Claude pricing explained: Free, Pro, Max, Team and the API
Kofi Agyem, Founder and CEO, CloudzyroPublished · 6 min read
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Claude's Free, Pro, Max, Ultra, Team and Enterprise plans, how usage limits work, and API prices per model, with worked examples and ways to spend less.
1. Claude's plans at a glance
Anthropic sells Claude two ways: subscription plans for people and teams who use the Claude apps and Claude Code, and the API for developers, billed per token. Every figure here comes from Anthropic's own pricing pages, checked on November 1, 2026. Prices don't include tax.
- Free: $0, with limited usage every 5 hours and every week.
- Pro: $20 a month, or $17 a month billed annually ($200 up front).
- Max: $100 a month, billed monthly.
- Ultra: $200 a month, billed monthly.
- Team: for 2 to 150 people. Standard seats $25 a month ($20 billed annually); premium seats $125 a month ($100 billed annually).
- Enterprise: $20 per seat a month, billed annually, with a 20-seat minimum, plus usage billed at API rates.
2. What each plan includes
Free covers chat on web, desktop and mobile, web search, creating files, running code, memory, connectors to your apps and tools, Artifacts, and up to 5 projects. It uses Sonnet and Haiku, not Opus.
Pro adds more usage (at least 5x Free per 5-hour session), Claude Code, Claude in Chrome, Claude for Microsoft 365, Research, Opus, projects without Free's limit of 5, and the ability to hand off and schedule tasks. Fable, Anthropic's top model, is available on Pro through usage credits.
Max gives 5x Pro's usage every 5 hours and every week, Fable for up to half your weekly limit, $100 a month in API credits for the Claude Platform, and priority access at busy times.
Ultra gives 10x Pro's weekly usage with no 5-hour limit for verified accounts, and $200 a month in API credits.
Team adds central billing and administration, single sign-on, enterprise search across your organization, admin controls for connectors, no model training on your content by default, and up to $500 a month in pooled API credits. You can mix standard and premium seats.
Enterprise adds SCIM, audit logs, role-based access, custom data retention, user and organization spend limits, IP allowlisting, and a HIPAA-ready offering.
3. How usage limits work on the plans
Claude's plans don't give you a fixed number of messages. Most accounts have a limit that resets on a rolling 5-hour window, and paid plans add a weekly limit on top. Chats on web, desktop and mobile and your work in Claude Code all draw from the same pool.
How fast you reach a limit depends on the model you pick, how long your chats are and how large your files are. When you hit it, you can wait for the reset, move to a bigger plan, or, on a paid plan, turn on usage credits and keep working at standard API rates. You can check where you stand in Settings, under Usage.
4. API pricing per model
The API is billed per million tokens (MTok), separately for input and output. Current models:
- Fable 5.1: $10 input, $50 output
- Opus 5.5: $4 input, $20 output
- Sonnet 5.5: $2 input, $10 output
- Haiku 5.5: $0.10 input and $0.50 output for prompts up to 100,000 tokens; $0.50 and $2.50 for longer prompts
Prompt caching makes repeated context much cheaper. Reading from the cache costs $0.25 per MTok on Fable 5.1, $0.20 on Opus 5.5, $0.10 on Sonnet 5.5 and $0.01 on Haiku 5.5. Writing to the 5-minute cache costs $12.50, $5, $2.50 and $0.125.
Other charges and discounts worth knowing:
- Batch processing: 50% off input and output for work that can wait.
- US-only inference: 1.1x the standard token prices.
- Fast mode for Opus 5.5: up to 2.5x faster, at 2x standard pricing.
- Web search: $10 per 1,000 searches, plus the tokens used.
- Code execution: 50 free hours a day per organization, then $0.05 per hour per container.
- Managed Agents: $0.08 per session-hour of active runtime, plus tokens.
Older models are still listed, at different prices: Opus 5 is $5 and $25, Sonnet 4.6 is $3 and $15, and Haiku 4.5 is $1 and $5.
5. Worked examples
- A solo developer using Claude Code most days: Pro at $20 a month. If you keep hitting the 5-hour limit, Max at $100 gives 5x the usage.
- A team of 6: six standard Team seats are $150 a month billed monthly, or $120 a month billed annually.
- A support chatbot on the API: 1,000 conversations a day, each with 2,000 input and 500 output tokens, is 2 MTok in and 0.5 MTok out a day. On Sonnet 5.5 that's $4 plus $5, about $270 over 30 days. On Haiku 5.5 it's $0.20 plus $0.25 a day, about $13.50 a month.
- One long agent task on Opus 5.5: 50,000 input and 15,000 output tokens cost $0.20 plus $0.30, so $0.50.
6. Limits worth knowing
- Every plan has usage limits, and Anthropic says it may limit usage in other ways, such as weekly or monthly caps, to keep access fair.
- Max and Ultra are billed monthly only. Annual billing is offered on Pro and Team, and Enterprise is annual only.
- Haiku 5.5 charges more for prompts over 100,000 tokens. The other current models charge the same rate across their full context window.
- Payments are generally non-refundable, except where Anthropic's terms or local law say otherwise.
7. How to keep your Claude costs down
- Use Sonnet or Haiku for routine work and save Opus or Fable for hard problems. Model choice changes both your plan usage and your API bill.
- On the API, cache long instructions and documents you send again and again, and batch anything that doesn't need an instant answer.
- Keep chats focused. Long conversations and big files use your limit faster.
- On Team, give premium seats only to the people who need the extra usage.
8. Where Cloudzyro fits
Claude can build a website, but the site still needs somewhere to live. Cloudzyro is listed in Claude's connector directory, and connectors are on every Claude plan, including Free. Connect it once, then ask Claude to put your site online. Hosting is billed separately from your Claude plan: Cloudzyro's Launch plan is free and allows business use, and Boost is $20 a month per site with 2 CPUs, 2 GB of memory and 1 TB of traffic. See Build with Claude and Deploy a site built with Claude.