In shortWhat to expect from this document
"What does Claude cost" is a question with five answers, because Anthropic sells five different things under one name. This article puts them side by side: what each plan costs, what it contains, how much you may use it for, and what happens once that allowance runs out. Every figure was taken from Anthropic on 11 September 2026.
The short version: the paid plans barely differ in features. Claude Code, Claude Cowork, projects and the connections to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are all included from Pro onwards. What you are paying for is usage allowance. That makes the choice simpler than most business software, and harder at the same time, because an allowance is difficult to estimate in advance.
Anthropic bills in US dollars and publishes no separate euro price list. The euro amounts below are conversions at the rate of 11 September 2026, $1 = €0.8627, excluding VAT. Your billing address determines how tax is calculated; a business VAT number is entered in your account's billing settings. So do not put these euro figures into a budget that has to last a year: use the dollar price plus a margin for the exchange rate.
01The five plans at a glance
Two of them are for you personally, two for an organisation, and one is free. The line-up has not changed since the spring; what did change, in May 2026, is that the existing plans gained allowance.
| Plan | Price | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Getting acquainted, the occasional question, finding out whether Claude suits your work. |
| Pro | $20 per month, or $200 up front per year | A regular user who works with Claude alongside the day job. |
| Max 5x | $100 per month | Someone using Claude intensively every week who would rather not watch the limit each session. |
| Max 20x | $200 per month | Claude is the main working environment, daily, often with Claude Code alongside. |
| Team | From $20 per seat per month | Two to 150 colleagues, with shared administration, billing and access rights. |
| Enterprise | $20 per seat plus usage | Larger organisations that want to roll out department by department and cap what is spent. |
02What each plan costs exactly
For yourself
Pro is the only individual plan with an annual discount. Max exists on a monthly basis only; take Max for a year and you simply pay twelve monthly instalments.
| Plan | USD per month | USD per year | EUR per month, indicative | EUR per year, indicative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | €0 | €0 |
| Pro, monthly | $20 | $240 | ~€17.25 | ~€207 |
| Pro, year up front | ~$16.67 | $200 | ~€14.40 | ~€172.55 |
| Max 5x | $100 | $1,200 | ~€86.25 | ~€1,035 |
| Max 20x | $200 | $2,400 | ~€172.55 | ~€2,070 |
Paying for a year of Pro up front saves $40, around €34. It is the only discount in the individual line-up, and small enough not to base a decision on. Start monthly, and switch once two months have shown that Claude is staying.
For an organisation
Team comes with two seat types. They offer the same features; the difference is the allowance per person. You may mix them within one organisation, and usually that is the sensible thing to do: premium for the few people who live in it, standard for everyone else.
| Seat | USD per seat per month, annual billing | USD per seat per month, monthly billing | EUR per seat per month, indicative | Allowance per session |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Team, standard | $20 | $25 | ~€17.25 to ~€21.55 | 1.25× Pro |
| Team, premium | $100 | $125 | ~€86.25 to ~€107.85 | 6.25× Pro |
| Enterprise | From $20 plus usage | Annual billing only | On request | Depends on the agreement |
Team runs from a minimum of two seats to a maximum of 150. Grow beyond that and Anthropic points you to Enterprise. A worked example close to everyday practice: a department of ten people, two of whom use Claude daily, costs eight standard seats plus two premium seats on annual billing, so $160 plus $200 per month. That is $4,320 a year, around €3,727 excluding VAT.
A $20 standard seat gives 1.25 times the allowance of Pro, not five times. Anyone buying Team because it costs roughly the same per person as Pro is mainly buying administration: one invoice, sign-in with the company account, rights per user and a spending cap. That is a perfectly good reason, but it is not an upgrade in allowance.
03What sits in which plan
This is the surprise for anyone used to software licences where every feature carries a price tag. With Claude, almost everything is already in the entry plan.
- Free covers conversations in the web, mobile and desktop apps, with web search, memory across conversations, voice mode, file creation, skills and connectors.
- Pro adds Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Claude Design, projects, extended research and the Microsoft 365 connection, plus at least five times the usage per session compared with the free service.
