Claude review

by Anthropic

The AI chat assistant that handles paperwork best: it reads a manual or a contract up to 100 pages with the diagrams included, and turns rough notes into a quote or a follow-up. Talking to it hands-free still carries a beta label, and the vendor will not say how much the free plan gives you.

Visit Claude

What it costsas of August 2026

Free: $0/mo
Pro: $17/moBilled annually, or $20/mo billed monthly
Max 5x: $100/moFive times Pro usage, monthly billing only
Max 20x: $200/moTwenty times Pro usage, monthly billing only
Team: $20/member/moBilled annually, or $25 monthly; 2 to 150 members
Team premium seat: $100/member/moBilled annually, or $125 monthly
Enterprise: Quote onlyBilled annually; 20 seats self-serve, 50 through sales

Max is monthly billing only. The Enterprise seat fee does not include usage, which is billed on top at the metered rates Anthropic charges developers, so the monthly bill is not fixed.

Visit Claude

Read our full Claude review

What Claude does

Pricing & terms

Starts atThe real monthly cost to get in the door, before add-ons.

Free to start. $20 a month for one person, or $17 if you pay for a year

How pricing worksFlat tiers, per user, or per job. This decides how fast the bill grows as you add people.

Flat price per person. A shop plan is $20 per member a month on a year deal

Free trial or planCan you try it with your own jobs before paying?

No trial of the paid plans. The free plan is free but tightly capped

ContractMonth-to-month vs a year-plus commitment you can't easily leave.

Month to month, cancel anytime. Paying a year up front drops it to $17

Fit & support

Ease of useHow hard it is to get a non-technical crew actually using it.

SupportWhat owners say about reaching a human when something breaks.

Help articles and an email form. No support phone number is published

What it does

Writing quotes & emailsTurns a few notes into a quote, a follow-up or a reply you can send.

Turns rough notes into a quote, a follow-up or an ad, on the free plan too

Reads photosSend it a picture of the job or a nameplate and ask what you are looking at.

Send a photo of a part or a nameplate and ask what it is, on any plan

Reads your documentsDrop in a manual, a spec sheet or a contract and ask questions about it.

Reads a manual or contract, diagrams included, up to 100 pages a file

Works hands-freeTalk to it from the truck instead of typing with dirty hands.

You can talk to it hands-free, but the vendor still calls this a beta

Usable free versionWhether you can get real work out of it without paying.

Free plan works, but the vendor will not say how much you get before it stops

Alternatives to Claude

Other tools that do the same job for a trade business.

ChatGPT

The AI chat assistant with the best hands-free story for a truck: you can talk to it on a CarPlay screen, and it will write a quote or read a photo of a nameplate. It reads the words in a manual but not the diagrams, which is the catch for equipment paperwork.

Google Gemini

The AI chat assistant already sitting in the Google account most shops run on: it drafts inside Gmail on paid plans, reads photos and spec sheets, and takes hands-free questions with the phone locked. Its free plan is the least restricted of the three.

Microsoft Copilot

The AI assistant already sitting on the office Windows PC and in the Microsoft 365 account a lot of shops already pay for: free for chat, photos, files and hands-free questions, but drafting inside Word, Excel and Outlook only works if you carry a Microsoft 365 subscription.

Birdeye

A reputation and local-marketing platform that automatically asks finished customers for Google reviews, pulls reviews from 200-plus sites into one dashboard so you can reply in one place, and keeps your business listings, texts, and social posts consistent so more local homeowners find you.

Constant Contact

An email marketing tool that lets a trade owner build a customer list and send branded promotions, seasonal reminders, and follow-up campaigns from ready-made templates without any design work.

Housecall Pro

Field-service management for home-service trades, strong on dispatching, service agreements, and customer marketing.

HubSpot

A CRM with a free tier that lets a trade owner keep every lead, call, and email in one place, then add paid marketing and sales tools like email campaigns and forms as the business grows.

Mailchimp

Email marketing you can run yourself to stay in front of past customers, send seasonal reminders and promotions, and turn your customer list into repeat and referral work.

How we research this

Pricing comes from Anthropic's own pricing pages and is dated at the time we checked it. Features are taken from the vendor's documentation, not from a sales call. We are independent and rank on fit alone. See how we review.