Claude Max vs Ultra: what changed and which plan to pick

Updated November 2, 2026. Researched and drafted with AI help; every figure is checked against the linked source.

At the end of October 2026 Anthropic renamed its two Max plans. The $100 plan, previously Max 5x, is now just Max. The $200 plan, previously Max 20x, is now Ultra, and verified Ultra accounts no longer have a five-hour usage limit. Anthropic’s help center says existing Max 20x subscribers “move to Ultra automatically, with no price change”.

This guide sets out what each plan includes according to Anthropic’s own pages, how the monthly API credits work, and what those credits buy at Claude API prices.

Max and Ultra side by side

	Pro	Max	Ultra
Price	$20 a month ($17 billed yearly)	$100 a month	$200 a month
Usage	“More usage than Free”	5x Pro, every 5 hours and every week	10x Pro every week
Five-hour limit	Yes	Yes	None for verified accounts
Fable	Paid with usage credits	Included, up to half your weekly limit	Included, up to half your weekly limit
Monthly API credits	None	$100	$200
Billing	Monthly or yearly	Monthly only	Monthly only

All figures come from Anthropic’s pricing page and help center. Max and Ultra both include Claude Code, “early access to advanced Claude features” and “priority access at high traffic times”, and both have a weekly limit across all models plus a separate weekly limit for Fable. The prices are for web subscriptions; Anthropic says mobile pricing may differ by app platform.

What changed with the rename

The five-hour limit is gone on Ultra, once your account is verified. Anthropic verifies Ultra accounts automatically “using factors like your account and payment history”. New accounts keep a temporary five-hour limit until then; adding a phone number at checkout does not remove it. To check, open Settings > Usage: if there is no “Current session” bar, the account is verified.

The usage multiple is now described per week. The old name, Max 20x, pointed to 20 times Pro’s usage. Anthropic’s pricing page now lists Ultra as “10x Pro usage every week” (the help center says “10 times the Pro plan’s usage every week”). The Next Web reported that Anthropic’s announcement did not mention this change and that weekly limits were unchanged. Anthropic does not publish its plan limits as token or message counts, so we cannot say from official sources whether the actual weekly allowance moved.

Max is unchanged apart from the name. It still gives five times Pro’s usage every five hours and every week, and it keeps the five-hour limit.

The API credits are the biggest difference in money

Both plans include a monthly credit for the Claude Platform (the developer API): $100 on Max and $200 on Ultra. The help center sets out the rules:

You claim the credit by linking one Claude Console organization to your plan from Billing settings on claude.ai. You need to have been on an eligible plan for seven days.
The credit works with any Claude model on the Claude Platform, including the Messages API and the Message Batches API, Claude Managed Agents and the Claude Agent SDK.
It does not cover interactive Claude Code, extra usage in Claude, Claude Code or Claude Cowork, Claude on Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI or Microsoft Foundry.
“Unused credits expire at the end of each billing cycle.” Nothing rolls over.
The credit does not raise your usage limits in Claude, Claude Code or Claude Cowork.
If the credit runs out and the organization has no purchased credits, API requests stop until the next month. “Usage is never charged to your Claude plan.”
Upgrading from Max to Ultra gives prorated credits straight away, then $200 each cycle.

What $100 and $200 buy at API prices

Using the same workloads as our cost per 1,000 requests guide, a chat is 2,000 input and 500 output tokens, and a coding-agent step is 2,000 fresh input tokens, 18,000 read from the prompt cache and 1,000 output tokens. At Anthropic’s standard API prices:

Model	Price in / out	Cache read	Chats for $100 (Max)	Chats for $200 (Ultra)	Agent steps for $200
Claude Haiku 5.5	$0.10 / $0.50	$0.01	222,222	444,444	227,272
Claude Sonnet 5.5	$2 / $10	$0.10	11,111	22,222	12,658
Claude Opus 5.5	$4 / $20	$0.20	5,555	11,111	6,329
Claude Fable 5.1	$10 / $50	$0.25	2,222	4,444	2,684

Anthropic’s Batch API is 50% off input and output, so if you can wait for results, the chat figures double: Ultra’s $200 covers about 44,444 Sonnet 5.5 chats through the Batch API.

The maths: three ways to read the price

On paper, each “Pro’s worth” of usage costs $20 on every monthly plan (less on Pro billed yearly at $17). Pro is 1x for $20, Max is 5x for $100 and Ultra is 10x for $200, though Max’s multiple applies per five hours and per week while Ultra’s is stated per week only. Max and Ultra don’t give you a volume discount on chat usage itself; what they add is the API credit, priority access and, on Ultra, no five-hour limit.

If you already use the API, the credit can offset the whole price. On Max, the $100 credit equals the $100 price; on Ultra, the $200 credit equals the $200 price. For someone who already spends at least that much a month through one linked Claude Console organization (not Bedrock, Vertex or Foundry), the subscription effectively costs nothing extra. If you never touch the API, the credit is worth nothing to you, because it expires monthly.

Moving from Max to Ultra costs $100 more a month. For that you get twice the weekly usage multiple (10x instead of 5x Pro), no five-hour limit once verified, and $100 more in API credit.

Which plan fits

Pro ($20) if you hit limits only occasionally. Fable is available, but only through paid usage credits.
Max ($100) if you hit Pro’s limits most days and the five-hour window is not what stops you. The $100 API credit is a bonus if you build anything on the Claude API.
Ultra ($200) if you work with Claude or Claude Code in long stretches and the five-hour reset is what interrupts you, or if you already spend $200 or more a month on the Claude API and can route that spend through the linked organization.
Neither, use the API directly, if your use is mostly programmatic and light. At Sonnet 5.5 prices, 1,000 chats cost $9.00; our cost calculator works out your own token counts.

How it compares with the other $100 and $200 plans

Plan	Price per month
Claude Max / Ultra	$100 / $200
ChatGPT Pro	$100, $200 or $500
Google AI Ultra	$99.99 or $199.99
The X Subscription Super / Ultra (xAI)	$100 / $200

Prices are from each company’s pricing page. For what each plan includes in models and limits, see ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini subscriptions and every plan side by side on our plans page.

If a Claude model seems worse than usual on your plan, check the Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Opus 5.5 pages, where community votes sit next to Anthropic’s official status incidents.