Claude Free, Pro, or Max: Which Plan to Choose to Avoid Regrets?

Three plans, prices ranging from zero to €90 per month, and the question everyone's asking: is Anthropic's Claude worth paying for? The answer isn't as obvious as you might think. Because while ChatGPT and Gemini focus on increasingly spectacular features, Claude has chosen a different path: excelling at what it does best. That is, reasoning, writing, and maintaining coherent conversations for hours. But which version is really right for you? Surprisingly, for many users, the free version might be more than enough.

Claude Free vs. Pro vs. Max: What's the Difference? Claude Free

The free version of Claude is probably the most generous offering in the conversational AI landscape. While other assistants severely limit basic features to push subscriptions, Anthropic has made a bold move. It provides virtually complete access to the core capabilities of its most advanced model.

Without spending a cent, you get access to Claude through a web browser or dedicated apps for iOS and Android. You can generate long and detailed texts, analyze images with impressive precision, generate code in dozens of programming languages, and even develop small, complete applications. Web search is included, as are desktop extensions that allow integration with other tools.

What's the catch (so to speak)? The amount of usage . After about 30-40 substantial messages in an 8-hour period, Claude will politely warn you that you've reached the limit and you'll have to wait. For those who use AI occasionally, such as for document summary, creative brainstorming, or writing assistance, these usage limits are rarely a problem. For those who work intensively with AI all day, however, it's not ideal.

An underrated feature of the free version is the quality of the responses. There is no difference in model intelligence between the free and paid versions. Claude Sonnet 4 , the main model, responds with the same depth and accuracy regardless of the plan. This is no small feat.

Claude Pro

For €15 a month, Claude Pro promises to quintuple your usage limits. In practice, this means going from those 30-40 messages every 5 hours to around 200 or more, depending on the complexity of your requests. But the numbers don't tell the whole story.

The true value of Pro lies in priority access during traffic peaks. When thousands of free users are queued or throttled, Pro subscribers continue to work without interruption. For professional users of Claude, this guarantee of availability alone is worth the subscription price.

But the coolest new features are the exclusive features, like access to more templates, including Opus 4.1 , and Claude's research assistant , available only for Pro and Max. Instead of generating answers based on its internal knowledge, it can deep-dive the web, read dozens of sources, fact-check, and produce detailed reports with citations.

Integration with Gmail, Calendar, and Google Docs turns Claude into a true personal assistant. He can read emails, summarize endless threads, create events based on conversations, and even draft complex documents from information scattered across multiple files. For those who live in the Google ecosystem, this feature is very interesting.

The "Extended Reflection" mode is perhaps the most powerful feature. Claude can take more time to think through complex problems, displaying his thought process step by step. It's fascinating to see how the AI ​​"reasons" through complex mathematical problems or ethical dilemmas, and it often leads to more accurate and nuanced answers.

Claude Max

At 90 euros a month, Claude Max is clearly aimed at a very specific audience: professionals who live within Claude from morning to night. The price jump is substantial, but what do you really get? Essentially, Max quintuples the limits of Pro. We're talking about potentially being able to send thousands of messages a day without ever seeing a limit warning. The output limits (how much text Claude can generate in a single reply) are also significantly higher, so it can generate very long documents in one go.

But here's the crux. Max offers no additional features over Pro. There are no secret models, hidden capabilities, or magical powers. It's purely a matter of volume. The only extra benefit is early access to new features when they're released, but in practice, that means getting access a few days or weeks before everyone else.

Who does Max make sense for? Content agencies generating hundreds of articles, developers using Claude for debugging and code generation all day, researchers processing massive amounts of data.

Comparison with the competition

ChatGPT Plus costs €23, a little more than Claude Pro, but it also includes image generation and even limited access to Sora's video generation. Gemini AI Pro , at €21.99, offers deep integration with the Google ecosystem and interesting features like video generation on Flow and Whisk , NotebookLM , and even 2 TB of total storage space for Photos, Drive, and Gmail.

Where Claude shines is in the quality of its writing and reasoning . For tasks that require deep understanding, coherence of context in long conversations, or high-level creative writing, Claude is often superior. But if you need to generate images, create videos, or perform real-time speech analysis, you'll have to look elsewhere.

It's also important to note what Claude doesn't do, even in the Max version: no image generation, no video creation, no text-to-speech. Anthropic has chosen to focus on text and reasoning, leaving multimedia features to others. For some, this is a limitation; for others, it's a sign of specialization.

Which subscription should I choose?

Ideally, you should start with the free version and use it intensively for at least two weeks, tracking how often you hit the limits and how much this impacts your productivity. If you find yourself constantly stuck, you can try upgrading to Pro for a month and see how it goes.

The extra trick: you can combine the free and Pro accounts . You can use the free one for quick and simple tasks, and reserve the Pro one for complex projects that require in-depth research or integrations. It's perfectly legal and can save you money when you don't need the premium features!