Claude's pricing in 2026: Free, Pro, Max, Team, Enterprise, and API
Guide published on October 26, 2026, compiled from Claude's official help center (support.claude.com), Anthropic documentation and price comparisons gathered in October 2026. Anthropic updates its offers every month and displays its prices in euros depending on the country: the amount shown at the time of payment is binding.
Claude costs from $0 to $200 per month for an individual, and from $20 per seat per month for a team. The free version is sufficient to discover the tool. The Pro subscription, around €18 excluding VAT per month in France, unlocks Claude Code. Cowork and the most powerful models. The two Max plans, at $100 and $200, don't offer a better model but rather greater storage capacity. For businesses, Team is designed for teams of 2 to 150 people, while Enterprise is for large organizations, with billing based on usage. Finally, the API is token-based, ranging from $0,10 to $50 per million depending on the plan. This guide details each price, what it includes, and how to choose the right plan without paying for unnecessary services.
Claude's price at a glance
| It offers | Price (excluding taxes) | For who | What changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 0 € | Discover Claude | Conversation, web search, files, limited usage |
| Pro | $20 per month, or $17 per month paid annually (approximately €18 and €15 excluding VAT in France) | Daily professional use | Claude Code, CoworkClaude Design, all models except Fable |
| Max 5x | $100 per month (approximately €90 excluding tax) | Heavy users, developers | 5 times the usage of Pro, including Fable |
| Max 20x | 200 $ per month | Intensive use of Claude Code | 20 times the usage of Pro |
| Team, standard seat | $25 per month, or $20 paid annually | Teams of 2 to 150 people | Centralized administration, SSO, connectors |
| Team, premium seat | $125 per month, or $100 paid annually | Heavy users of a team | 6,25 times the usage of Pro, including Fable |
| Enterprise | Annual seat ($20 self-service) plus consumption at the API rate | Large organizations | Spending controls, compliance, with no monthly cap |
| API | From $0,10 to $50 per million tokens | Developers, applications | Pay-as-you-go, no subscription required |
All subscription prices are exclusive of tax. Individuals in France pay an additional 20% VAT: the monthly Pro subscription then costs just over €21 including VAT. Businesses subscribing with their intra-community VAT number are billed excluding tax and can reclaim the VAT under the usual conditions. If you subscribe via the iPhone app, the price is set by the App Store and may differ from the website price.
Claude, free: what you get without paying
Claude is fully free to use on the web, on computers (Windows and macOS), and on mobile devices. Simply create an account with an email address. The free version includes:
- The conversation to write, summarize, translate, analyze a text or attached document.
- Web search, with the sources cited.
- Memory from one conversation to the next.
- File creation (documents, tables, presentations) and the execution of code to analyze data.
- The connectors to Google Workspace and Slack, and remote MCP connectors.
- In-depth reflection for questions that require multi-step reasoning.
What free doesn't include: Claude Code, CoworkClaude Design, Claude for Microsoft 365, the Research function and access to the most powerful models. Fable, Anthropic's most advanced model, is not offered in the free version.
The real drawback of free services is the volume. Anthropic doesn't publish a daily message limit: usage depends on the length of your exchanges, the attachments, and server load. In practice, a few long conversations with documents are enough to reach the limit, and you have to wait for it to reset before you can continue. The encrypted quotas circulating on the internet don't originate from Anthropic.
A word of caution for professional use: a free personal account does not offer the contractual guarantees of a team plan. Before uploading work documents, check your organization's policy. We discuss these issues in more detail in our article. Claude's Safety and Compliance in Business.
Claude Pro: the price and what it includes
Claude Pro costs $20 per month with no commitment, or $200 paid once per year, which works out to about $17 per month. Price checks conducted from France in October 2026 indicate approximately €18 excluding VAT per month and approximately €15 excluding VAT per month annually, before the 20% VAT for individuals.
The Pro version is the offering that transforms Claude from a conversation assistant into a work tool. It adds to the free version:
- More use per session, with a limit that resets every five hours and a weekly limit.
- Claude Code, the agent that codes in your terminal, your editor, or the desktop application.
- Coworkwhich performs complete tasks on your files, from research to deliverable.
- Claude Design, to produce presentations, visuals and mock-ups.
- Unlimited projects, with their knowledge bases.
- Research, which conducts in-depth documentary research on the web and in your connected devices.
- Claude for Microsoft 365 and additional connectors.
- The Opus, Sonnet and Haiku models.
One exception to be aware of: since July 20, 2026, the Fable template is no longer included in the Pro subscription. A Pro subscriber can still use it, but on a pay-as-you-go basis using usage credits, at the API rate. For the vast majority of office tasks, Opus and Sonnet are more than sufficient: see our article The right AI model for each task explains how to choose.
