Claude for Small Business in 2027: plans, prices and what to check

Anthropic sells Claude as a per-person subscription. Prices are published in US dollars, excluding tax, and Anthropic notes they can change. This is what the pricing page showed on 10 November 2026.

Every plan has usage limits. Most accounts have a limit that resets on a rolling five-hour window, and paid plans add a weekly limit on top. Pro gives at least five times Free's usage per five-hour session, Max five times Pro, and Ultra ten times Pro's weekly usage, with no five-hour limit for verified accounts.

When you hit a limit on a paid plan, you can turn on usage credits and keep working at standard API rates. It is a useful release valve at the end of a busy month, and worth watching so the bill does not surprise you. API rates are covered in our guide to Claude API pricing.

Max and Ultra are billed monthly only. Pro and Team can be paid annually, which lowers the monthly price. Enterprise is annual only.

For a business with more than one person, the real decision is Pro versus Team. The price per person stays close: $20 a month billed annually against $17 for Pro. What changes is the framework around it.

• No training by default. The pricing page lists “No model training on your content by default” for Team. On Pro, training is on unless each user turns it off in settings.
• Central billing and admin. An owner manages seats, billing and organization settings. Accounts stop being personal.
• SSO and domain verification. Staff sign in with the company account, and you can stop people creating separate organizations on your domain.
• Connector controls. The admin decides which remote and local connectors are allowed. This is the setting that matters most once Claude touches your inbox or your books.
• Enterprise search and shared projects. Claude can search the organization's connected tools, and projects can be shared between colleagues.
• Mixed seats and API credits. You can mix standard and premium seats, and the plan includes up to $500 a month in pooled API credits.

What Team lacks, according to the comparison table: SCIM provisioning, audit logs, fine-grained roles, the Compliance API, custom data retention and the HIPAA-ready offering. Those are Enterprise only. A ten-person business usually manages without them. A law firm or a healthcare practice should look closely at the custom data retention line before choosing.

Anthropic launched Claude for Small Business on 13 May 2026. It is a plugin, a bundle of skills and connectors, that sits on top of the plan you already have, on any paid plan: Pro, Max, Ultra, Team or Enterprise. You add it from Customize, then Plugins, then Small Business.

The idea: you describe a job in plain English, Claude picks the matching skill, reads the data in your tools and prepares the work. Anthropic stresses one point: by default, nothing sends, posts or pays without your approval. Payroll is set up for you to submit, bills wait for your sign-off before they are paid, and Claude does not file anything for you.

The Claude Academy tutorial lists commands including:

• /monday-brief: one page to start the week with cash, sales, pipeline, your calendar and the one thing that needs you.
• /close-month: reconciles your books against payment processors, updates the cash forecast and writes the close packet for your accountant.
• /pay-the-bills: codes your bills, checks the cash and lines up the payment run for your OK.
• /plan-payroll: checks cash covers payroll and drafts reminders for overdue invoices.
• /speed-to-lead: answers new inquiries on nights and weekends with real meeting times and updates your CRM.
• contract-review: summarizes a contract in plain English, lists red flags and produces a marked-up redline.

Two skills go further: build-connector, which connects Claude to a tool with no official connector through the Claude connector directory or Zapier, and build-agent, which turns a task you keep doing by hand into a skill you run by name or on a schedule.

On software, the Small Business page names Intuit QuickBooks, HubSpot, Shopify, Stripe, Gusto and Canva, “and 25 more”. The tutorial also lists Xero, Zoho Books, PayPal, Square, Docusign, Gmail, Google Drive, Microsoft 365, Notion, Slack and Salesforce, among others. According to Anthropic, most owners using it run businesses under ten people, many of them solo.

A connector gives Claude access to a piece of software, with the permissions of the account you connect. Connectors are available on every plan, including Free. What Team changes is that the admin allows or blocks them for the whole organization.

• Microsoft 365. The connector, built by Anthropic, gives access to SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook and Teams from inside Claude. Separately, Claude for Microsoft 365 puts Claude in Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Outlook; it is included from Pro upward.
• Google Workspace. Claude for Google Workspace is an add-on for Docs, Sheets and Slides. It sees only the open file and the connectors you enable, and a Google admin can deploy it to the whole domain or selected groups.
• Operations and sales. Claude's directory lists HubSpot, Slack, Notion, Shopify, Canva, Gmail, Google Drive and Google Calendar, among others.

Anthropic states a principle that matters for a small business: Claude sees only what the connected account can see. If an employee cannot open a folder in Drive or a module in QuickBooks, they cannot reach it through Claude either. To connect Claude to business software with no connector, the technique is MCP, explained in our guide to MCP in the enterprise.

Claude Cowork brings Claude Code's agent capabilities to knowledge work: reading your files, browsing the web, running code and using your apps. The Small Business plugin runs inside Cowork. It is available on every paid plan, in the desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux (beta), and on web and mobile for Pro, Max, Ultra and Team (beta on Team).

Anthropic's Help Center has a full page on Cowork's risks, worth reading before you open it to a team. Two points stand out. Write tools, which create an invite, delete a file or run a command, carry more risk than read tools, and Anthropic recommends human oversight when the stakes are high. And while reading a website or an email, Claude can meet content written to manipulate it: prompt injection. We cover the defences in our guide to AI agent security.

Claude Code, Anthropic's coding tool, is included in every paid plan and shares the same usage limits. For a small business without a developer, it is mostly a way to build small internal tools. The testimonials Anthropic publishes on its Small Business page point the same way, though they are customers the vendor picked.

Read this before putting customer data into Claude. In its launch post, Anthropic says half of the small business owners it surveyed named data security as their single biggest hesitation about AI.

