The cheapest way to run Claude right now: every route in our catalog, from $0 to $200 a month
Claude is not one price. Depending on where you point your API key, the same model can be free with rate limits, metered by the request, bundled into a subscription, or discounted through a credit scheme. We maintain a structured catalog of 45 AI providers, and seven of them list Claude models by name, with an eighth route via bring-your-own-key tooling. One caveat up front, because E-E-A-T starts with admitting what you do not know: the catalog tracks plans, allowances, and credit math as structured data, but it does not carry per-million-token prices for Claude itself in these provider wrappers. So this article compares what we can actually verify — routes, monthly costs, rate limits, and subscription math — and says exactly where the data stops. If you need pay-per-token Claude pricing, the provider's own pricing page is your source; our provider directory links you there for each entry.
How we verified each route
Every row in the next table is a provider entry in our catalog with a verified_at timestamp in June 2026 and a source_url pointing at the provider's own pricing or docs page. We read the page, captured the plan names and the allowance or credit math into structured fields (free_tier, subscription_plans, rate_limits, promo_codes), and re-fetched to confirm the field still resolves. Where a provider says 'varies by usage tier' without a hard number, we store that string instead of inventing one. Where a plan is labeled 'free tier' but scoped to personal use and prototyping, we store both facts. The plans table is the rendered view of that data, and the free-tier hub is the filtered view for the $0 lanes. This article is a snapshot of that data as of August 1, 2026, refreshed August 23 without changing a price until the catalog itself changes.
Every route to Claude we track
| Provider | Route to Claude | Cost | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub Models | Claude 3.5 Sonnet on the free tier | $0, no credit card | Rate-limited, and scoped to personal use and prototyping |
| Kilo Code | Free plan with sign-in; Claude 3.5 Sonnet in the model list | $0 | 200 requests/hour cap; BYOK when you outgrow it |
| LLM Gateway | Free tier, then pay-per-token routing to Claude | $0 to start, no credit card | A 5% fee rides on token spend after the free tier |
| AI Router | Smart routing to Claude 3.5 Sonnet with fallbacks | Free entry at 1K requests/month; Starter is €20/mo for 20K requests | Above the included volume you pay per request (€0.0015 on Starter) |
| CrofAI | Straight pay-as-you-go Claude 3.5 Sonnet | No monthly charge at all | The Hobby tier caps at 500 requests/day |
| OpenRouter | Claude 3.5 Sonnet, paid | Usage-based | The famous 50 req/day free pool excludes Claude; the free models rotate, and Claude is not one of them |
| Anthropic | Direct: Pro, Max 5x, Max 20x | $20 / $100 / $200 per month | No free tier and a card is required; the Max tiers buy headroom, not newer models |
| Kilo Pass | Monthly AI-credit subscription inside Kilo Code | $19 / $49 / $199 per month | Credits, not unlimited use; the 50% bonus credit is what makes the math interesting |
Cheapest for light use: genuinely free
If your Claude usage is a few dozen prompts a day, the cheapest answer in the catalog is GitHub Models: Claude 3.5 Sonnet on a free tier, no credit card, with paid usage beyond the free limits. The catch is scope: the plan is documented for personal use and prototyping, so a product backend does not belong on it — that is not our editorializing, it is the plan's own terms, and we link the source from the provider entry . Kilo Code gives you 200 requests per hour just for signing in, which is generous for an editor built around Claude, and LLM Gateway starts free and only charges token spend (plus that 5% routing fee) once you pass its free tier. AI Router's entry lane is 1,000 requests a month, which is evaluation volume, not a lifestyle. Open the free-tier hub and you can filter these four side by side; the plans table shows what each one costs once you stop being free, because the cheapest month is rarely the cheapest year.
Cheapest for heavy use: do the subscription math
If Claude is a daily tool rather than an experiment, the math inverts. Anthropic's own Pro plan is $20 a month with Claude Code access and every Claude model in the catalog, from Claude 4.5 Sonnet up to Claude 4.1 Opus. The Max 5x ($100) and Max 20x ($200) tiers multiply the allowance and add priority access at peak, but the model lineup is identical at $20 — a common misunderstanding. You are buying headroom and priority, not a newer model. Kilo Pass is the other structure worth doing arithmetic on: $19 a month buys up to $26.60 in credits, $49 buys up to $68.60, and $199 buys up to $278.60, a 50% bonus on each tier, and Kilo's Auto Model routes each request to a capability and cost tier instead of burning everything on the flagship. That bonus is why Kilo Pass sometimes beats Anthropic direct on a per-credit basis if you live inside Kilo Code. If you want pure metered billing with zero monthly commitment, CrofAI is the only provider in the catalog that sells Claude as straight pay-as-you-go with no subscription wrapped around it: you pay per request until you hit the Hobby cap of 500 requests/day, then you upgrade. For teams, that pay-per-request shape is easier to attribute to a cost center than a credit pool.
Two honest notes, because comparison tables flatter the winner. First, OpenRouter is usually the default answer to 'cheap access to everything', and it is excellent for open models: 50 free requests a day without a card, 1,000 once you add $10 in PAYG credit. But Claude sits outside that free pool — our OpenRouter entry says so explicitly, and the provider's own free-model list confirms it — so it does not win this particular contest. Second, per-million-token Claude pricing is exactly the kind of field we do not track in the catalog wrappers yet; Anthropic's catalog entry describes its API as usage-based with no monthly subscription required, and when providers publish token prices for Claude we add them. Until then, the provider directory and our pricing page carry whatever is current, and the AI hub is the front door to all of it. If you are building a product on Claude, run the same prompt through two routes on /chat with your own keys and watch the latency and rate-limit headers yourself — that is worth more than any comparison article.
Who should pick which
- Trying Claude for the first time or prototyping a prompt: GitHub Models or Kilo Code. No card, no commitment, and the limits are high enough to finish the prototype before you decide.
- Light production that fits in ~1K requests/month: AI Router free tier, then Starter at €20/mo if you need fallbacks and smart routing.
- Bursty pay-as-you-go without a subscription: CrofAI Hobby (500 requests/day) or LLM Gateway (5% fee after the free tier but no monthly minimum).
- Daily driver for coding: Anthropic Pro at $20/mo is the cleanest buy. If you already live in Kilo Code, do the Kilo Pass credit math at $19/$49 — the 50% bonus can make Kilo cheaper than direct if you route through Auto Model.
- Teams that need priority at peak: Anthropic Max 5x/20x ($100/$200) buys headroom, not a better model. Budget for the allowance multiplier, not a model upgrade.
Limitations and when to re-check
Plans, credit offers, and free-tier scopes rotate without notice. A provider that was free last month can be paywalled this month, and a 50% bonus can become 25%. Our catalog stores a verified_at per entry for exactly this reason, and we re-verify monthly; the directory reflects changes first. This article's prices and caps are accurate as of August 1, 2026, editorially refreshed August 23. Before you commit to an annual plan, open the live provider entry — if the number on the provider page disagrees with the number here, the provider page is right and we want the bug report.