# Claude Code pricing: how much do Pro, Max, Team and the API cost?

Canonical: https://clawdocx.com/blog/claude-code-pricing
Author: Theo Marsh
Published: 2026-10-19
Updated: 2026-10-19

> What Claude Code costs on every Claude plan: Free, Pro at $17 or $20, Max 5x and 20x, Team seats and Enterprise, plus the per-token API rates.

Claude Code has no price of its own. It is included in every paid Claude plan, so what you pay is the plan: $17 a month for Pro on an annual commitment, $100 or $200 a month for the two Max tiers, $20 or $100 per seat a month for Team, or per-token API rates if you skip the subscription entirely. For one developer the honest default is Pro first and Max 5x only once you are actually hitting the session limit, because Anthropic's own figures put typical metered usage well above the Pro price and around the Max 5x price.

## Which plans include Claude Code?

Every paid one. The comparison table on [claude.com/pricing](https://claude.com/pricing) marks Claude Code as available on Pro, Max 5x, Max 20x, Team and Enterprise, and unavailable on Free, and the page's FAQ puts it plainly: "Claude Code is included in all paid plans."

That resolves a question worth being clear about, because older material says otherwise. Anthropic's Team and Enterprise support article now states that "Claude Code is included with every Team plan seat." Premium Team seats are not an access tier, they are a usage tier: the pricing page describes premium seats as carrying 5x more usage than standard seats. If you have read that Claude Code needs a premium seat, that advice predates the current documentation.

## What does each plan cost?

| Plan | Price as published | Claude Code | Usage, as the vendor describes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | No | Everyday questions |
| Pro | $17 per month with the annual discount ($200 billed up front); $20 billed monthly | Yes | At least 5x more usage than Free per 5-hour session |
| Max 5x | $100 per month | Yes | 5x the Pro plan's per-session usage allowance |
| Max 20x | $200 per month | Yes | 20x the Pro plan's per-session usage allowance |
| Team, standard seat | $20 per seat per month billed annually; $25 billed monthly | Yes | More usage than Pro |
| Team, premium seat | $100 per seat per month billed annually; $125 billed monthly | Yes | 5x more usage than a standard seat |
| Enterprise | US$20 per seat per month, billed annually, 20 seat minimum, plus usage at API rates | Yes | Billed at API rates, so cost scales with models and tasks |

Two details in that table are easy to misread. The pricing page advertises Max as "From $100" and never names the second tier's price; the $200 figure for Max 20x comes from the Max plan support article, which is the page that splits Max into the named 5x and 20x tiers. And Pro's "$17" is a rounded monthly equivalent of an up-front annual charge: $200 for the year is about $16.67 a month, which is why the annual and monthly figures are $200 and $20 rather than $204 and $20.

## How do the usage limits actually work?

Anthropic publishes allowances as multiples rather than counts, so no plan comes with a token budget you can read off a page. The shape is the same on every subscription: a session limit that, per the Max support article, "will reset every five hours", plus a weekly limit that "applies across all models". Max 5x and Max 20x are described as five times and 20 times the Pro plan's per-session allowance, and the support article does not publish Pro's underlying figure, so the comparison is relative by design.

On Team and Enterprise plans the allowance is per seat, resets on the same rolling five-hour and weekly windows, and is shared with Claude chat and Cowork rather than reserved for the terminal. That sharing matters more than it sounds: a day of heavy chat use eats into the same allowance your coding session draws on.

When you reach a limit, you are not simply stopped. Usage credits let you keep working past the plan's allowance and are managed with `/usage-credits` after signing in with a claude.ai subscription. They are billed spend, not included allowance, and they carry one side effect worth knowing: the prompt cache lifetime is an hour on a subscription and drops to five minutes once you are drawing on usage credits, which makes long gaps between messages more expensive than they were before.

## What does the API route cost instead?

If you authenticate with an API key rather than a subscription, you pay per token at list price and no allowance applies. These are the rates for the models a Claude Code session is most likely to use:

| Model | Input per million tokens | Output per million tokens |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 5.5 | $4 | $20 |
| Claude Opus 5 | $5 | $25 |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | $2 | $10 |
| Claude Haiku 5.5, prompts up to 100,000 tokens | $0.10 | $0.50 |
| Claude Haiku 5.5, prompts over 100,000 tokens | $0.50 | $2.50 |

Two discounts change the arithmetic. Cache hits and refreshes are billed at 0.05x the base input price on Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5, and at 0.1x on the other models, which is why a well-cached session costs far less than its raw token count suggests. The Batch API takes 50% off both input and output, though it is irrelevant to interactive coding. Note also that Haiku 5.5 is priced by prompt length: a request whose prompt crosses 100,000 tokens pays the higher rates for that whole request, cache reads included.

