Do I Have to Pay for This?

Short answer: no. You can do everything in these guides on the free plan, and I’d rather you started there.

Here’s what’s actually behind the paywall, so you can decide for yourself instead of guessing.

---

What the free plan gives you

Two of the four models. Claude comes in a few versions. Free gets you Haiku, which is quick and light, and Sonnet, which is the everyday one that does the actual work. Sonnet is the default on both the free plan and the paid one, so the model you’re using free is the model most people use all day.

Projects, up to five. This is the one that surprises people. Projects are the thing that makes Claude remember your business instead of starting fresh every time, and you get five of them without paying anything. Five is plenty. I’d struggle to keep more than four going.

Memory. It builds up a picture of you as you chat, and it’s switched on already. Nothing to buy and nothing to turn on.

A daily allowance. You get a certain amount of use in a stretch, and if you hit it you wait a few hours. In practice you notice this when you’re doing something big. You don’t notice it writing a newsletter.

---

What paying actually adds

Pro is 20 US dollars a month, or 17 a month if you pay for the year. Max is a bigger tier again, and honestly, if you need Max you already know it and you’re not reading this guide.

Pro gives you:

Two more models. Opus, which is for heavy thinking, and Fable, which is for long involved jobs. Neither is what you’d reach for to answer a parent.

A lot more headroom. This is the real difference. You stop bumping into the limit.

Better handling of uploaded documents inside Projects. The paid plans have a proper retrieval layer, which means if you load a Project up with files it can dig through them sensibly. On free there’s no such layer, which matters for how you set things up rather than whether you can.

---

So when should you actually pay?

Not on day one. Genuinely.

Start free. Use it properly for two or three weeks on real work, not experiments. Write actual emails to actual parents. Set up one Project.

You’ll know when it’s time, and it’ll be one of two things. Either you keep hitting the limit mid-job and it’s annoying you, or you’ve built something you rely on and you’d be irritated to lose it. Those are both good reasons. “I probably should” is not.

And if you don’t hit either, don’t pay. Plenty of people running small providers will never need more than the free plan. There is no version of this where I tell you to upgrade because it’s better. It’s better if you’re using it more.

---

The one thing I’d say about the money

Twenty dollars is roughly one child’s monthly fees, depending what you charge.

I’m not going to tell you what that’s worth to you, because I don’t know your books and I’m not doing the thing where someone claims a tool will transform your revenue. What I will say is that the hour I used to spend on a Sunday night writing to parents is mostly gone, and I’d have paid twenty dollars for that hour a long time ago.

Work it out on your own numbers. Start free and see whether you’re using it enough for the question to even come up.

---

A note if you’re on ChatGPT

I use Claude, so that’s what I can show you. If you’re on ChatGPT, the thinking is the same and the buttons are somewhere else. I’m not going to pretend I know where, because I don’t use it.

Both are good. Claude is the one that stuck for me.

---

What to do next

Go and set up a free account and use it for a fortnight on something real. That’s it. That’s the whole recommendation.

If you want to get the settings right first, and I’d suggest you do, that’s the data guide. It takes about ten minutes and then you can stop thinking about it.

---

August 2026 edition. Anthropic change plans and pricing from time to time, so I check this every quarter and update the page when it moves. Prices are in US dollars because that’s how they’re charged.

More free guides at www.katemarkham.ai/resources.

Questions? I’m at hello@katemarkham.ai, always happy to help.