· Independent
Five Pro subscriptions run $1,000 a year. Five Standard seats run $1,200. Five Premium seats run $6,000. Here is what each one actually buys you, and the specific work that makes the jump worth it.
Loistrofi Editorial — Sep 1, 2026 — 9 min read
For a five-person business, the free tier is enough right up to the day one of your people runs out of usage in the middle of something that has a deadline attached. That is the trigger. Not a feature, not a better model — a wall hit at 3pm on a Thursday. Five Pro subscriptions billed annually cost $1,000 a year. Five Standard seats cost $1,200. Start there, not with the enterprise tier.
The unit every vendor bills you on is the seat, and a seat is one named human with a login. It is not a device, not a project, not a shared account. Before you compare a single price, write down the names of the people who would open the tool on a normal Tuesday. In most five-person businesses that number is not five. It is two or three: whoever writes, whoever codes, whoever wrangles spreadsheets. The other two open it monthly and would not notice if their account vanished.
That distinction is worth real money. Five Standard seats billed annually cost $20 each per month — $100 a month, $1,200 a year. Three seats cost $60 a month, $720 a year. If you buy five because you have five employees rather than five daily users, you have spent $480 a year on logins nobody touches. Count the users, then price the plan. The reverse order is how small teams end up on an annual contract they resent by month four.
| Option | Price per seat | Five seats / month | Five seats / year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| Pro, annual | $17/mo, $200 billed up front | $85 | $1,000 |
| Pro, monthly | $20 | $100 | $1,200 |
| Standard seat, annual | $20 | $100 | $1,200 |
| Standard seat, monthly | $25 | $125 | $1,500 |
| Premium seat, annual | $100 | $500 | $6,000 |
| Premium seat, monthly | $125 | $625 | $7,500 |
| Max | from $100/mo | — | — |
| Enterprise | $20 + usage at API rates | $100 + usage | $1,200 + usage |
Free is $0 for everyone, and for a lot of five-person work it is not a compromise. Drafting a client email, cleaning up a job description, asking what a clause in a contract means — that is chat-box work, and the free tier does chat-box work. The problem is not quality. It is that the free plan is metered, and you find the meter by hitting it. The pricing page does not publish the specific free-tier limits, so you cannot plan around them; you can only discover them.
That discovery is the whole cost. If someone hits the ceiling while assembling a proposal that goes out tomorrow, the twenty minutes of scrambling — or the reversion to doing it by hand — costs more than $17 a month. So the honest test is not "is free good enough at its best" but "what happens to us on the worst day it fails." If the answer is "we shrug and finish it Friday," stay free. If the answer is "we miss a deadline," pay for that one person and leave everyone else on free.
Pro is $17 per month when you take the annual subscription, billed as $200 up front, or $20 if you pay monthly. Five people on annual Pro is 5 × $200 = $1,000 a year, paid in one hit. Five people on monthly Pro is 5 × $20 = $100 a month, $1,200 across twelve months. The annual route saves you $200 a year across five people and locks you in for the same period.
The catch is administrative, not technical. Five Pro subscriptions are five individual accounts on five individual cards or one card charged five times, with no shared administration between them. When someone leaves, you chase down their login. When your bookkeeper asks what the AI line item is, it is five separate charges. For a five-person shop that already handles software this way, that is survivable. For anyone who has to justify the expense to a partner or an accountant, it is friction that compounds every month.
A Standard seat is $20 per seat per month billed annually, or $25 billed monthly. Five Standard seats annually is $100 a month, $1,200 a year — exactly $200 more than five annual Pro subscriptions, or $40 per person per year. The page describes the seat as all Claude features plus more usage than Pro. So the upgrade buys you two things: headroom above the Pro ceiling, and the fact that it is one account with seats rather than five accounts you happen to own.
Pay the $200 if your usage is genuinely bumping the Pro limit, or if you need one bill and one place to add and remove people. Do not pay it on the theory that team plans are more capable. The page does not describe the Standard seat as unlocking any model or feature the Pro plan lacks; it describes it as more usage. If nobody is hitting a ceiling on Pro, that $200 is buying you tidier billing, which is a real thing to want but is not a productivity argument.
A Premium seat is $100 per seat per month billed annually, or $125 monthly, and it carries five times the usage of a Standard seat. It also includes Claude Code and Claude Cowork, and includes Claude Design. Five Premium seats annually is $500 a month, $6,000 a year — six times what five Standard seats cost. Almost no five-person business needs that. What some five-person businesses do need is one Premium seat for the one person running long agentic sessions.
