Claude pricing and free tier: what you actually get
Yes, and the free tier is substantially more capable than most people assume. Paying starts at $20 a month billed monthly — the $17 figure Anthropic advertises requires $200 up front for the year.
What the plans actually cost
Prices as billed MONTHLY. Vendors headline the annual-equivalent rate, which is not what you pay unless you commit for a year.
Free
Free
Free for everyone.
Pro
$20/mo$17/mo if you pay $200 up front
The advertised figure is the annual rate. Billed month to month it is $20.
Max
from $100/mo
Starts at $100/month; higher tiers exist.
Team
Not published as a flat rate
For teams of 2 to 150. Seat pricing not confidently mapped from the page and therefore not stated here.
Enterprise
Not published as a flat rate
Seat price plus usage at API rates.
What you get without paying
Free tier includes
Chat on web, iOS, Android and desktop
Generate code and visualize data
Write, edit and create content
Ability to search the web
Memory across conversations
Create files and execute code
Desktop extensions
Connect Slack and Google Workspace services
Integrate any context or tool through connectors with remote MCP
Extended thinking for complex work
Paying adds
More usage
Claude Code
Claude Cowork
Claude Design
Claude Science
Unlimited projects to organize chats and documents
Access to Research
Ability to use more Claude models
Claude for Microsoft 365
Counted from Anthropic's published plan features on 2026-08-12. A count of bullets is not a measure of value, but it does show where the line sits.
What is not published, and so is not stated here
Anthropic does not publish a numeric message cap for the free tier on this page, so no cap is stated here. Every 'X messages per Y hours' figure circulating is somebody's estimate, and repeating it would be the exact failure this dataset exists to avoid.
Is it still alive?
Claude is ALIVE as of 2026-08-12. This matters more than it sounds: the AI tool graveyard is full of products that were taking signups a month before they shut down. We track status separately in the tool status registry.
Read 2026-08-12. AI pricing changes faster than almost any other category — if this page is more than a couple of months old, treat the vendor's page as authoritative and tell us what moved.
Prices shown as billed monthly, checked 2026-08-12 against Anthropic's own pricing page. Figures we could not confidently map to a named plan are omitted rather than estimated.