Claude Max: $100 or $200 for more volume
The Max subscription comes in two tiers: Max 5x at $100 per month (approximately €90 excluding VAT in France) and Max 20x at $200 per month. There is no discounted annual rate for Max. The name says it all: Max 5x provides five times the Pro usage per five-hour session, Max 20x twenty times.
Max doesn't offer a smarter Claude: the models are the same as on Pro. He buys in volume, with four concrete advantages:
- Fable includedup to half of the weekly quota, at no extra cost. Beyond that, you must switch to another model or pay with usage credits.
- Priority access during peak demand hours and with new features.
- Monthly API credits Starting October 7, 2026: $100 per month on Max 5x, $200 on Max 20x. These fees cover the API, agent SDK, and managed agents, but not Claude Code or additional usage within Claude applications. These fees do not roll over from month to month.
- A comfortable margin for Claude Code, which shares the same counter as the conversation.
Max is justified in two cases: you reach the Pro limit several times a week, or you entrust Claude Code with long development sessions. For typical office use, even heavy use, Pro remains the right choice.
How do usage limits work?
This is the most frequently asked question during training, because Claude doesn't count messages but calculations. Three rules help to navigate this:
- A limit of five hours per session. It starts with your first message and resets five hours later.
- A weekly limitThis applies to all models combined, in addition to a counter specific to Sonnet and a counter specific to Claude Design. The "Usage" panel in the settings displays these gauges.
- A common counter to all your interfaces: web, desktop application, mobile, Claude Code and Cowork draw from the same reserve.
What uses the most resources: long conversations (Claude rereads the entire history after each reply), large attachments, tasks Cowork and Claude Code, who follow the steps, and the most powerful models. Opening a new conversation for each topic and choosing Sonnet for simple tasks saves a lot of space.
Usage credits: continue after the limit
On Pro, Max, and Team plans, you can enable usage credits in the settings. When a limit is reached, your requests will switch to pay-as-you-go pricing instead of stopping, at the standard API rate. Credits are prepaid, and three safeguards are in place: a monthly spending cap, automatic top-up below a threshold you choose, and alerts when you're approaching your limits. Without credits enabled, you won't be charged anything extra; you simply wait for the credits to reset.
Claude Team: the price for a team
The Team offer covers groups of 2 to 150 people. It offers two types of seats, which can be mixed within the same team:
| Standard seat | Premium Seat | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly price, no commitment | $25 per person | $125 per person |
| Price paid annually | $20 per person per month | $100 per person per month |
| Per-session usage | 1,25 times Pro | 6,25 times Pro |
| Fable | Pay-as-you-go | Includes up to half of the weekly quota |
| Monthly API credits | $ 20 | $ 100 |
A team's API credits are pooled and capped at $500 per month. For example, a team with three standard seats and two premium seats receives $260 in monthly API credits.
Beyond sheer volume, Team delivers what IT departments expect: centralized billing and access management, single sign-on (SSO) with domain capture, roles and permissions, spending limits per organization and per person, connectors to Microsoft 365, Google Drive, Gmail, GitHub, and Slack, and a pre-configured enterprise search. Claude Code and Cowork are included. Usage limits are individual: an employee cannot transfer their reserve to another.
Example budget: A team of 50 people with standard seating costs $12,000 per year (excluding taxes) with annual billing, compared to $15,000 with monthly billing. Annual billing saves 20%, but commits you to a specific number of seats: it's better to start with monthly billing to gauge actual adoption.
Claude Enterprise: one seat plus consumption
The Enterprise offering underwent a change in its pricing model in 2026. New contracts are based on a single seat, paid annually, which grants access to the platform but does not include any usage. Consumption is billed separately, at the standard API rate, based on the tokens actually used. Price comparisons from August and October 2026 indicate a self-service entry price of $20 per seat per month; contracts negotiated with Anthropic's sales team have a seat price specific to each client.
The old standard and premium fixed-price seats are no longer offered to new clients: organizations that have them switch to the consumption-based model upon renewal. A few rules to know before signing:
- The seats are billed at the beginning of the year. Those added during the year are prorated, and in self-service you cannot withdraw them before the expiry date.
- Usage is prepaid with credits. self-service, or billed monthly in arrears in a negotiated contract.
- Spending limits These are settled at the organizational and individual levels; the lower of the two applies. Usage-based billing, which is part of the offer, cannot be disabled.
- Accommodation in the United States onlyIf you activate it, it increases consumption by 10%.
This model has a direct impact on the budget: the cost of Enterprise depends as much on how your teams use Claude as on the number of seats. One hundred seats at $20 each represent $24,000 per year before any usage. An employee who instinctively chooses Fable to rephrase an email costs five times more than using Sonnet and one hundred times more than using Haiku, for the same result. This is why training is part of the calculation: a Claude's training in the workplace Learning to choose the right model and structure one's requests directly reduces the consumption bill.
