By
Mayowa Adebajo
April 29th, 2024
The paid plan for Claude Pro has been competitive priced in order to directly compete with ChatGPT Plus.
On Thursday, September 7, popular AI startup Anthropic, co-founded by ex-OpenAI employees, announced the launch of its first paid subscription plan for its AI-powered, text-analyzing chatbot Claude Pro. The paid version of the Claude chatbot shall be currently available in the US and the UK.
At a monthly rate of $20 in the US or £18 in the UK, subscribers receive “5x more usage” compared to the free Claude 2 tier. They also gain the capacity to send “many more” messages, enjoy priority access to Claude 2 during peak usage times, and gain early access to new features. At this price point, Claude Pro shall be directly competing with ChatGPT Plus.
Anthropic states that, depending on Claude’s capacity, the average user can expect to receive a minimum of 100 messages every eight hours. The company also assures users that they will receive a notification when they have only 10 messages left, and these limits will reset every eight hours
In a recent blog post, Anthropic revealed that since its launch in July, users have embraced Claude as their primary AI assistant due to its extended context windows, accelerated outputs, advanced reasoning abilities, and more.
Many users have expressed their desire for increased file uploads and extended conversation durations. With Claude Pro, subscribers can now enjoy a 5x boost in usage of our latest model, catering to their evolving needs and preferences. In its support document, Anthropic added:
“A model as capable as Claude 2 takes a lot of powerful computers to run, especially when responding to large attachments and long conversations. We set these limits to ensure Claude can be made available to many people to try for free, while allowing power users to integrate Claude into their daily workflows.”
AI Startup Anthropic’s Quick Rise
Anthropic introduced Claude in March, promoting it as a bot that’s more user-friendly and less prone to generating harmful outputs. Initially accessible only through Slack or for business use, Anthropic expanded the availability of Claude 2 to users in the United States and the United Kingdom in July.
The majority of the funds, including earnings from products like Claude Pro, will be allocated to expanding computing capacity. Anthropic suggests in the presentation that it depends on clusters equipped with “tens of thousands of GPUs” for model training and anticipates the need to invest approximately one billion dollars in infrastructure over the next 18 months.
In two years of its launch in 2021, Anthropic has secured $1.45 billion in funding, valuing the company in the single-digit billions. Although this sum might seem substantial, it falls considerably short of the $5 billion they estimate they’ll require over the next two years to bring their envisioned AI to life.
Anthropic reports a customer and partner base numbering in the “thousands”. This includes platforms like Quora, which offers access to Claude 2 and Claude Instant, a more budget-friendly but less advanced version of Claude 2, through its subscription-based generative AI app called Poe.