Claude Code pricing: Pro $20, Max $100, Ultra $200 a month

Claude Code pricing starts at $20 a month. As of October 31, 2026, Anthropic's pricing page lists Claude Code as included on Pro, Max, Ultra, Team and Enterprise, and not included on the Free plan. If you would rather pay per token, you can also run it on a Claude Console account at API rates.

So there are two ways to pay: a flat subscription with usage limits, or metered API billing. Which one is cheaper depends on how much you use it.

Claude Code pricing by plan

Prices below are from the Claude pricing page, as of October 31, 2026. Anthropic renamed its top two tiers on October 30, which we covered in Max and Ultra plans renamed.

Team is for 2 to 150 users. The pricing page does not list separate Claude Code limits. On subscriptions, Claude Code draws from the same allowance as the rest of your plan.

Is Claude Code free?

No. The Free plan does not include Claude Code, so the cheapest subscription route is Pro. Our earlier piece, Is Claude Code free?, covers that question in more detail.

How much Claude Code costs through the API

Claude Code can also run on a Claude Console account. In that case you pay per token, with no plan limit.

Anthropic's cost documentation says Claude Code charges by API token consumption. Across enterprise deployments, the average cost is around $13 per developer per active day and $150 to $250 per developer per month. Costs stay below $30 per active day for 90% of users. Anthropic says individual costs vary widely with model choice, codebase size and habits such as running several instances or automation.

The models behind those bills have these list prices on the pricing page, per million tokens, as of October 31, 2026:

Haiku 5.5 costs $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts up to 100K tokens. Batch processing saves 50%. Cache writes cost more than plain input; the pricing page lists them.

Compare that with the plans. At the $13-a-day average, a developer who works 20 active days would spend about $260 on the API. Ultra at $200 a month would cost less, though Anthropic does not say a given plan covers that much work. Treat this as arithmetic on an average, not a promise.

Which plans work with Claude Code

Per the authentication docs, you can sign in with any of these:

• A Claude Pro, Max or Ultra subscription, using your claude.ai account.
• Claude for Teams or Enterprise, using the account your admin invited you to.
• A Claude Console account, billed per token.
• A cloud provider: Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud's Agent Platform or Microsoft Foundry. Billing goes to your cloud account.

After you install Claude Code, run claude and it opens a browser window to log in.

How to check and cut your Claude Code spend

Run /usage inside Claude Code. On API billing it shows the session's token use and an estimated dollar cost, which Anthropic says is calculated locally and is an estimate; the Claude Console usage page is the authoritative bill. On a subscription it shows plan usage bars instead.

Anthropic's docs suggest a few habits that cut token use:

• Run /clear when you switch to unrelated work, because Claude Code sends the full conversation with every request.
• Use Sonnet for most coding and keep Opus for hard problems. Switch with /model.
• Lower the effort level with /effort for simple tasks.
• Disable MCP servers you are not using.

When you hit a plan limit, /usage-credits lets you add usage credits to keep working past it, if your plan allows that.

What the pricing page does not say

The page does not give a token count or number of messages behind "1x" or "5x". It also does not list a Claude Code allowance separate from the rest of the plan. Anthropic changes plans often, so check claude.com/pricing before you commit.