Claude AI Pricing: Every Plan Explained (Free, Pro, Max, Team, Enterprise)

Anthropic’s Claude pricing covers six tiers — Free, Pro, Max 5x, Max 20x, Team, and Enterprise — plus a separate pay-per-token API. Choosing the wrong path can cost you significantly more than necessary. Here’s what each option actually includes in 2026.

What Are Claude’s Subscription Plans and Prices?

Claude offers six tiers: Free ($0), Pro ($20/month), Max 5x ($100/month), Max 20x ($200/month), Team (from $25/seat/month), and Enterprise (custom pricing).

What Does the Claude Free Plan Include?

The Free plan gives you access to Claude on web, iOS, Android, and desktop with no credit card required, subject to rolling usage limits.

The Free plan gives you access to Claude on web, iOS, Android, and desktop with no credit card required. It includes text, image, and code generation plus web search. Usage limits are intentionally opaque — Anthropic doesn’t publish exact message caps — but limits reset on a rolling 5-hour window. The Free tier is designed for exploration, not sustained daily work.

Is Claude Pro Worth $20 a Month?

Pro delivers substantially more usage than Free, plus Claude Code, unlimited projects, the Research feature, and Google Workspace integration — sufficient for most individual developers and writers.

Pro delivers substantially more usage than Free, Claude Code in the terminal, unlimited projects, the Research feature, file creation, code execution, and Google Workspace integration. Usage still has limits — Anthropic does not publish exact message counts, but heavy sessions will reach the ceiling — but it’s sufficient for most individual developers and writers. Annual billing brings the effective rate to $17/month.

What Is the Difference Between Claude Max 5x and Max 20x?

Max 5x ($100/month) gives you 5x Pro’s per-session usage; Max 20x ($200/month) gives you 20x — enough that rate limits stop being a practical concern for full-day development work.

Max 5x provides 5x Pro’s per-session headroom at $100/month. Max 20x at $200/month delivers 20x Pro usage — enough that rate limits stop being a practical concern for most full-day development work. Both tiers include Claude Code, with access to Claude Opus 4.7 and Sonnet 4.6, and a 1M token context window.

Extra usage is available on Pro, Max 5x, and Max 20x — when you hit your included limit, you can continue at standard API-rate billing with a spending cap you set.

How Does Claude Team Plan Pricing Work?

Team requires a minimum of 5 seats: Standard seats at $25/seat/month (annual) include collaboration features but not Claude Code; Premium seats at $100/seat/month add Claude Code for developers.

Team requires a minimum of 5 seats and comes in two flavors. Standard seats at $25/seat/month (annual) include 1.25x more usage per session than Pro with a weekly reset, plus collaboration features, central billing, SSO, and Microsoft 365 and Slack integrations. Standard seats do not include Claude Code.

Premium seats at $100/seat/month add Claude Code, making them the right choice for engineering team members. You can mix Standard and Premium seats within one Team plan — so non-technical staff get Standard while developers get Premium.

Enterprise Plan — Custom Pricing

Enterprise is for organizations with compliance, data residency, or governance requirements. It includes access to the full 1M token context window, HIPAA readiness, SAML SSO, domain capture, spend controls, and dedicated support. Based on user reports, pricing starts around $60/seat with a 70-seat minimum, putting the floor near $50,000 annually — contact Anthropic sales for exact figures. Training on customer data is disabled contractually at this tier.

How Much Does the Claude API Cost Per Token?

As of May 2026: Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs $3.00 input / $15.00 output per million tokens; Opus 4.6 costs $5.00 / $25.00; Haiku 4.5 costs $1.00 / $5.00.

