Is Claude Code going to cost $100/month? Probably not - it's all very confusing

Is Claude Code going to cost $100/month? Probably not—it’s all very confusing 22nd April 2026 Anthropic today quietly (as in silently, no announcement anywhere at all) updated their claude.com/pricing page (but not their Choosing a Claude plan page, which shows up first for me on Google) to add this tiny but significant detail (arrow is mine, and it’s already reverted): The Internet Archive copy from yesterday shows a checkbox there. Claude Code used to be a feature of the $20/month Pro plan, but according to the new pricing page it is now exclusive to the $100/month or $200/month Max plans. Update: don’t miss the update to this post, they’ve already changed course a few hours after this change went live. So what the heck is going on? Unsurprisingly, Reddit and Hacker News and Twitter all caught fire. I didn’t believe the screenshots myself when I first saw them—aside from the pricing grid I could find no announcement from Anthropic anywhere. Then Amol Avasare, Anthropic’s Head of Growth, tweeted: For clarity, we’re running a small test on ~2% of new prosumer signups. Existing Pro and Max subscribers aren’t affected. And that appears to be the closest we have had to official messaging from Anthropic. I don’t buy the “~2% of new prosumer signups” thing, since everyone I’ve talked to is seeing the new pricing grid and the Internet Archive has already snapped a copy. Maybe he means that they’ll only be running this version of the pricing grid for a limited time which somehow adds up to “2%” of signups? I’m also amused to see Claude Cowork remain available on the $20/month plan, because Claude Cowork is effectively a rebranded version of Claude Code wearing a less threatening hat! There are a whole bunch of things that are bad about this. If we assume this is indeed a test, and that test comes up negative and they decide not to go ahead with it, the damage has still been extensive: A whole lot of people got scared or angry or both that a service they relied on was about to be rug-pulled. There really is a significant difference between $20/month and $100/month for most people, especially outside of higher salary countries. The uncertainty is really bad! A tweet from an employee is not the way to make an announcement like this. I wasted a solid hour of my afternoon trying to figure out what had happened here. My trust in Anthropic’s transparency around pricing—a crucial factor in how I understand their products—has been shaken. Strategically, should I be taking a bet on Claude Code if I know that they might 5x the minimum price of the product? More of a personal issue, but one I care deeply about myself: I invest a great deal of effort (that’s 105 posts and counting) in teaching people how to use Claude Code. I don’t want to invest that effort in a product that most people cannot afford to use. Last month I ran a tutorial for journalists on “Coding agents for data analysis” at the annual NICAR data journalism conference. I’m not going to be teaching that audience a course that depends on a $100/month subscription! This also doesn’t make sense to me as a strategy for Anthropic. Claude Code defined the category of coding agents. It’s responsible for billions of dollars in annual revenue for Anthropic already. It has a stellar reputation, but I’m not convinced that reputation is strong enough for it to lose the $20/month trial and jump people directly to a $100/month subscription. OpenAI have been investing heavily in catching up to Claude…

This excerpt is published under fair use for community discussion. Read the full article at Simon Willison's Weblog.