• Training. On Free, Pro, Max and Ultra, the Consumer Terms let Anthropic use your content to train its models unless you opt out. Even after opting out, feedback you send and content flagged for safety review can be used. The Commercial Terms say Anthropic may not train models on customer content, and the pricing page lists no training by default on Team and Enterprise.
• GDPR processing terms. The Commercial Terms incorporate Anthropic's Data Processing Addendum by reference, in effect since 24 February 2025. It includes the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, UK and Swiss addenda, and a subprocessor list. The Consumer Terms reference no DPA, so a business processing personal data needs the commercial framework. Check which terms apply to your account when you sign up.
• Where data is processed. The Privacy Policy describes transfers to servers in the US under standard contractual clauses. The API documentation offers two inference geographies, global or US, and one storage geography, the US. EU-only processing exists through Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud or Microsoft Foundry, that is, in a project built on the API.
• Certifications. The regional compliance page lists SOC 2 Type 2, ISO/IEC 27001, 27017 and 27018, and CSA STAR. Details sit in Anthropic's Trust Center.
• Retention. A deleted conversation leaves your history immediately and Anthropic's back end within 30 days, according to the Privacy Policy. Retention periods set by the company exist only on Enterprise.

In practice, for a business handling customer or employee data, Team is the reasonable minimum. The detailed obligations, and the equivalent contracts at OpenAI and Mistral, are in our guide to GDPR and AI agents. For health data in France, Claude is not presented as an HDS-certified host in the pages we read, so a medical project needs a different architecture.

These work with the plan and the plugin as they ship, without any development. Each one comes with its limit.

• Preparing the month-end close for your accountant. Claude matches Stripe or PayPal settlements against your books, flags gaps and writes a readable summary. Limit: the plugin's tax skill targets US taxes. VAT and statutory filings outside the US stay with your accountant.
• Chasing late invoices. The plugin ranks overdue invoices and drafts a reminder for each customer, matched to their payment history. Limit: nothing sends without your approval, and the tone has to be one you would stand behind.
• Answering evening inquiries. Claude offers real meeting times and updates the CRM. Limit: HubSpot and Salesforce are covered. For an industry CRM, such as Apimo in French real estate, the connection has to be built and maintained.
• Reading a contract before signing. Summary, red flags, marked-up redline. Limit: it is a first read, and Claude does not replace your lawyer on a significant commitment.
• Screening applicants. The hiring-screener skill ranks candidates against the job's requirements. Limit: in the EU, automated CV screening falls under GDPR; in France, the CNIL has published guidance, covered in our guide to screening CVs with AI.
• The Monday brief. One page with cash, sales and the week's meetings. Limit: the quality depends on how clean the data in your tools is.

• A product designed for the US. The plugin's tax prep produces quarterly estimates and 1099 lists, and Anthropic's in-person workshops are held in US cities. French tools such as Pennylane, Qonto and Sellsy do not appear in the tutorial's tool list.
• Prices in dollars. Anthropic publishes prices in US dollars, excluding tax. What you are charged depends on the exchange rate and the VAT that applies.
• Usage limits are not fixed quotas. Anthropic publishes no message count: usage depends on the model, the length of conversations and the files involved. A team that works heavily with Claude should plan for premium seats or usage credits.
• An assistant that waits to be started. Scheduled tasks exist, but Claude runs inside your account and sessions. A process that has to run on its own, on every new order or every call, belongs in a server-side automation.
• Staff training. In the EU, the AI Act has required measures on staff AI literacy since 2 February 2025. Our guide to the AI training obligation explains what it asks of a small business.

For a business of a few people, a sensible rollout fits in five steps. This is our recommendation, built on the settings Anthropic documents.

1. Pick the plan and buy it in the company's name. Team as soon as two people use Claude with customer data, to move off the consumer terms.
2. Close what you do not need. In the admin settings, allow only the connectors you need in the first week, such as email and calendar.
3. Install the plugin and run smb-onboard. This skill asks about your business, helps you connect your tools and saves that context for every other skill.
4. Start with a read-only task. The Monday brief or a cash snapshot changes nothing in your tools. Keep approval before every send or payment, which is the default.
5. Write a one-page internal rule. Which data may go into Claude, which may not, and who signs off on what. Then train the team, for example with Anthropic and PayPal's free course.

One check before rollout: Anthropic's supported regions list sets where the products may be used. It includes France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the UK, Canada and Morocco, among others, and use while physically in an unlisted country is not allowed, even for staff of a company based in a listed one.

• You work alone and handle no sensitive personal data: Pro, with training turned off in settings.
• You are 2 to 150 people and Claude touches customer data: Team, standard seats for everyone, premium for the two or three people who use it all day.
• You are in a regulated sector or need audit logs: Enterprise, from 20 seats, or a project on the API with suitable hosting.
• You are weighing Claude against ChatGPT: our Claude vs ChatGPT for business comparison sets the team offers side by side.

To buy Team, install the plugin and connect Google Workspace or HubSpot, you do not need an agency: Anthropic built that path for an owner working alone. An agency becomes useful in three cases.

• Your tools have no connector. An industry CRM, law firm software, a local ERP: the connection has to be built and maintained when the tool changes. That is the work described on our page on Claude in the enterprise.
• The process has to run with nobody at the screen. Answering every inbound request, updating the CRM on every form, chasing on fixed dates: that is the job of a server-side workflow, for example with n8n, calling Claude through the API.
• The data demands a framework. Health, legal, candidates: you have to choose where data travels, under which contract, and what the agent may do. Our custom AI agents page describes that approach.

To compare providers, our ranking of Claude implementation agencies lists what each one publishes and what can be checked.