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.
FreeFreeFree for everyone.
Pro$20/mo$17/mo if you pay $200 up frontThe advertised figure is the annual rate. Billed month to month it is $20.
Maxfrom $100/moStarts at $100/month; higher tiers exist.
TeamNot published as a flat rateFor teams of 2 to 150. Seat pricing not confidently mapped from the page and therefore not stated here.
Enterprise$20 /seat/mo + usageSeat 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.

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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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.