The price of the Claude API, model by model
The API is used to integrate Claude into your own applications, agents, or automations. There is no subscription: you pay for the tokens sent (input) and the tokens produced (output). One token is roughly equivalent to three-quarters of a word in English, slightly less in French. Here are the prices in effect as of October 2026, in dollars per million tokens:
| Model | Starter | Trip | Reading cache | Batch processing (input/output) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $ 10 | $ 50 | $ 0,25 | $5 / $25 |
| Opus 5.5 | $ 4 | $ 20 | $ 0,20 | $2 / $10 |
| sun 5.5 | $ 2 | $ 10 | $ 0,10 | $1 / $5 |
| Haiku 5.5 (requests up to 100,000 tokens) | $ 0,10 | $ 0,50 | $ 0,01 | $0,05 / $0,25 |
| Haiku 5.5 (beyond 100,000 tokens) | $ 0,50 | $ 2,50 | $ 0,05 | $0,25 / $1,25 |
Prices dropped significantly in the fall of 2026. Opus 5.5, released on September 22, costs $4 and $20 compared to $5 and $25 for Opus 5. Haiku 5.5, released on October 7, is advertised as being about 75% cheaper to run than Haiku 4.5. Sonnet 5.5 has retained the prices of Sonnet 5, whose planned increase on September 1 has been cancelled.
The factors that affect the bill
- The prompt cache : a reused context (instructions, reference documents) is reviewed at a fraction of the entry price. Writing it costs 1,25 times the entry price for a duration of five minutes, 2 times for one hour.
- Batch processing divides the price by two for tasks that can wait a few hours: document classification, database enrichment, serial summaries.
- The quick mode of Opus 5.5, in preview, produces answers up to 2,5 times faster for double the price (8 and 40 dollars).
- The long context The one million token window is charged at the normal rate for Fable, Opus, and Sonnet. Only Haiku 5.5 incurs a five times higher rate beyond 100,000 tokens.
- Accommodation in the United States only increases all tokens by 10%.
How much does an exchange actually cost?
Let's take a typical request: 2,000 tokens sent (one instruction and a one-and-a-half-page document) and 800 response tokens. The calculation gives:
| Model | Cost of an exchange | Cost of 1,000 exchanges | 1,000 batch exchanges |
|---|---|---|---|
| Haiku 5.5 | 0,06 cents | $ 0,60 | $ 0,30 |
| sun 5.5 | 1,2 cents | $ 12 | $ 6 |
| Opus 5.5 | 2,4 cents | $ 24 | $ 12 |
| Fable 5.1 | 6 cents | $ 60 | $ 30 |
The difference between the lightest and most powerful models reaches a factor of 100. For an agent handling thousands of requests, choosing the right model is far more significant than any price negotiation. These figures only apply to simple exchanges: an agent who performs multiple searches, tool calls, and reviews quickly consumes ten to fifty times more resources.
Note: the API is set up by prepaying credits on the Claude console, and Claude is also available from major cloud providers (Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud, Microsoft Foundry), which allows the expense to be charged to an existing cloud contract.
Claude Code and Cowork How much does it cost?
Neither Claude Code nor Cowork They are not sold separately. Both are included in all paid subscriptions (Pro, Max, Team, Enterprise) and draw from the same data allowance as chat. They are not included in the free plan.
These are also the functions that consume the most resources, because they operate autonomously across multiple stages. A developer using Claude Code for several hours a day quickly reaches the Pro plan's limits: this is the typical profile for the Max subscription. Claude Code can also work with an API key, billed per token: useful for occasional use or continuous integration, but less predictable than a subscription for daily use. Our guide Claude Code in business details how to frame it.
For CoworkThe question of price also arises on Microsoft's side. Copilot Cowork It works with Anthropic templates, but it's purchased differently: it requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license ("Copilot Premium"), and each task is billed separately in Copilot credits, at a rate of $0.01 per credit on a pay-as-you-go basis. The differences between the two are detailed in our article. Difference between Copilot Cowork and Claude Cowork.
Students, teachers, researchers: is there a discount?
There is no individual student rate for Claude: no promo code, no discounted price with a university email address. Access is through the institution. With the Claude for Education offer, subscribed to by a university, students and staff log in with their university email address at no personal cost and benefit from a learning mode that guides students through questions rather than providing answers. For research teams, a Team offer reserved for scientists provides free standard seats and premium seats for $15 per month for twelve months, subject to approval by the lab director.
Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot: price comparison
| Claude | ChatGPT | Microsoft 365 Copilot | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free version | Yes | Yes | Yes (Copilot Chat, included in Microsoft 365) |
| Individual entry offer | Pro: approximately €18 excluding VAT per month | Plus: €23 including VAT per month | License costs approximately $30 per user per month |
| Offer for large users | Max: $100 or $200 | Pro: from €103 per month | No equal |
| Team offer | Team: $20 to $25 per seat | Business class: €21 to €26 per seat | Per-user license, plus Cowork in use |
| Big business | Seat plus consumption at API rate | Quote only | Microsoft Contract |
The entry prices are similar; what really distinguishes the offers is what the basic subscription includes. With Claude, Pro already includes Claude Code and CoworkFrom Microsoft's perspective, Copilot's appeal lies in its integration with Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint, which your teams already use. To compare usage and not just price, see our comparison. Claude or ChatGPT: which one to choose for work.
Which Claude offer should I choose?
- You are discovering AI or using it a few times a week : the free version is sufficient, provided that no sensitive company data is put in it.
- You use it every day to write, analyze, or prepare documents Pro, preferably with annual payment once the service is installed.
- You reach the Pro limit several times a week, or you code with Claude Code : Max 5x initially, Max 20x only if the limit returns.
- You equip a team of 2 to 150 people Team in standard seats, with some premium seats for the biggest users.
- You are deploying more than 150 people, or you have strict compliance requirements. : Enterprise, by planning a consumption budget and ceilings from the outset.
- You integrate Claude into an application or an agent : the API, starting with Haiku or Sonnet and reserving Opus and Fable for tasks that really need them.
Five ways to pay Claude less
- Upgrade to an annual subscription once usage is confirmed : approximately 17% savings on Pro, 20% on Team.
- Claim monthly API credits If you are on Max or Team: these funds are not automatically allocated; you must activate them on claude.ai and link them to an organization within the console. If unused, they are lost at the end of the month.
- Choose the model according to the task : Sonnet or Haiku to reformulate, summarize or classify, Opus for complex analyses, Fable for cases that really justify it.
- Open a new conversation by topic : a conversation that gets longer becomes increasingly expensive with each reply, both in terms of limits and tokens.
- Capping usage credits as soon as they are activated, to avoid an unexpected bill at the end of the month.
F.A.Q
Is Claude free?
Yes, Claude offers a free version on the web, for computers and mobile devices, with chat, web search, file creation, and memory. Usage is limited, and Claude Code, CoworkClaude Design and the most powerful models are reserved for paid offers.
How much does a Claude Pro subscription cost in euros?
Approximately €18 excluding VAT per month with no commitment in France, which is just over €21 including VAT for individuals, and approximately €15 excluding VAT per month with annual billing. The reference price is $20 per month, or $200 per year.
What is the difference between Claude Pro and Claude Max?
Volume, not intelligence. Max 5x ($100) gives you five times the usage of Pro, Max 20x ($200) twenty times. Max also includes Fable up to half the weekly quota, priority access, and monthly API credits. The available models are the same.
Is Claude Code included in the subscription?
Yes, it's included in all paid subscriptions: Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise. It shares the same chat usage limits. It's not available in the free version, but can also be used with an API key charged per token.
What happens when I reach the usage limit?
Claude will tell you the reset time, at the latest five hours after the start of the session, unless the weekly limit has been reached. If you have activated usage credits, you will continue to pay as you go, at the API rate, up to the limit you have set.
Can I cancel my Claude subscription at any time?
Yes, you can do this through your online account's billing settings. Paid access remains active until the end of your current billing period. Subscriptions purchased through the iPhone or Android app are canceled in the app store settings, not on claude.ai.
How much does Claude cost a company?
For a team of 2 to 150 people, the Team plan costs $20 to $25 (excluding tax) per person per month for a standard seat, and $100 to $125 for a premium seat. For larger teams, the Enterprise plan combines an annual seat with API usage: the budget then depends on both usage and the number of people.
Sources
- Claude's Help Center, Team offer: seats, prices and features, accessed October 26, 2026.
- Claude's Help Center, the use of the Max offer, accessed October 26, 2026.
- Claude's Help Center, Enterprise offer billing, accessed October 26, 2026.
- Claude's Help Center, manage usage credits for paid offers, accessed October 26, 2026.
- Claude's Help Center, Claude Fable according to your offer, accessed October 26, 2026.
- Sentra, API Claude ratesOctober 2026, cross-checked with the statement of October 14, 2026 published on DEV Community.
- AI Weekly, Claude Haiku 5.5 launch, 7 October 2026
- MIXED News, the monthly API credits of the Max and Team plans, 8 October 2026
- Vantage Point, Claude's offers, from Free to EnterpriseUpdated October 10, 2026.
- Fabrimot, Claude subscription prices recorded from FranceUpdated October 12, 2026.
- GeoToolbox, ChatGPT pricing in eurosUpdated October 24, 2026.
- Microsoft, Copilot credits and Copilot billing Cowork.
- TrustedTech, Microsoft 365 Copilot license and Copilot cost Cowork, 2026.