Mix the tiers and the arithmetic gets sane. One Premium seat plus four Standard seats, billed annually, is $100 + (4 × $20) = $180 a month, $2,160 a year. Compare that with $1,200 for five Standard seats: you are spending $960 extra a year on a single person's headroom. If that person is a developer whose terminal work and chat work draw from the same pool — the FAQ is explicit that Claude Code shares your plan's usage limits — $960 is roughly a day and a half of their time. It clears easily.
Max starts at $100 per month for a single individual. It sits above Pro on the individual track and, at the entry price, costs the same per person as a Premium seat billed annually. For a five-person business that mostly matters as a comparison point: if one of your people is going to spend $100 a month, a Premium seat at $100 per seat per month billed annually puts them inside your team account rather than outside it, and includes Claude Code, Claude Cowork and Claude Design per the page. The pricing page states Max only as a starting figure, so the tiers above it are not something you can budget from.
Enterprise is $20 per seat per month plus usage billed at API rates, billed annually, and you can start self-serve. The $20 looks like a bargain next to a $100 Premium seat until you price the second half. Five seats is $100 a month in seat fees, then every token is metered: Sonnet 5 at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output, Opus 5 at $5 and $25, Haiku 4.5 at $1 and $5. Web search is $10 per 1,000 searches. Code execution gives 50 free hours daily per organisation, then $0.05 per hour per container.
Work an example. Five seats at $20 is $100. A month where your team pushes 20 million input and 4 million output tokens through Opus 5 costs (20 × $5) + (4 × $25) = $100 + $100 = $200 in usage, for $300 total — three times the flat Standard-seat price. The same volume on Sonnet 5 is (20 × $2) + (4 × $10) = $80, for $180. Batch processing halves those rates on eligible work. Enterprise is the right shape when you want admin controls — SCIM, audit logs, custom data retention, role-based access — and spend limits, not when you want a cheaper seat.
- **If nobody on your team has hit a usage limit in the last month**, stay on Free and revisit in ninety days, because you would be paying $1,000 a year to solve a problem you do not have yet.
- **If one or two people hit limits and the other three barely log in**, buy Pro for those people only — 2 × $200 = $400 a year annually, or $40 a month if you pay monthly — because seats you buy for non-users are pure waste.
- **If all five use it weekly and you want one invoice and one admin screen**, take five Standard seats at $100 a month annually, $1,200 a year, because the $200 premium over five Pro subscriptions is the cheapest team administration you will buy this year.
- **If one person runs long coding or agent sessions and keeps starving everyone else**, give that person a Premium seat and leave the rest on Standard: $180 a month, $2,160 a year, because 5x usage for one seat costs less than upgrading four people who do not need it.
- **If you need audit logs, SCIM or enforced spend limits to satisfy a client or an insurer**, go Enterprise at $20 per seat plus API-rate usage and set the org spend limit on day one, because the controls are the product and the metered usage is the price of them.
- Open the pricing page and confirm the current free-tier limits in the plan comparison, because they are not stated in the summary and they determine whether you need to pay at all.
- Confirm whether the seat plans carry a minimum seat count before you buy for three people — the page does not state one, and a minimum would change your total.
- Confirm what happens to the $200 annual Pro payment if someone leaves in month three, and whether it is refundable or transferable.
- Check the data retention and training policy for your tier on Anthropic's own policy pages before any client material goes near it; the pricing page does not cover it.
- If you are considering Enterprise, set the org and per-user spend limits in the admin screen before you invite anyone, and price one realistic month at the model you would actually use.
- Verify whether Standard seats can be upgraded to Premium mid-term and how the annual billing is prorated, because mixing tiers is the plan most five-person teams should end up on.
Run everyone on Free for a month and keep a note of who hits a wall and what they were doing when they did. Then buy annual Pro at $200 a year for exactly those people — usually one or two, so $200 to $400 for the year. Only move to five Standard seats at $1,200 a year when you want the shared account, and be honest that you are buying billing hygiene, not intelligence. If a single person is running long agent or terminal sessions, give them a Premium seat and leave everyone else on Standard: $2,160 a year total, and the argument for it is that person's time, not the tool's.
Loistrofi does not take vendor briefings or speak to sales teams. Every figure here comes from a page the vendor publishes itself, checked on Sep 1, 2026. Where a number could not be confirmed at source, it is marked rather than smoothed over.
