Claude Pro vs Max vs Ultra: prices, usage limits, Fable models and which plan to choose

Claude has three paid plans for individuals, Pro, Max and Ultra, and the gap between them is mostly about how much you can do before you hit a limit. Pro costs $20 a month and suits regular use. Max costs $100 a month and gives five times Pro’s usage, plus the Fable models included in the plan. Ultra, at $200 a month, replaced the old Max 20x plan: it gives ten times Pro’s weekly usage and drops the five-hour limit for verified accounts. This guide compares prices, limits and features using Anthropic’s pricing and help pages as of November 2026.

Claude Pro vs Max vs Ultra at a glance

Free is $0. The Fable models aren’t available on Free at all.

Screenshot: the Pro, Max and Ultra plan cards on Anthropic’s pricing page at claude.com/pricing. Max lists 5x Pro usage every five hours and every week; Ultra lists no five-hour limit, 10x Pro usage every week and $200 a month in API credits. Captured by Universal Digital Assistant on November 2, 2026.

What Pro includes

Anthropic says Pro gives more usage than Free every five hours and every week, and its pricing page puts that at least five times Free’s usage per session. Pro includes:

• Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding agent, in the terminal, IDEs, desktop app and web. Our guide to using Claude Code covers the setup.
• Cowork and longer tasks. You can hand off and schedule tasks, and Cowork’s multi-step work is moving into ordinary chats, explained in What is Claude Cowork?.
• Projects and Research, plus access to more models, Claude Science and the Chrome and Microsoft 365 extensions.
• Optional usage credits, which Pro subscribers can turn on to keep working past their limits.

The Pro plan doesn’t include Claude API usage, which is billed separately.

What Max adds

Max costs $100 a month and includes everything in Pro, plus:

• Five times Pro’s usage every five hours and every week.
• The Fable models in your plan, at no extra cost, up to half of your weekly limits.
• $100 a month in API credits to build on the Claude Platform.
• Early access to advanced Claude features and priority access at high traffic times.

Max used to come in two sizes, Max 5x and Max 20x. Max is now a single plan, and the bigger tier has become Ultra.

What Ultra adds

Ultra costs $200 a month and includes everything in Max, plus:

• No five-hour limit for verified accounts, so you work at your own pace within a weekly limit.
• Ten times Pro’s usage every week.
• $200 a month in API credits, up from $100 on Max.

Anthropic’s help center says the Max 20x plan is now called Ultra and that existing Max 20x subscribers moved to it automatically, with no price change. Anthropic verifies Ultra accounts automatically using factors like account and payment history. Until that happens, a temporary limit applies; Anthropic says you can tell you’re verified when Settings > Usage no longer shows a Current session bar. Ultra still has a weekly limit across all models and a separate weekly limit for Fable.

How Claude’s usage limits work

On Pro and Max, Claude measures usage in two ways:

• A five-hour session window, which rolls forward as you work.
• Weekly limits, which reset at a fixed time assigned to your account.

Verified Ultra accounts only have the weekly limits. On every plan, longer tasks and more powerful models draw more from your allowance, and your use of Claude on the web, desktop, mobile and Claude Code all comes from the same pool. That matters most for Claude Code and long tasks, which can run for a long time on a single request. When you reach a limit, you can wait for it to reset, move to a bigger plan or turn on usage credits.

Fable models on each plan

Claude Fable 5 and Fable 5.1 are Claude’s Fable-series models, and they’re for paid plans only. How you pay depends on the plan:

Anthropic notes that on the included plans, Fable models draw down your regular limits faster than other models. The launch promotion for Fable 5 ended on July 19, 2026 at 11:59:59 PM PT, and Fable 5.1 was never part of it. To use them you need Claude Code 2.1.170 or later for Fable 5, or 2.1.255 or later for Fable 5.1, and the latest Claude Desktop for Cowork.

Monthly API credits on Max and Ultra

Max includes $100 a month and Ultra $200 a month in credits for the Claude Platform, which you claim by linking a Claude Console organization once you’ve been on the plan for seven days. They cover the Claude API, Claude Managed Agents and the Claude Agent SDK. They don’t cover interactive Claude Code, extra usage in Claude or Claude on cloud platforms, and unused credits expire at the end of each billing cycle. Pro isn’t eligible.

What changed on September 22, 2026

With the launch of Claude Opus 5.5, Anthropic said it is increasing five-hour usage limits on Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise plans, and giving subscription users a rate limit reset that they can save and use whenever they choose. Anthropic’s announcement doesn’t give the new limits as numbers. Read our report on Claude Opus 5.5, and see Claude models explained for which model each plan uses.

What changed on May 6, 2026

Anthropic announced higher limits on May 6, 2026, alongside a compute deal with SpaceX for more than 300 megawatts of capacity and over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs at Colossus 1. It doubled Claude Code’s five-hour limits for Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise plans, and removed the peak-hours limit reduction on Claude Code for Pro and Max.

Team and Enterprise

Organisations have their own plans. Team has Standard seats at $20 a month billed annually ($25 monthly) and Premium seats at $100 a month billed annually ($125 monthly), with Premium seats giving five times the Standard usage. Enterprise combines a seat fee with usage billed at API rates.

Which plan should you choose?

• You use Claude for writing, research and the odd coding task: Pro.
• You hit Pro’s limits regularly, or want the Fable models without paying per use: Max.
• You run Claude Code or long tasks for hours every day, or keep running into the five-hour limit on Max: Ultra.
• You’re not sure: start on Pro and check how quickly you reach your limits before you upgrade.

For the assistant as a whole, see the Claude profile, and for how it compares with OpenAI’s plans, read ChatGPT vs Claude and our guide to ChatGPT Pro. For heavy coding work, the best AI coding assistants guide sets Claude Code beside Codex and Cursor.