$20, $100 or $200.
Which one, and why.
The plan comparison everyone writes lists the tiers and stops. The harder question is which tier your actual week needs, and there is a way to buy the answer for a few dollars before committing to a year of the wrong one.
Pro is $20 a month, or $17 a month if you pay annually. Max comes in two tiers: $100 a month for five times Pro’s usage per session, and $200 a month for twenty times. Anthropic positions the first as suited to frequent users working across a variety of tasks, and the second as suited to daily users who work with Claude on most of their tasks. All three include Claude Code, Claude Cowork and Claude Design.
The multipliers are relative, not a quota
Five times and twenty times are measured against Pro’s usage per session, not against a published number of messages or tokens. That matters because nobody can tell you in advance how many hours of your particular work fits in a tier. What you can do is measure your own consumption against Pro for two weeks, which is a real number rather than an estimate.
The rule that beats guessing
Do not upgrade because you hit a limit. Upgrade when hitting a limit stops work that earns money or blocks someone else. Being capped at four on a Friday when you were tidying notes is an inconvenience. Being capped at eleven on Tuesday with a client waiting is a business cost, and the second one justifies the tier in a single incident.
Buy the answer before you buy the plan
When you reach a cap you can wait for the reset, move up a plan, or switch on usage credits and keep working at standard API rates. That third option is the interesting one, because it puts a price on your overflow. Run a month on Pro with credits enabled and look at what the overflow cost. If it came to $12, moving to $100 a month is a poor trade. If it came to $90, the decision has made itself.
One allowance, two jobs
Usage limits are shared across Claude and Claude Code, and they reset on a rolling five-hour window with weekly limits on top. So a heavy afternoon of agentic coding competes directly with the writing you planned for the evening. People who feel their plan is too small are often running two demanding workloads through one allowance without realising it.
Teams are a different calculation
Team seats are priced separately, with a standard seat and a premium seat that carries five times the standard seat’s usage, and both are cheaper billed annually. The reason to move a team onto seats is rarely the price. It is that you get shared administration and a single place to see what is being spent, which is worth more than the per-seat difference once you are past about five people.
Every figure here was accurate in May 2026 and Anthropic revises plans, limits and multipliers regularly. Check the current numbers before you commit. If you are weighing a plan upgrade against getting your team properly trained on what they already pay for, our pricing page sets out how we work, and team training covers the group version.
Things people
usually ask.
It is four times the usage per session, not twice, and it costs twice as much. Whether that is good value depends entirely on whether you were hitting the 5x ceiling. If you were not, the extra headroom does nothing for you.
Paying annually is cheaper per month and commits you for the year. Given how quickly these plans change, running monthly for a couple of months first and then committing once you know your pattern is the safer sequence.
No. Claude Code is included on Pro. What Max adds is headroom, and Claude Code is usage-hungry enough that heavy users tend to feel Pro’s ceiling before light users feel it at all.