Claude for Your Team · Lesson 1 of 7
Pick the plan and set it up
25 minutes. For the owner. Choose the plan that fits, create the company organization, and invite your people the right way.
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Here's how Claude usually arrives at a small business. Someone tries the free version. It helps. They tell a coworker. Six months later, four people use it: two on free accounts, one on a personal Pro plan they expense, and one on their own Gmail. Customer emails, price lists and a draft of the employee handbook are spread across all four. None of it belongs to the business, and nobody can see any of it but the person who typed it.
This lesson ends that. By the end, the business owns one Claude organization, you control who's in it, and every person has a seat that fits how they work.
Claude has individual plans and business plans. Here's what Anthropic's pricing page listed on October 10, 2026:
| Plan | Price | Who it's for | |---|---|---| | Free | $0 | Trying it out | | Pro | $20 a month, or $17 a month billed annually | One person | | Max | From $100 a month | One heavy user | | Team, Standard seat | $25 a month, or $20 a month billed annually | Most of your team | | Team, Premium seat | $125 a month, or $100 a month billed annually | Your heaviest users | | Enterprise | $20 per seat per month billed annually, plus usage | Larger or regulated organizations |
Prices exclude tax.
Use this to decide:
- Just you? Team needs at least two people. A solo owner can start on Pro. Lesson 2 shows the one privacy setting you must check on an individual plan.
- Two to 150 people? Team. This is the plan for most small businesses, and the one this course is built around. It includes central billing and member management, single sign-on, connector controls, and, per Anthropic, no model training on your content by default.
- More than 150 people, or you need things like custom data retention, audit logs, spend limits by group, or a HIPAA-ready setup? Those are listed under Enterprise, not Team. Talk to Anthropic's sales team.
A word on health information. On the pricing page, "HIPAA-ready" is listed for Enterprise only. If your business handles patient health information (a clinic, a therapy practice, a home care agency), don't put it into a Team plan. Talk to your IT partner and Anthropic before anyone pastes a single patient detail.
Standard or Premium?
You can mix seat types on one Team plan. Anthropic describes a Standard seat as 1.25 times Pro's per-session usage, and a Premium seat as 6.25 times Pro's, which is five times a Standard seat. Both have weekly limits, and limits apply to each person, not to the team as a whole.
Start almost everyone on Standard. Give Premium only to the one or two people you already know will use Claude for hours a day. Upgrading someone later is quick and prorated (Lesson 6). Downgrading only takes effect at renewal, with no prorated refund. So start low.
At Comfort Zone, Marcus gave Standard seats to himself and five of the office staff, and Premium to Tina, who writes all the estimates and the customer letters. The technicians didn't get seats yet. More on that in Lesson 6.
Before you start, have these ready:
- A business email address on your company's domain. Anthropic requires the person creating a Team to use a business email, not a Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail address.
- A payment method, and a decision on monthly or annual billing. You choose during signup. Annual is cheaper per seat; monthly is easier to change.
If nobody has a Claude account yet
- Go to claude.ai/login.
- Enter your work email address.
- Follow the onboarding prompts and select the Team plan.
If you already have a personal Pro or Max account
You can upgrade it from claude.ai/upgrade. Know three things first, all from Anthropic's help center:
- Your individual Pro or Max subscription is cancelled automatically, and you get a prorated refund.
- Any public projects in your account become private after the upgrade.
- There's an option to Keep your personal account separate. If your personal account has personal chats in it (your kid's science fair, your own taxes), tick it. Your personal account stays yours. The new Team organization starts clean and belongs to the business.
Team plans have four roles:
- Primary Owner: one person. Can see billing, manage everyone, and transfer ownership. Only the Primary Owner can export the organization's data.
- Owner: can see billing and manage members and organization settings.
- Admin: can manage members, but can't see billing.
- User: everyone else.
Two rules that save trouble later:
- The Primary Owner should be the business owner, using a company email address, not a personal one. If the person who set it up leaves, you don't want the business locked out of its own account.
- Name one backup Owner. One person on vacation shouldn't stop the business from adding a new hire.
Write both names on your Team Setup Checklist.
As the Primary Owner, Owner or Admin:
- Go to Organization settings > Members.
- Click Add member.
- Enter the person's email address. It must be on one of your organization's allowed email domains. For most of you, that means your company domain.
- Choose their seat type (Standard or Premium) and role.
- Click Add members.
To add several people at once, use Bulk add and paste email addresses separated by commas or new lines.
Two things to know:
- Pending invitations take up a seat immediately. If you invite someone who never accepts, you're paying for that seat. Check for stale invites in a week.
- On Team plans, invite links and member-to-member invites are on by default. That means anyone on the team can invite a colleague. For a small team that trusts each other, that may be fine. If you want every new seat to go through you, look in Organization settings > Organization and access for the invite link setting, and check your organization settings for the option that lets members invite others.
People who already pay for their own
Ask anyone who uses Claude on a personal account for work to join the company organization and stop putting company work in their personal account. If they want to bring their personal Claude history into the company account, Anthropic lets people on a Team plan move their own personal account voluntarily. Admins can't do it for them on a Team plan. Either way, make sure they cancel any personal subscription the business was paying for.
- Pick your plan, and write down how many Standard and Premium seats you need, and who gets which.
- Create the organization (or upgrade) using a company email address.
- Name the Primary Owner and one backup Owner.
- Invite your first wave of people. Start with the ones who already use Claude.
Open the Team Setup Checklist and fill in Part 1.
Check it worked
- Your organization exists, and the Primary Owner signs in with a company email address.
- A second person is an Owner.
- Everyone invited has the right seat type and role.
- You know who on the team was using a personal account for work, and each one has been asked to switch.
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Next: the settings. Most are fine out of the box. A few are worth a deliberate choice.
→ Lesson 2: Settings that protect the business