- Max adds almost nothing to Pro in features. You are buying five or twenty times the session allowance, higher output limits and early access to new models and features.
- Team adds the organisational part: all models, a 200,000-token context window, shared projects and knowledge bases, search across Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack and GitHub, and administration with single sign-on, just-in-time provisioning and roles.
- Enterprise adds spend limits per user and per organisation, SCIM provisioning, audit logs and a HIPAA option.
So if you are wondering whether Claude Code or Claude Cowork has to be bought separately: it does not. They are in Pro. The only question is whether your allowance is large enough to use them alongside each other, because they all draw on the same pot.
04How the usage limits work
Anthropic publishes no message count per plan, and that is not evasiveness: how much you can do depends on the length of your conversation, the files you attach, the model you choose and the effort level you let it work at. Instead of a number, you get two windows.
The five-hour session window
Your session allowance refills every five hours. A long afternoon of heavy work can use it up; the next morning you start with a full pot again. This is the window most people run into.
The weekly limit
On top of that there is a weekly limit, resetting at a fixed time each week that is assigned to your account. This window mainly affects people running long sessions every day; anyone using Claude a few hours a week will never see it.
Where to see where you stand
On Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise plans, Settings has a Usage section with two progress bars: one for your five-hour session and one for your week. That is the only reliable measurement of your own pattern, and it is worth watching deliberately for a week before moving to a more expensive plan.
On 6 May 2026 Anthropic doubled Claude Code's five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise plans, and removed the peak-hours reduction for Pro and Max. Anyone judging the limits on experience from 2025 is judging a situation that no longer exists.
05What happens when your allowance runs out
You then have two options: wait for the window to reset, or keep working and pay for what you use. The second is called extra usage, and it is available on Pro, Max 5x and Max 20x.
Extra usage is billed at standard API rates, with no mark-up. You set a monthly spending cap yourself, and you can have the balance topped up automatically once it drops below a threshold you choose. There is a daily redemption limit of $2,000. On Team and Enterprise the administrator arranges this centrally, with limits per user and for the organisation as a whole.
If you hit your limit every single week, a higher plan is almost always cheaper and more predictable than extra usage. Extra usage is meant for the outlier: the week a deadline falls, not the normal pattern. Do look at your way of working first, because endless conversations that never get closed and oversized attachments are a more common cause than the plan.
06Team or Enterprise?
The dividing line is not only the number of people. Three questions settle it in practice.
How much control do you need? Team gives you seats, roles and a spending cap. Enterprise adds spend limits per user, user management through SCIM and audit logs. For organisations that have to demonstrate who had access to what, that is the difference that counts.
How do you want to pay? Team charges a fixed price per seat whether it is used or not. Enterprise charges a lower seat price plus actual usage at API rates. In an organisation where forty people have an account and ten really work with it, that second shape often comes out better. For a group working equally hard, the fixed seat price is more predictable.
How will you roll out? Enterprise lets you switch it on per department or group. That helps when you want to start with a department that is ready, rather than with everyone at once.
07Paying per use: the API rates
If you are building something yourself, or want to know what that extra usage is based on, this is the price list. Rates per million tokens; a token is roughly four characters.
| Model | Input per million tokens | Output per million tokens | What for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 5 | $5 | $25 | The heaviest reasoning and long-running work. |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | $2 | $10 | The workhorse for most applications. |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1 | $5 | Simple work in large volumes. |
Two things bring the bill down considerably and are often forgotten. A fixed part of your instruction, a manual or a long brief you send every time, can be stored; reading it back costs a tenth of the normal input price. And work that does not have to be finished immediately can be submitted as a batch, at fifty per cent off input and output. Web search is charged separately, at $10 per thousand searches.
Claude Sonnet 5's introductory rate of $2 and $10 per million tokens became permanent on 10 August 2026. The previously announced increase to $3 and $15 from 1 September 2026 will not happen. Anyone who budgeted for that increase can revise it downwards.
08Which plan fits which pattern?
