Claude Code pricing explained
Anthropic’s terminal coding agent — pay a flat Claude subscription or raw API tokens.
The plans
| Plan | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Free | no Claude Code |
| Pro | $20/mo | — |
| Max 5× | $100/mo | — |
| Max 20× | $200/mo | — |
Why the bill surprises people
Running Claude Code on API pay-as-you-go with Opus is the trap: agentic loops re-send the full history plus tool results every turn, so heavy daily use can reach hundreds to thousands per month versus a capped $100–200 Max subscription.
How the flat plan map to real token cost
On a Claude subscription, Claude Code is bundled into a flat fee with rolling 5-hour and weekly usage caps — no per-token bill. On API pay-as-you-go it’s literal token passthrough at list price (Opus $5/$25, Sonnet $3/$15, Haiku $1/$5 per 1M tokens; cached reads ~0.1×).
Claude Code runs on Claude Opus, Claude Sonnet, Claude Haiku. To see what your actual prompts cost at the API level — and which model is cheapest for your workload — paste one into the calculator.
FAQ
- Why is my Claude Code bill higher than expected?
- Running Claude Code on API pay-as-you-go with Opus is the trap: agentic loops re-send the full history plus tool results every turn, so heavy daily use can reach hundreds to thousands per month versus a capped $100–200 Max subscription.
- How do the flat plan translate to actual cost?
- On a Claude subscription, Claude Code is bundled into a flat fee with rolling 5-hour and weekly usage caps — no per-token bill. On API pay-as-you-go it’s literal token passthrough at list price (Opus $5/$25, Sonnet $3/$15, Haiku $1/$5 per 1M tokens; cached reads ~0.1×).
- Which models am I paying for on Claude Code?
- Claude Code runs on Claude Opus, Claude Sonnet, Claude Haiku. You can estimate the raw token cost of any prompt against those models in the tokenmath calculator.
Pricing sourced from Claude Code’s official pricing as of 2026-06-23. Platform pricing changes often — verify before you commit.