Claude Pricing 2026: Every Plan, and the 25% iPhone Markup

TL;DR: Claude Pro is $20/mo billed monthly or $17/mo billed annually, Max starts at $100/mo, and Team is $25 per seat. Buying the same plans inside the iPhone app costs about 25% more.

Perspective AI reaches Claude for $14.99/mo through a multi-model plan that covers every major family, which is the number worth holding in your head while you read Anthropic's own price list. Claude pricing is unusually clean by the standards of this market: four consumer plans, published figures, no metered surprises on the chat side. The interesting part is not the tiers. It is that the same subscription carries two different prices depending on whether you buy it in a browser or on an iPhone, and that one widely repeated claim about the Max plan is wrong. Everything below was read off Anthropic's pages and Apple's listing on 18 August 2026, and every figure names where it came from. This page sits in the pricing hub, and the spec strip version of these numbers lives at the Claude plan breakdown.

What does Claude cost in 2026?

Claude Pro is $20 per month billed monthly, or $17 per month billed annually. Max starts at $100 per month. Team is $25 per seat billed monthly. The free plan is $0 and has no published message count.

• Free: full access to Claude with a usage ceiling Anthropic does not quantify, 200k context, $0/mo.
• Pro: the standard individual plan, higher usage than Free, Projects and larger uploads, $20/mo billed monthly or $17/mo billed annually.
• Max 5x: five times Pro's usage, listed on the plan card as "From $100 Per month", so $100/mo.
• Max 20x: twenty times Pro's usage, sold as a multiplier chosen at checkout rather than a second priced card, from $100/mo.
• Team: standard seats at $25/seat/mo billed monthly or $20/seat/mo billed annually, premium seats at $100/seat/mo.
• Enterprise, self-serve: $20/seat with usage cost scaling by model and task, per Anthropic's own wording.

Source: claude.com/pricing, read 18 August 2026. Anthropic's footnote on that page is worth quoting because it governs every number above: prices exclude tax, and plans are subject to change at Anthropic's discretion.

The same Claude Pro costs 25% more inside the iPhone app

The Claude iOS listing sells the identical subscriptions at higher numbers than claude.com does. Checked 18 August 2026, the gap runs to 24.99% on the Max tiers:

• Claude Pro Monthly: $20.00 in the app, matching the web.
• Claude Max 5x Monthly: $124.99 in the app, against $100 on claude.com.
• Claude Max 20x Monthly: $249.99 in the app.
• Claude Pro Annual: $214.99 in the app, against $17 per month billed annually on the web.

The Max gap is 24.99%. Over a year, buying Max 5x through the iPhone rather than a browser costs $1,499.88 instead of $1,200, a difference of $299.88 for the same product. Apple's commission explains the gap. The instruction is blunt: open a browser, go to claude.com, subscribe there. Source: the Claude App Store listing, 18 August 2026.

The same check on three other iOS listings separates vendor choice from platform rule. Google's Gemini app returns $19.99, $4.99 and $199.99, exactly its web figures. OpenAI's ChatGPT app returns $19.99 for Plus and $8.00 for Go. Perplexity's app returns $20.00 for Pro. Anthropic is the outlier among the four.

Where the 20x figure stops being a price and becomes a multiplier

Anthropic's plan card does not quote Max as two plans at $100 and $200, which is how secondhand pricing tables report it. On 18 August 2026 it printed "From $100 Per month" and described the tier as "Choose 5x or 20x more usage than Pro", with no separate figure attached to the 20x option. The comparison table lists Max 5x and Max 20x as columns, but the price line covers both.

The App Store listing is the surface that does put a number on it, at $249.99 for Max 20x monthly, and that number carries the in-app markup described above. Rather than import a $200 figure from somewhere else and present it as verified, this page states what Anthropic published: Max starts at $100/mo, and the 20x step is priced at checkout. Load the checkout flow for the exact 20x web figure before committing. That check takes one minute and beats trusting a table.

Who never needs to pay Anthropic anything

Claude's free plan covers three usage shapes completely: a handful of substantial conversations a day rather than a continuous working session, occasional document review without repeated re-uploads, and any workflow that tolerates waiting out a reset window. Anthropic publishes no message count anywhere, so nothing announces the wall in advance. Writers doing a few drafts a week and students checking reasoning on problem sets rarely see the ceiling.

The free plan stops working the moment Claude becomes the tool you work inside rather than the tool you consult. Long coding sessions burn the free allowance in under an hour, as does any workflow that re-uploads the same reference document. The free plan has stopped being free once you have restructured an afternoon around a usage reset, because the cost moved from your card to your calendar. Related reading on where every vendor's caps actually bite: AI usage limits compared.

Two subscriptions, or one $14.99 bill that includes Claude

Here is the arithmetic, once. Claude Pro at $20/mo plus one other standard assistant plan at roughly $20/mo is $40/mo, which is $480 a year for two model families. Perspective AI is $14.99/mo, includes Claude, and adds GPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek and the wider open-weight roster, with model switching inside a single conversation. Against that two-subscription stack the difference is $25.01/mo, or $300.12 across a year.

That comparison holds only for people who use more than one model. Anthropic's $20 is the correct purchase when Claude is the only assistant you have opened in three months. The consolidation case strengthens with every repetition of the sentence "let me check this in the other one". For the wider version of that calculation across every vendor, the master price index holds the full table, and the side by side plan comparison shows how the $20 tier fragments once you look at what each one includes. If you want Claude without the Anthropic relationship at all, using Claude without an Anthropic subscription covers the routes.

What to do with $20 if Claude is only part of your week

Usage concentration decides all three cases. Pay Anthropic $20/mo in a browser when Claude does 90% of your AI work, and drop to $17/mo billed annually with a year of confidence behind the decision. Take a multi-model subscription at $14.99/mo when Claude does half your work and something else does the rest, because the $40/mo two-subscription shape is the expensive answer to a solved problem. Diagnose the ceiling before paying $100/mo for Max: more of one lab's output is a very different purchase from more capacity across five labs.

Whichever you choose, buy it on the web. The $299.88 a year that Max 5x costs extra through the iPhone is the single largest avoidable line item on this page.

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