Claude Code pricing: what each plan and the API cost

Claude Code price by plan

Claude Code is included in every paid Claude plan, and the Free plan doesn't include it. Pro is the only individual plan with yearly billing at $200 up front, while Max is billed monthly only.

Paying per token with an API key

Instead of using a monthly subscription, you can run Claude Code with an API key from the Claude Console. When you do that, Claude Code bills per token from prepaid credits bought at platform.claude.com/settings/billing rather than drawing from a plan's usage pool.

The table below shows API rates for the four current Claude models; the Claude API pricing page has the full price list.

What Claude Code costs on the API in practice

• Across enterprise deployments, Anthropic reports the average Claude Code API cost is about $13 per developer per active day and $150 to $250 per developer per month.
• Daily API costs stay below $30 per active day for 90% of users.
• Thinking tokens generated during a run are billed at the model's output token rate.
• Agent teams use significantly more tokens than a single session, because every teammate runs its own context window and usage scales with the number of active teammates.
• Turning on fast mode for Opus 5.5 gives up to 2.5x speed and raises the price to $8 per million input tokens and $40 per million output tokens.

At any point during a session, you can run the /usage command in Claude Code to see your token use and estimated cost.

Usage limits on Pro and Max

Paid plans enforce rolling 5-hour session limits along with weekly limits, and there is no fixed message count. Your activity in Claude on the web, desktop, mobile, and inside Claude Code all draws from that same shared pool. Pro gives you at least 5x the usage of the Free tier per 5-hour session, and Max gives you 5x or 20x the usage of Pro. Anthropic raised the 5-hour Claude usage limits on Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise plans when Opus 5.5 launched on September 22, 2026.

When you hit a limit, you can wait for the window to reset, upgrade to a higher plan, or turn on usage credits billed at standard API rates. If Claude Code reaches your five-hour session limit partway through a response, it may keep working briefly to finish the step in progress: up to once per weekly usage period on Pro, and each time you hit a five-hour limit on Max. This wrap-up allowance counts toward your weekly limit and is still rolling out.

Max API credits don't cover Claude Code

The Max plans come with a monthly allotment of API credits: $100 a month on Max 5x and $200 a month on Max 20x. You can spend those credits on the Claude API, Claude Managed Agents, the Agent SDK and the Console playground. Pro includes no API credits; Claude Pro vs Max covers the other differences.

Use your Claude plan outside Claude Code

If you want to call your subscription from your own scripts or other developer tools, Plan2API connects the Claude Pro or Max plan you already pay for and gives you one OpenAI-compatible p2a_ key. Requests go to POST /v1/chat/completions in the OpenAI Chat Completions format only; there is no Anthropic /v1/messages or /v1/responses endpoint. Your Claude plan's own 5-hour and weekly usage limits still apply, and Plan2API never bills per token. See Claude subscription API for how it works.

The Plan2API Free plan costs $0 with no card needed and covers 1 connected subscription and 50 chat requests a day, while the Pro plan costs $12 a month (or $99 a year) for 3 subscriptions and no daily request cap. You can connect your account with a Google login, sign in with your Claude account, and send a request with curl:

curl https://api.plan2api.com/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $PLAN2API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "claude/claude-opus-5-5",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Review this diff for bugs."}]
  }'