For a five person security team, the published monthly cost of five Claude Pro subscriptions is $100 to $125, a Team plan is the same range for standard seats, and API spend depends entirely on tokens used. Choose by who needs shared admin features, how heavy the usage is, and whether you are building automation. Prices fetched 18 October 2026.
What do the plans cost?
From Anthropic's pricing page, fetched 18 October 2026:
- Claude Pro: $17 per month on an annual plan (billed as $200 up front) or $20 per month billed monthly. Five seats: $85 or $100 per month.
- Claude Team, listed for teams of 2 to 150: standard seat $20 per seat per month billed annually, or $25 billed monthly. Five standard seats: $100 or $125 per month. Premium seat: $100 per seat per month billed annually, or $125 monthly, with 5 times the usage of a standard seat.
- Claude Max starts at $100 per month for one person, with a choice of 5 times or 20 times the usage of Pro.
The pricing documentation, fetched the same day, lists API prices per million tokens. Claude Sonnet 5.5 is $2 input and $10 output. Claude Opus 5.5 is $4 input and $20 output. Claude Haiku 5.5 is $0.10 input and $0.50 output for prompts up to 100,000 tokens.
We make no claims about what any plan costs Anthropic to provide. This is arithmetic on published figures.
How do five Pro seats compare with a Team plan?
On the monthly figures, a standard Team seat costs $5 more per month than a Pro seat when both are billed monthly, and $3 more when both are billed annually. The page lists Team as including all Claude features plus more usage than Pro. What the money buys you beyond that, such as shared administration, is something to confirm on the page and with Anthropic sales before you buy. We did not verify those details.
For a security team, administration matters because the work involves sensitive material. Decide who may paste what into the tool, and check what controls the plan gives you to enforce that.
When does the API win?
The API makes sense when the work is automation: a pipeline that triages alerts, summarizes advisories or reviews pull requests. Those jobs run without a person typing, and the cost scales with volume.
A rough budget: suppose a triage job reads 20,000 tokens and writes 2,000 per alert. On Sonnet 5.5 that is 0.02 MTok times $2, which is $0.04, plus 0.002 MTok times $10, which is $0.02, so $0.06 per alert. At 1,000 alerts a month that is $60. Those numbers are our assumptions, not benchmarks. Replace them with your own measurements.
At the same $100 a month, the API gives you 50 MTok of Sonnet 5.5 input or 10 MTok of output, or a mix. Whether that is more or less than five people need by hand depends on their habits.
What about limits?
Pro and the other plans use a rolling five hour session window with weekly limits on paid plans, according to the page. If your team has a crunch, such as an incident, you may hit the limits when you need the tool most. The API has no such window, but spend has no natural cap unless you set one.
A practical split
Many small teams run both: subscriptions for people who work interactively, and an API key for automation with a monthly budget alert. Keep the API key in a secrets manager and scope it, because an exposed key is a bill and a data risk.
What to do
- List the tasks you want help with and tag each as interactive or automated.
- Count heavy users. Five people rarely have equal usage.
- Price your automated jobs in tokens at list rates and add a margin.
- Compare five seats on Pro and on Team, and confirm what Team adds with Anthropic.
- Set a monthly API budget and alerts before you start.
- Write a short rule on what data may go into the tool.
- Re-check prices each quarter.
Quick check
What is the cheapest option for five people?
On published prices, five Pro seats on an annual plan are $85 a month. Cheapest on paper is not the same as the best fit if you need team features or automation.
Can the API replace the subscriptions?
For automated jobs it can. For people working interactively, you would need an interface for them, which costs time to build or buy.
Sources
- Claude pricing page, fetched 18 October 2026
- Anthropic API pricing documentation, fetched 18 October 2026
Last reviewed: 18 October 2026.
