses early with Esc — the tokens generated so far still count. - Use ⌘R to regenerate rather than paraphrasing your prompt — regeneration doesn't grow the input. - Turn off SEARCH for chats that don't need it. Search retrieval adds input tokens. - Turn off THINK for casual conversations. Thinking tokens are billed as output.

**Upgrading:** Base is generous for most professional workloads. If you regularly hit the cap several times a week, Max 5x is likely the right move. Max 20x is for extremely heavy use (several hours a day with large file attachments).