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	$20 /seat/mo + usage	Seat price plus usage billed at API rates, so cost scales with model and task.

What you get without paying

Free tier includes

Chat on web, iOS, Android and desktop
Ability to search the web
Create Artifacts
Desktop extensions
Voice mode
Incognito chats
User preferences
Projects (up to 5)
Create and edit files with code execution
Memory
Skills
Connectors
Web search

Paying adds

Claude Code
Claude Science
Claude in Chrome
Claude for Microsoft 365
Claude for Microsoft Outlook
Claude Design, Slides, Docs
Research

Paying also buys more usage, Opus models and usage credits; those are allowances, so they are not counted as features.

How much of Claude you get without paying

Features in the vendor's own plan comparison table, counted on 2026-09-30

13 free7 paid

65% of the listed features cost nothing

The paid tiers mostly add usage and adjacent products, not core ability. Rows of the vendor feature table that Pro includes, not a measure of value.

Counted from Anthropic's plan comparison table on 2026-09-30: every feature row Pro includes, split by whether Free has it (Projects, capped at 5 on Free, counts as free). The August version counted plan-card bullets, which Anthropic has since condensed, so the two counts are not comparable. A count 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.

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Common questions

Is Claude free?

Yes, and the free tier is substantially more capable than most people assume. The free tier includes chat on web, iOS, Android and desktop, web search, Artifacts, memory, connectors, skills and file creation with code execution. Checked against Anthropic's pricing page on 2026-09-30.

How much does Claude Pro cost per month?

$20 billed monthly. The advertised $17 figure requires paying $200 annually up front.

What does paying for Claude actually add?

More usage and Opus models, plus Claude Code, Claude Science, Claude in Chrome, Claude for Microsoft 365 and Outlook, Claude Design, Slides and Docs, and Research. 13 of the 20 features Pro includes are also on the free tier.

Is it still alive?

Claude is ALIVE as of 2026-09-30. 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.

The source

https://claude.com/pricing

Read 2026-09-30. 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.

Going deeper on Claude

Prices shown as billed monthly, checked 2026-09-30 against Anthropic's own pricing page. Figures we could not confidently map to a named plan are omitted rather than estimated.