Claude AI: free plan, Pro or Max, the full guide to Anthropic's assistant

Updated on September 18, 2026

Claude AI is the conversational assistant from Anthropic, a San Francisco company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei. A free plan covers chat, web search, memory and voice mode, while Pro costs $20 per month ($17 billed annually). The model range is headed by Claude Fable 5.1, alongside Opus 5, Sonnet 5 and Haiku 4.5. Apps run on the web, Windows, macOS, iOS and Android.

Fable 5.1, Opus 5, Sonnet 5 and Haiku 4.5, the Claude model range

Four models power Claude, each with a clear role. Fable 5.1, the most capable, targets ambitious coding, long-running agents and scientific research, available from the Pro plan upward. Opus 5 is the recommended pick for most tasks, Sonnet 5 handles everyday work and Haiku 4.5 goes for speed. Fable, Opus and Sonnet support a context window of 1 million tokens. You drop a 300-page report into the chat, ask three questions, and the summary lands (a whole codebase fits too, nobody is judging).

A quick word about the name. It is widely read as a reference to Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, though Anthropic has never settled the question publicly. The company also steers its models with a public Constitution, the backbone of its safety approach.

Claude Code, Cowork, Chrome, an ecosystem well past the chat window

The Claude ecosystem reaches from the terminal to the browser, with desktop and mobile apps on every major platform.

Rivals keep their own strengths, of course. In the crowded market for AI chat assistants, ChatGPT holds on to image generation and its GPT catalog, Google Gemini leans on Google's services, Mistral Le Chat plays the European card and Perplexity bets on sourced search. Claude built its name on careful writing and code, to the point that plenty of developers have made it their daily tool.

• Claude Code, the coding agent living in your terminal
• Claude Cowork, automation for files and repetitive tasks
• Claude Design, mockups and interface generation
• Claude for Chrome, an agent that browses on your behalf
• Claude in Excel and Microsoft 365 for office work

From the free plan to Max, what a subscription costs

Claude starts at $0 with a Free plan that includes chat, web search, memory, voice mode, artifacts and file creation. Pro costs $20 per month, or $17 billed annually, and adds Opus 5, Fable 5.1, Claude Code, Cowork, Claude Design, the Research feature and unlimited projects. Max begins at $100 per month for five to twenty times the usage of Pro, higher output limits and early access to new features. Team runs $20 per seat billed annually ($25 monthly), Enterprise starts at $20 per seat billed annually with usage-based costs on top.

On the API side, Haiku 4.5 bills at $1 per million input tokens, Sonnet 5 at $2, Opus 5 at $5 and Fable 5.1 at $10, with output priced five times higher. These figures shift as new models ship, so the official pricing page is the only number that counts on the day you subscribe.

Frequently asked questions