Claude's Pro plan starts at $17 per month with annual billing, or $20 if you pay monthly, and Max plans start at $100 per month. All plans are billed in US dollars by Anthropic, so the exact charge in pounds varies with the exchange rate and your card provider's fees. For most one-person and small businesses, Pro is the sensible starting point.
That's the headline. The more useful question is what those numbers mean for a small business in practice - which plan you actually need, what the total cost of ownership looks like and where the free plan genuinely won't do.
At the time of writing, the plans a small business will care about are:
Anthropic sets and changes these prices, not us, and plans and limits do change. Before you commit, check Anthropic's current pricing page for the exact figures and what each plan includes on the day you buy.
For a one-person business doing drafts, research, summaries and planning, start with Pro. It includes the desktop features that let Claude work with your actual files and tools rather than living in a browser tab, which is where the business value sits.
Two honest notes. First, paid plans have usage limits, and if you run long sessions every day you may bump into them. Where the limits sit changes over time, so check Anthropic's current pricing page rather than trusting any article, including this one, to stay current. Second, you don't need Max to start. If Pro begins to pinch after a few months of daily use, that's a nice problem, and upgrading takes minutes. Starting on Max "to be safe" is usually money spent on headroom you haven't earned the need for yet.
Claude is billed in US dollars, so there's no fixed sterling price - the charge in pounds moves with the exchange rate, and some cards add a foreign transaction fee. It's worth checking whether yours does before you're surprised by a couple of extra pounds a month.
We won't invent a conversion that will be wrong by the time you read it. The practical guidance: take the dollar price, run it through today's rate and add a small margin for card fees. For a Pro plan, you're in the territory of a modest software subscription, not a payroll decision.
The subscription is the visible cost. The honest total has three parts:
1. The subscription. Pro from $17/month with annual billing ($20 monthly). Ongoing, paid to Anthropic, cancellable like any subscription.
2. Your time. This is the cost most pricing pages skip. Claude out of the box is a capable generalist that knows nothing about your business. Getting it working like a team member takes real setup: teaching it your business, your voice and your files. Done properly, that's around a fortnight of sessions for a first role, front-loaded. Done badly or not at all, the subscription becomes a fancy search box and quietly stops earning its keep - which is how most "we tried AI" stories end.
3. Any method or training you buy. Optional, one-time if you choose well. A guided method (ours is a one-time £119) or a course. The test to apply: does it leave you with something persistent - files, structure, working roles - or just ideas? Ideas fade. Structure compounds. We've written about that difference in prompt packs versus a persistent AI team.
So a realistic first-year picture for a one-person business: the Claude subscription, perhaps a one-time method, plus the honest fortnight of setup effort. Against that, weigh what an evening a week is worth to you, because that's the currency the payback arrives in: proposals drafted, briefings ready, Mondays that start with a plan.
It depends entirely on what you build on it, which sounds like an evasion but is the actual answer. A subscription plus an empty chat window is worth very little to a business. A subscription plus a structured setup - a chief of staff role that knows your business, then further roles tested before you trust them - takes on real legwork: drafts in your voice, research as one-page briefings, tidy numbers, a week plan from your own notes.
One design principle matters more than any price: nothing a well-built setup produces should post, send or spend on its own. You review everything. The cost of Claude buys you legwork, not a replacement for your judgement, and anyone pricing it as the latter is overselling.
Fewer than you might fear, but worth naming:
If you're weighing Claude against hiring help instead, we've compared the two directly in AI assistant vs virtual assistant.
If you do subscribe, the difference between wasted money and a working team is method, not luck. Build My AI Team is a guided method that takes a non-technical person from a blank page to a working AI team on Claude in about a month - a chief of staff first, then roles you choose, each tested before it goes live, with the filing structure underneath that keeps it all working.
It's a one-time purchase, £119, with 12 months of updates included - no subscription to us, ever. The Claude plan is a separate cost paid to Anthropic, and we say so upfront. Built on Claude, not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic. If you'd rather your subscription earned its keep from week one, that's what the method is for.