The table below is our reading of the ratios Anthropic states, combined with what we see in organisations during training. It is a starting point for your own measurement, not a promise.
| Plan | Fits this pattern |
|---|---|
| Free | You want to find out whether this is for you. A few questions a day, no deadlines resting on it. |
| Pro | Claude is a tool beside your work. Half an hour to an hour a day, occasionally something bigger. Expect an intensive afternoon to use up that day's session allowance. |
| Max 5x | Claude is a fixed part of your week. You alternate conversations, documents and Claude Code and would rather not watch the bar each session. |
| Max 20x | Claude is your main working environment. Long sessions, daily, usually with code or long-running tasks alongside. |
| Team | Several people work with it and you want one invoice, shared projects and rights management. Mix the seat types according to real use. |
| Enterprise | You want spend caps per user, usage reporting and a rollout you switch on department by department. |
Measure your own pattern in a week
This is the only method that predicts your situation reliably, and it costs nothing:
- Work a normal week on your current plan and check Settings, Usage, every day.
- Note which days you ran into the session window, and what you were doing that day.
- If you never ran into it, your current plan is enough. Leave extra usage switched off.
- If you ran into it weekly, look at the way you work first: close long conversations, avoid oversized attachments, start a new conversation per task.
- If it still pinches with a tidy way of working, then move one plan up.
09The cost that rarely makes the budget
Of all the numbers in this article, the licence price is the smallest. An hour of a Dutch employee's time cost an employer €48 on average in 2025, according to Statistics Netherlands. A Pro subscription is about €17 a month. The licence pays for itself the moment someone saves a little over twenty minutes a month with it.
What actually costs organisations money is the reverse: people with a paid subscription who use it like a free one. They ask isolated questions instead of handing over the work, they do not know what projects are for, they never load in their own documents, and they paste results across without checking them. Then you are paying for Max and getting Free.
That is exactly why we sell training rather than subscriptions. In the Claude training participants work with their own documents and learn where the tool stops, which matters as much as what it can do. If your organisation runs several tools alongside each other, the hub covering all AI and Copilot training goes into choosing between them. And if you would rather read on first: the complete guide to Claude Design describes how the design side works, and the Claude Design cost analysis goes deeper into what design work specifically consumes.
FinallyA sober conclusion
For an individual user, Pro is the sensible starting point: $20 a month, every feature, and enough room for daily use alongside the day job. If you hit the limit weekly, Max 5x is the next step, and only after that Max 20x.
For an organisation the honest sum is less dramatic than it looks. Ten people on standard seats cost $2,400 a year on annual billing, around €2,070 excluding VAT. That is not a figure a board needs to meet about. The question that does deserve attention is whether those ten people are still logging in three months later, and whether what they get out of it is worth the time. No price list answers that.
Start with a small group on Pro or a handful of standard seats, measure for four weeks who runs into the limits, and then raise the plan specifically for the people who demonstrably need it. Do not buy Max for a whole department because two people are busy, and only switch on extra usage once the pattern is clear.
SourcesVerified on 11 September 2026
- claude.com/pricing, all subscription prices, as at 11 September 2026
- support.claude.com – What is the Pro plan, what Pro contains and how it relates to the free service
- support.claude.com – What is the Max plan, prices for Max 5x and Max 20x and the session ratios
- support.claude.com – What is the Team plan, seat prices, seat counts and the 1.25× and 6.25× ratios
- support.claude.com – How do usage and length limits work, session and weekly limits
- support.claude.com – Manage usage credits for paid Claude plans, extra usage, spending caps and the daily redemption limit
- support.claude.com – Understanding your billing address and tax calculation, billing address and tax calculation
- anthropic.com – Higher usage limits, doubling of Claude Code's five-hour limits, 6 May 2026
- platform.claude.com – Pricing, rates per million tokens, batch discount, prompt caching and Sonnet 5's permanent rate
- European Central Bank – reference rates, rate of $1 = €0.8627 on 11 September 2026
- Statistics Netherlands – The labour market in figures 2025, an average of €48 per hour worked in 2025