The API is entirely separate from subscription plans. You pay per million tokens (MTok) with no monthly minimum. Current rates as of May 2026 (verified from Anthropic’s official models page):

• Claude Opus 4.7: $5.00 input / $25.00 output per MTok
• Claude Sonnet 4.6: $3.00 input / $15.00 output per MTok
• Claude Haiku 4.5: $1.00 input / $5.00 output per MTok

Prompt caching cuts input costs by up to 90% for repeated context. The Batch API processes requests within 24 hours at a flat 50% discount on all tokens — ideal for content pipelines, data enrichment, and any workload where real-time responses aren’t required. As of March 2026, Anthropic eliminated long-context surcharges, so a 900K-token request costs the same per-token rate as a 9K one.

Which Claude Plan Is Right for You?

Start with Pro for individual use, move to Max 5x if you regularly hit limits, choose Max 20x for full-day heavy use, and use Team for groups of 5+ where Standard seats cover non-technical staff and Premium covers developers.

Start with Pro if you’re an individual who hits Free limits regularly. Move to Max 5x if you’re a developer doing focused coding sessions. Max 20x makes sense if Claude is your primary tool throughout the workday. For teams, buy Standard seats for non-technical staff and Premium seats for developers who need Claude Code. If you’re building an application or automation that calls Claude programmatically, use the API — subscription plans don’t provide API credits and don’t reduce API costs.

Claude API Pricing: Pay-Per-Token Rates for Every Model

The Claude API is priced separately from claude.ai subscriptions. You pay per million tokens (MTok) consumed — input and output priced separately. There is no monthly minimum; you add credits and they deplete as you use the API.

Prompt caching reduces costs significantly for repeated context: cache write is 25% of base input price, cache read is 10%. The Batch API offers 50% off all models for non-time-sensitive work. For a full breakdown of how to minimize token spend, see Claude on a Budget: the Complete Guide.

How Does Claude Pricing Compare to GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0?

Claude Sonnet 4.6 sits above GPT-4o on price but competes at or above it on reasoning tasks. Claude Haiku 4.5 is the cost-competitive option for high-volume pipelines. Gemini 2.0 Flash is significantly cheaper for commodity tasks; the trade-off is reasoning depth and context handling on complex documents.

Frequently Asked Questions: Claude Pricing

May 2026: Managed Agents & Claude Security Pricing

Claude Managed Agents Pricing

Managed Agents pricing follows the standard API token rates for whichever Claude model you use inside the agent pipeline — there’s no separate Managed Agents surcharge on top of model costs. You pay for the tokens the models consume:

The Dreaming advisor tool uses a short-plan generation (typically 400–700 tokens) at the advisor model’s rate, while the executor handles full output at its lower rate — keeping combined cost well below running the advisor model end-to-end. Use max_uses to cap advisor calls per request. Requires beta header: anthropic-beta: advisor-tool-2026-03-01. Docs: platform.claude.com/docs/en/managed-agents/dreams

Claude Security Beta Pricing

Claude Security is currently in public beta for Enterprise customers. Anthropic has not published a standalone per-scan or per-seat price for Claude Security Beta — access is included as part of Enterprise during the beta period. Underlying model is Claude Opus 4.7 ($5 input / $25 output per million tokens at API rates). For Enterprise pricing including Claude Security, contact Anthropic sales.

Claude Mythos Preview Pricing (Project Glasswing)

Claude Mythos Preview is not available via standard API or any subscription tier. Through Project Glasswing (invitation-only, defensive cybersecurity workflows): $25 per million input tokens, $125 per million output tokens. No self-serve access — contact Anthropic for Glasswing information at anthropic.com/glasswing.

Claude Pricing Calculator (Updated May 15, 2026)

Use this tool to figure out which Claude plan actually fits your usage, what you’d pay on the API equivalent, and how the new June 15, 2026 Agent SDK billing change affects your costs. All rates verified against Anthropic’s official pricing documentation as of May 15, 2026.

Next Steps: What to Read After This

You came here for pricing. Depending on what you actually need to do next, these are the right places to go:

For the broader operating philosophy of how Claude fits alongside the rest of a working AI stack, see The Three-Legged Stack: Why I Run Everything on Notion, Claude, and Google Cloud.