Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic has launched Claude Pro, a paid subscription service that offers more usage of its 100k token conversational AI assistant Claude. The service costs $20 per month and is available in the U.S. and U.K. With Claude Pro, subscribers can get five times more usage than Anthropic’s free tier. This means that they can have more extended conversations with Claude by sending many more messages over an 8-hour period.
Claude is a powerful AI assistant that can be used for a variety of tasks, including summarizing research papers, writing different kinds of creative content, and answering your questions in an informative way. It has a longer context window than ChatGPT, allowing users to feed large batches of written information into Claude to analyze and give feedback. For example, if a user is summarizing a research paper, they could ask Claude detailed questions about it and get paragraph-length summaries of critical sections. The extended usage limits in Claude Pro allow for deeper research tasks like this. Essentially, users can have a ‘conversation’ with the information being analyzed, with Claude retaining tens of thousands of words of text in each research task.
Exact usage limits will vary based on factors like the length of messages and the size of file attachments. Anthropic says the average conversation length on its platform is around 200 sentences, for which Claude Pro would allow approximately 100 messages every 8 hours. The subscription also provides priority access to Claude during high-traffic periods and early access to new features.
To maximize usage, Anthropic advises Claude Pro subscribers to:
- Start new conversations for each new topic.
- Ask multiple questions at once in a single message.
- Avoid re-uploading the duplicate files repeatedly.
The critical aspect is that Claude Pro’s limitations appear based on token usage rather than message limits. ChatGPT’s paid tier limits the number of messages per hour but not the length of messages. Anthropic’s approach applies a more granular ‘fair-usage’ policy, limiting the overall volume sent to its LLM rather than the number of queries.
Anthropic says the limits are intended to make Claude freely available for many users to try while still providing increased capacity to paying power users. The company first launched Claude in July 2022 as an AI assistant focused on harmless, honest, helpful conversations.
