Claude Code starts at $17 a month, and the Free plan does not include it

The cheapest way into Claude Code is Claude Pro, which works out to about $17 a month when paid yearly. Claude Code is Anthropic's tool that runs in your terminal, reads your project files and edits them directly. It is not sold on its own, and the Free plan does not include it. There is no trial for it either.

What each individual plan costs

Pro costs $200 billed once a year, or $20 month by month. Max costs $100 a month and gives five times the Pro usage. Ultra costs $200 a month and removes the five hour usage window, but only for verified accounts, so there is an identity check behind it. Max and Ultra also include monthly credits for building on Anthropic's developer platform.

Free needs only an account, no card. It covers web search, file creation, code execution and up to five projects, with Sonnet and Haiku models but no Opus. Its usage limit is described only as limited.

Which tier fits

Pro suits a couple of focused Claude Code sessions a day. Long automated runs, several copies running at once and large projects use up the allowance much faster. Moving from Pro to Max is $83 more a month. Ultra is for work built around one long task, such as overnight rewrites, where stopping at a five hour boundary costs more than the extra money.

A simple rule from the guide: if you hit your limit twice in a week and lose your working context each time, move up a tier. If it happens once a month, the upgrade buys little.

Teams and companies

Team plans cover 2 to 150 people. Anthropic lowered the minimum to two seats in July. A standard seat is $20 a month billed annually, or $25 monthly. A premium seat is $100 annually, or $125 monthly, with five times the standard allowance. Seat types can be mixed inside one organization.

• Team adds central billing, single sign-on, admin controls and usage analytics.
• Team includes up to $500 a month of pooled API credits.
• Team does not include audit logs, role-based access, SCIM or custom data retention.

Those missing items sit in Enterprise, and they are what security reviews usually ask for. Enterprise costs $20 per seat per month billed annually, with a 20 seat minimum, plus usage at API rates. The seat is only the access fee. Budgeting it as a flat subscription is a common mistake.

What to watch

In late October, some users reported Claude Code limits draining within hours of a reset. Check for that before blaming your own prompts and upgrading in a hurry. Prices on the official page exclude tax and can change. The material does not describe the sales-led Enterprise option in full.