## Should you pay by subscription or by token?

For a developer using Claude Code most working days, the subscription wins, and the clearest evidence is Anthropic's own. The Claude Code cost documentation reports that across enterprise deployments "the average cost is around $13 per developer per active day and $150-250 per developer per month, with costs remaining below $30 per active day for 90% of users". Those are metered API figures. Set them beside $17 a month for Pro and $100 for Max 5x and the comparison makes itself.

The API key is still the right choice in three situations: usage that is genuinely occasional, where per-token billing beats any monthly fee; an organisation that wants workspace spend limits and per-user cost reporting in the Claude Console rather than seat allowances; and running Claude Code through Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud or Microsoft Foundry, where the tokens bill to your existing cloud account. Our [Codex and Claude Code comparison](/blog/codex-vs-claude-code) sets the same subscription-versus-token question against OpenAI's plans, and the [Claude Code beginner's guide](/blog/claude-code-beginners-guide-2026) covers which sign-in method to pick on day one.

## Why is the app price different from the web price?

Because the published prices are web prices. The Max plan support article states that its figures "are for web subscriptions only" and that "Mobile pricing may vary depending on your app platform." Anthropic does not publish the mobile figures on the pages above, so treat the price shown at the point of purchase in a mobile app as the one that applies to you, and subscribe on the web if you want the price you just read.

## How do you keep the bill down on either route?

The same habits help whether you are protecting an allowance or a budget, because both are driven by context size rather than message count:

- Clear between unrelated tasks with `/clear`. Claude Code sends the full conversation with every request, so a stale session charges for history you no longer need.
- Match the model to the job. Sonnet handles most coding work, and Sonnet 5.5 output runs $10 per million tokens against $20 for Opus 5.5 and $25 for Opus 5.
- Check `/usage`. On a paid plan it breaks down recent usage by skills, subagents, plugins and MCP servers, and flags behaviours such as long context or cache misses that account for 10% or more of it.
- Watch agent teams. The documentation puts them at roughly 7x the tokens of a standard session when teammates run in plan mode, because each teammate keeps its own context window.
- Expect a small idle cost. Background work such as conversation summarisation typically stays under $0.04 per session.

The [Claude Code hub](/ai-agents/claude-code) is where we keep the platform facts current, and the [Claude Code ultimate guide](/blog/claude-code-ultimate-guide) covers the workflow these costs pay for.

## What this page does not tell you

Anthropic publishes no token figure for any subscription allowance, so nobody outside the company can convert "5x Pro per session" into a number of requests, and this page does not try. If you need a hard ceiling you can plan against, the API route is the only one that gives you one, priced per token in the table above.

## Frequently asked questions

**Is Claude Code included in a Claude subscription?**

Yes, on every paid plan. The pricing page's FAQ states that Claude Code is included in all paid plans, and its comparison table marks Claude Code as available on Pro, Max 5x, Max 20x, Team and Enterprise, and unavailable on Free. There is no separate Claude Code subscription to buy.

**How much is the Max plan for Claude Code?**

Anthropic's Max plan support article lists two tiers: Max 5x at $100 per month and Max 20x at $200 per month. The article says those prices are for web subscriptions only and that mobile pricing may vary depending on your app platform. The public pricing page shows Max only as From $100 per month.

**Do Team standard seats get Claude Code, or only premium seats?**

Both. Anthropic's Team and Enterprise support article states that Claude Code is included with every Team plan seat, and the pricing page marks Claude Code as available on Team. Premium seats differ in how much usage they carry, not in whether Claude Code works: the pricing page describes premium seats as getting 5x more usage than standard seats.

**Is it cheaper to use Claude Code with an API key or a subscription?**

For one developer working most days, a subscription is almost always cheaper. Anthropic's own cost documentation puts average API-metered spend at around $13 per developer per active day and $150 to $250 per developer per month, which is above the $100 Max 5x tier and well above Pro. An API key makes sense when usage is light and occasional, or when you need per-token billing and workspace spend controls.

**Why does Claude cost more in the iPhone app than on the web?**

Anthropic publishes its subscription prices for web purchases. The Max plan support article says explicitly that its prices are for web subscriptions only and that mobile pricing may vary depending on your app platform. If you subscribe inside a mobile app, check the price shown at the point of purchase rather than assuming the web figure.

**What counts against a Claude Code usage limit?**

The same allowance covers Claude chat, Cowork and Claude Code, and it resets on a rolling five-hour window with a separate weekly limit across all models. Because Claude Code resends the conversation with every request, a session left open all day keeps drawing usage even for short questions.

## Sources

- [Claude pricing](https://claude.com/pricing)
- [Claude Help Center: What is the Max plan?](https://support.claude.com/en/articles/11049741-what-is-the-max-plan)
- [Claude Help Center: Use Claude Code with your Team or Enterprise plan](https://support.claude.com/en/articles/11845131-use-claude-code-with-your-team-or-enterprise-plan)
- [Claude Platform docs: Pricing](https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing)
- [Claude Code docs: Manage costs effectively](https://code.claude.com/docs/en/costs)