How much does Claude cost per month?

At the time of writing: Free is $0; Pro is $20 a month, or $17 a month billed annually; Max is $100; Ultra is $200; Team costs $25 a month ($20 annual) per Standard seat and $125 ($100 annual) per Premium seat; Enterprise is $20 per seat per month billed annually, plus usage at API rates. Prices are US web prices before tax.

What happened to Claude Max 20x?

Anthropic renamed it Ultra in late October 2026. The price is still $200 a month and existing subscribers moved over automatically. Usage is now described as 10x Pro every week, and verified accounts have no five-hour limit. The $100 plan is now simply called Max.

What is the difference between Claude Max and Ultra?

Max costs $100 a month and gives 5x Pro usage in every five-hour window and every week, plus $100 of monthly API credits. Ultra costs $200 a month and gives 10x Pro usage per week with no five-hour limit once your account is verified, plus $200 of API credits. Both include Claude Code and let you spend up to half the weekly limit on Fable models.

Do Claude's monthly API credits work in Claude Code?

No. The credits on Max, Ultra and Team cover the Claude API, the Console Playground, Managed Agents and the Agent SDK with a key from your linked organisation. They do not cover interactive Claude Code, runs started from the GitHub Action, IDE extensions or desktop app, or usage in the Claude apps.

Is Claude Pro worth it over the free plan?

If you use Claude most days, yes. Pro adds Opus models, Claude Code, Research, Claude in Chrome, more than five Projects and higher usage limits for $17 to $20 a month. If you only ask the occasional question, Free is enough.

Claude Pricing (2026): Free, Pro, Max, Ultra and Team Plans

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Claude costs $0 on Free, $20 a month or $17 a month billed annually on Pro, $100 on Max, $200 on Ultra (formerly Max 20x), $25 or $20 per Team Standard seat and $125 or $100 per Team Premium seat; Enterprise is $20 per seat billed annually plus usage at API rates. Most individuals should start on Pro and move to Max only when they hit limits most weeks.

Prices were checked on claude.com/pricing and Anthropic’s help centre on 3 November 2026. They are US web prices before tax; Anthropic says mobile app prices may differ. For our verdict on the product itself (writing, documents, coding), read our Claude review. This guide is only about what you pay and what you get.

Claude plans and prices at a glance

Plan	Monthly	Billed annually	Usage	Five-hour limit	Monthly API credits	Claude Code
Free	$0	-	Limited	Yes	None	No
Pro	$20	$17/month ($200 up front)	Baseline	Yes	None	Yes
Max	$100	Not offered	5x Pro, per five hours and per week	Yes	$100	Yes
Ultra (formerly Max 20x)	$200	Not offered	10x Pro per week	No, once verified	$200	Yes
Team Standard	$25/seat	$20/seat	1.25x Pro per session, plus weekly limit	Yes	$20/seat, pooled, capped at $500	Yes
Team Premium	$125/seat	$100/seat	6.25x Pro per session, plus weekly limit	Yes	$100/seat, pooled, capped at $500	Yes
Enterprise	-	$20/seat plus usage at API rates; 20-seat minimum	Depends on seat type	Depends on seat type	Not eligible	Yes

Prices at the time of writing. Sources: Claude pricing, Team plan, monthly API credits.

Also worth knowing: priority access at busy times starts at Max, not Pro; Claude Tag is Team and Enterprise only; Claude Security is Enterprise only. An Education plan is listed with no public price.

What is Claude Ultra (formerly Max 20x)?

In late October 2026 Anthropic renamed its $200 plan. The help article now says “The Max 20x plan is now called the Ultra plan”; existing subscribers moved over automatically with no price change, and the $100 tier lost its “5x” suffix and is now just Max (Ultra plan).

The price stayed at $200 a month, monthly billing only. What changed is how usage is described. Max 20x was sold as 20 times Pro usage. Ultra is described as 10 times Pro usage every week, a weekly measure rather than the old headline multiplier. Anthropic does not publish a conversion between the two, so it is not possible to say whether this is more or less usage than before; the measure changed.

The practical benefit is the five-hour window. Verified Ultra accounts have no five-hour limit, only weekly limits: one across all models and a separate one for Fable. Verification is automatic and based on account and payment history; until it happens, a temporary five-hour limit applies. To check, open Settings > Usage: if there is no “Current session” bar, you are verified. Verifying your phone number at checkout is a separate step and does not remove the limit.

Ultra also includes $200 a month of API credits (see below). If you upgrade from annual Pro, Anthropic credits your unused Pro balance when the billing address matches.

How Claude usage limits work

Anthropic publishes no message or token counts for any plan. Instead, paid plans run on two limits at once (usage limits):

A five-hour session limit. The window starts with your first message and resets in full five hours later.
A weekly limit across all models. It resets at a fixed day and time assigned to your account.

Claude on the web, desktop and mobile and Claude Code all draw from the same allowance, so a morning of Claude Code sessions leaves less for chat in the afternoon. What you use depends on the length of the conversation, attached files, the model, the effort level and how many tools and connectors are switched on. Anthropic’s own tips for stretching a plan are to lower effort, turn off extended thinking when you do not need it, disable unused tools and connectors, and keep project instructions short.

Settings > Usage shows the current session, how long until it resets and when the weekly limit resets. Claude Code also has a “wrap-up” allowance that is rolling out: if you hit the five-hour limit mid-response, it can finish the current step. Pro gets this once a week, Max each time it hits the five-hour limit; it does not apply to verified Ultra accounts, which have no five-hour limit (Claude Code with your plan).

