Claude Pro Adds Claude Code and Opus; Max Is $100 or $200

Update, 11 October 2026. This page listed Claude Design, Slides and Docs as Pro features. Anthropic’s pricing table, re-read on 11 October, marks all three Yes on Free, and its Design help page says Claude Design “is available on Free, Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans”. The table and the Pro section are corrected; Claude in Chrome and Claude for Microsoft 365 are still Pro and above. We also described Google’s 9 October change as free Gemini dropping to Flash-Lite; Google’s revised notice gives free accounts Auto, mostly Flash-Lite, and that link is reworded.

Claude Free costs nothing and covers chat with the Sonnet and Haiku models; Pro, at $20 a month, adds Claude Code, Opus, Research and more than five projects. Max costs $100 for five times Pro’s usage per five-hour session, or $200 for twenty times, and adds Anthropic’s Fable models up to half the weekly limit. Anthropic states none of these limits as a message count.

Free, Pro and Max side by side

	Free	Pro	Max 5x	Max 20x
US price a month	$0	$20, or $200 a year	$100	$200
Usage per five-hour session	Base	At least 5x Free	5x Pro	20x Pro
Weekly limit	None stated	Yes	Yes	Yes
Models	Sonnet, Haiku	Adds Opus	Adds Fable	Adds Fable
Fable 5 and 5.1	No	With usage credits	Up to 50% of weekly limit	Up to 50% of weekly limit
Claude Code	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Projects	Up to 5	Yes	Yes	Yes
Research	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Claude Design, Slides, Docs	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Claude in Chrome; Claude for Microsoft 365	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Pay to keep going (usage credits)	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Priority access at busy times	No	No	Yes	Yes
Monthly API credit	No	No	$100	$200

Prices are Anthropic’s US list prices before tax, read on 8 October 2026, from claude.com/pricing and its Help Center. “Yes” and “No” are the pricing page’s own values. Pro’s annual price is $200 billed up front, which the pricing page shows as $17 a month; Max is billed monthly, with no annual option.

What Free already includes

More than the price suggests. The pricing page marks all four plans Yes for chat on web, iOS, Android and desktop, web search, memory, Artifacts, voice mode, incognito chats, Skills, connectors, desktop extensions, and creating and editing files with code execution. Each plan’s context window is listed as “up to 1M, varies by model”.

What Free lacks is depth. It has no Claude Code, no Opus, no Research, and projects are capped at five. Anthropic’s own description of the Free allowance is that it “covers everyday questions”.

How the limits work, in Anthropic’s words

Anthropic gives three rules, on its pricing page and in the Help Center:

1. A rolling five-hour session. All four plans reset on it.
2. A weekly limit on top, for paid plans. It resets at a fixed day and time assigned to your account, shown in Settings › Usage.
3. One pool. Chat on the web, desktop and phone, and Claude Code, all draw from the same allowance.

Anthropic publishes the multiples and not the base they multiply. It says “there’s no fixed message count”, because usage depends on the length of the conversation, attached files, the model, the effort level and the features used. So Max 20x is twenty times Pro per session, but neither page says how many messages Pro allows, or how large any weekly limit is.

Both help articles also reserve the right to limit usage “in other ways, such as weekly and monthly caps or model and feature usage”. When you hit a limit, the options are to wait, move up a plan, or on a paid plan turn on usage credits, billed at standard API rates.

Long chats spend the allowance faster. On paid plans with code execution on, Claude summarises older messages as a chat nears its context window, and Anthropic says those longer chats “consume more of your usage limit”. Why chatbots lose track of long conversations explains what that window is.

What Pro adds

Claude Code is the headline. Anthropic’s Help Center says it covers the terminal and supported IDEs, including VS Code, Cursor and JetBrains, on one subscription, and that IDE use counts against the same limits. One catch it flags: if an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is set on your computer, Claude Code bills that API key instead of your plan.

Pro also adds Opus, Research, projects beyond Free’s five, Claude in Chrome and Claude for Microsoft 365. Claude Design, Slides and Docs are on every plan, Free included, by Anthropic’s pricing table and its Design help page. Claude Code is also the route to Claude’s Learning output style for programmers, covered in how the chatbots’ study modes compare.

Anthropic’s own pages disagree on one point. The Pro Help article lists “priority access to Claude during high-traffic periods” as a Pro benefit. The comparison table on the pricing page marks priority access No for Pro and Yes for both Max tiers.

What Max adds

More usage, mainly. Max 5x and Max 20x show identical features on the pricing page; they differ in the usage multiple, the price and the size of the API credit below. Anthropic also lists “higher output limits for all tasks” and early access to new features.

Two extras come with Max and not Pro:

• Fable models. Anthropic’s Fable 5 and 5.1 are included on Max, up to 50% of the weekly limit, and use that limit faster than other models. On Pro, Fable runs on paid usage credits from the first message; a promotion that included Fable 5 on Pro ended on 19 July 2026. Free does not get Fable.
• A monthly API credit: $100 on Max 5x, $200 on Max 20x, for building on the Claude API. It cannot be spent in Claude Code or the Claude apps, does not roll over, and becomes claimable after seven days on the plan.

Team and Enterprise, briefly

Team is for 2 to 150 people: a Standard seat is $25 a month, or $20 billed annually, with more usage than Pro; a Premium seat is $125, or $100 billed annually, with five times a Standard seat. Enterprise is $20 a seat a month, billed annually, plus usage at API rates.

How this compares with the other two

Anthropic’s plans are sold on usage more than features above Pro, which is how Google sold Gemini until free accounts lost the choice of model on 9 October. OpenAI went the other way at DevDay, putting its new agent on Pro rather than Plus; what each ChatGPT plan includes sets that out.

Questions people ask

Is Claude free to use?

Yes. The Free plan costs $0 and includes chat on web, desktop and mobile, web search, memory, file creation, voice mode, connectors and up to five projects, with the Sonnet and Haiku models. It does not include Claude Code, Opus or Research.

How much is Claude Pro a month?

$20 a month billed monthly in the US, or $200 billed once a year, which Anthropic shows as $17 a month. Prices exclude tax, and Anthropic says app-store prices can differ from the web.

What is the difference between Claude Max 5x and 20x?

Usage and price. Max 5x is $100 a month for five times Pro’s usage per five-hour session; Max 20x is $200 for twenty times. Features are the same on both, and each includes a monthly API credit equal to its price.

How many messages do you get with Claude Pro?

Anthropic does not give a number. It says there is no fixed message count: usage depends on conversation length, attached files, the model and the features you use. It says Pro gives at least five times the Free plan’s usage per five-hour session.

Does Claude Pro include Claude Code?

Yes. Claude Code is included on Pro and both Max tiers, not on Free. It shares one usage pool with your chats, so coding in the terminal uses up the same limit as talking to Claude in the app.

When do Claude usage limits reset?

The session limit resets on a rolling five-hour window. Pro and Max also have a weekly limit that resets at a fixed day and time assigned to your account, shown in Settings › Usage.

Can I use Claude Opus on the free plan?

No. Anthropic’s comparison table marks Opus as not included on Free and included on Pro, Max 5x and Max 20x. Free gets Sonnet and Haiku.