What happens when you hit the limit

You have three options. Wait for the reset. Upgrade, which takes effect immediately. Or turn on usage credits: on Pro, Max and Ultra you can prepay for extra usage billed at standard API rates, enabled under Settings > Usage, with a monthly spending cap or no cap and optional auto-reload (usage credits). If you subscribed in a mobile app, you enable them on the web. On Team, an admin switches on prepaid credits for the organisation.

Claude API credits on Max, Ultra and Team: what they cover

Since October, the higher plans include monthly credits for the Claude API: $100 on Max, $200 on Ultra, and on Team $20 per Standard seat plus $100 per Premium seat, pooled into one balance capped at $500 a month. Anthropic’s own example: three Standard and two Premium seats give $260 a month. Free, Pro and Enterprise are not eligible.

To claim them you need seven days on the plan; then you link one Claude Console organisation from Billing settings on claude.ai in a browser.

What they cover:

The Messages and Message Batches APIs and the Console Playground
Claude Managed Agents and the Agent SDK
claude -p when it runs with an API key from the linked organisation

What they do not cover:

Interactive Claude Code in the terminal, IDE, desktop or web
Runs started by the Claude Code GitHub Action, IDE extensions or desktop app
Usage credits or extra usage in Claude, Claude Code or Cowork
Claude on Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI or Microsoft Foundry

The credits refresh each billing cycle, expire at the end of it and do not roll over. They do not change your Claude or Claude Code limits. When they run out, API requests pause until the next grant unless the organisation has bought credits or set up auto-reload. They are a budget for building your own apps and agents (monthly API credits).

Fable, Opus and Claude Code: which plan gets what

Free: Sonnet and Haiku only. No Claude Code, no Research, no Fable, up to five Projects.
Pro: adds Opus, Claude Code, Research and Claude in Chrome. Fable runs only on usage credits.
Max, Ultra and Team Premium seats: Fable included, up to 50% of the weekly limit, then usage credits or another model.
Team Standard seats: same as Pro; Fable on usage credits.
Enterprise: premium seats get Fable up to 50% of the weekly limit; standard seats use usage credits if the organisation has enabled them; usage-based Enterprise pays API rates.

Fable shares the weekly limit and never adds to it; you “can never use more than your weekly limit” (Fable on your plan). One detail for developers: if the ANTHROPIC_API_KEY environment variable is set, Claude Code bills that API key instead of your subscription. If you are weighing Claude Code against editor-based tools, our guide to AI coding assistants and Cursor review cover the alternatives.

Claude Team and Enterprise pricing

Team is for 2 to 150 people. Standard seats cost $25 a month or $20 billed annually; Premium seats cost $125 or $100 and carry five times the usage of a Standard seat. You can mix seat types. Limits are per member and are not pooled: a Standard seat gets 1.25x Pro’s per-session allowance and a Premium seat 6.25x, each with a weekly limit across all models. Admin features include SSO with domain capture, just-in-time provisioning, role-based permissions, and spend caps at organisation and user level. Team includes Claude Tag, and Anthropic says Team and Enterprise content is not used for model training by default (Team plan).

A Team Premium seat is worth noting for developers: 6.25x Pro per session for $100 to $125, compared with 5x on Max for $100. The catch is the two-seat minimum, so the cheapest Team plan with one Premium seat is $120 a month on annual billing ($100 plus a $20 Standard seat).

Enterprise costs $20 per seat per month billed annually, with a 20-seat minimum, plus usage at API rates. Admins can set spend limits for users and the organisation, and Claude Security is Enterprise only. Enterprise is also getting the unified chat and Cowork experience that Pro and Max already have; our story on Claude Enterprise merging chat and Cowork covers the admin settings.

What Claude really costs per year

Estimates from list prices, plan fees only, before tax and any usage credits:

Who	Plan	Per year
One person, daily use	Pro, annual	$200 (vs $240 monthly)
One heavy user or developer	Max	$1,200
One all-day agent user	Ultra	$2,400
Team of 5, light use	5 Team Standard, annual	$1,200 (vs $1,500 monthly)
Team of 5 with 2 developers	3 Standard + 2 Premium, annual	$3,120 (plus $260/month of API credits)
Company of 20	Enterprise, 20 seats	$4,800 plus usage at API rates

Max and Ultra have no annual option, so their yearly cost is simply 12 monthly payments. Anthropic says individual plans have no standard discounts; nonprofits get discounted Team and Enterprise plans instead.

Which Claude plan should you buy?

Occasional questions and drafting: Free.
Daily writing, research, document work and light coding: Pro. Pay annually if you are sure; it saves $40 a year.
Daily Claude Code sessions, or hitting Pro limits most weeks: Max.
Long agentic runs that keep tripping the five-hour window, or heavy Fable use: Ultra.
A team that needs admin controls, SSO and no training by default: Team Standard, with Premium seats for developers.
20 or more seats, compliance needs, usage-based billing: Enterprise.

If you only want Claude inside your own software, skip the subscriptions and pay per token on the API; our AI coding assistants guide explains where that fits.

How Claude’s prices compare

At the main tier, Claude Pro costs about the same as the main paid tiers of its two biggest rivals, roughly $20 a month, with a $17 annual option on top. The differences are in what each plan includes and how the limits behave. Our ChatGPT vs Claude and Claude vs Gemini comparisons match the plans tier by tier, and ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini puts all three side by side. More plan explainers are in our guides section.

Verdict

Pro for almost everyone, Max when limits bite weekly, Ultra only if the five-hour window is what slows you down. Treat the API credits as a bonus for building, not extra chat or Claude Code time. If you are still deciding whether Claude is the right assistant at all, start with our Claude review.