The short answer: Claude has a free tier for testing the waters, a single regular user costs roughly 20 USD per month (Pro), and a business seat in Claude Team runs somewhere between 25 and 30 USD per user per month depending on whether you pay annually or monthly. In Czech crowns that works out to roughly 550 to 700 CZK per person per month excluding VAT. The gap between Claude, ChatGPT Business and Microsoft 365 Copilot comes down to a few dollars — what actually decides it is the type of work you do and where your data lives.
Pricing is the least interesting part of choosing an AI tool. So this article isn’t about which plan is „cheapest", but about what a company actually gets for the money, where the costs appear that no price list mentions, and how to choose between three services whose monthly fee is essentially identical.
Treat every figure below as indicative. Anthropic and Microsoft change prices, limits and plan names faster than any comparison can go stale — before you order, verify the current terms directly in your account and in the official price list.
What Claude costs: plan overview
| Plan | Indicative price | Who it makes sense for |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Free | 0 USD | Trying it out and occasional non-critical tasks |
| Claude Pro | 20 USD per month, less when paid annually (200 USD per year) | One regular user, freelancers, business owners |
| Claude Max 5× | 100 USD per month | Very frequent use by a single person |
| Claude Max 20× | 200 USD per month | Intensive daily use, working with code |
| Claude Team | roughly 25 USD per user paid annually, 30 USD billed monthly | A company that wants user management and billing in one place |
| Claude Enterprise | custom quote | Larger organisations with stricter governance and contract requirements |
Alongside the standard seat, Team also offers a pricier variant with higher limits and full Claude Code for people who really push AI to its limits. Verify the exact price of that seat and the minimum team size when you order — both have changed since the service launched, and older comparisons online tend to be out of date. Standard and premium seats can be mixed within one team: most people get by on the basic tier, while the more expensive licence goes to, say, the one person who chews through hundreds of pages of source material every day.
Beyond the higher limits, Team brings shared user and billing management, projects, shared knowledge bases, connectors to work services and permission controls. Three model families are available: Opus (the most capable, the most expensive), Sonnet (the workhorse) and Haiku (fast and cheap). Specific model versions get refreshed several times a year, so picking an annual subscription based on today’s model number makes no sense.
What that is in Czech crowns
At an exchange rate of around 22 CZK to the dollar, a standard business seat comes to roughly 550 to 650 CZK per month excluding VAT. The real figure shifts with the rate on the day the payment is taken, your bank’s currency conversion fee and the VAT regime — if you supply your VAT number with the order, reverse charge usually applies and you account for the tax in your return. For five people we’re talking about 35,000 CZK a year, an amount nobody spends weeks approving. Which is precisely why the decision shouldn’t get stuck on it.
When Claude Pro is enough and when you need Team
Claude Pro is the simplest choice for a business owner or a specialist working alone: preparing quotes, analysing documents, drafting replies, research, working with code. But it is a personal plan, not a managed corporate workspace. The account belongs to the person, not the company.
The moment two or more people are using Claude, the case tips towards Team. The company gains:
- the ability to revoke the account of someone who has left — without begging for a password;
- user and payment management in one place, rather than five personal cards in the books;
- access tied to corporate identity and roles;
- visibility into spending and any add-on usage purchased;
- separation of work content from employees’ private accounts;
- shared projects and knowledge bases that stay with the company.
Max is a personal plan for someone whose work regularly grinds to a halt against Pro’s limits mid-afternoon. It is not automatically „better than Team". It gives more capacity, but no user management, no ownership of the workspace and no corporate data terms. A company that buys Max instead of Team is treating a symptom and buying itself a problem for later.
Claude versus ChatGPT and Copilot: price is only the first filter
| Business service | Indicative price per user per month | Main reason to choose it |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Team | ~25 USD annually / ~30 USD monthly | Long documents, working with text, projects, development and Claude Code |
| ChatGPT Business | ~25 USD annually / ~30 USD monthly | A broad toolset — data analysis, images, custom GPTs, connectors |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot | ~30 USD on an annual commitment | Working directly in Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Teams |
Copilot is an add-on to a supported Microsoft 365 licence, so its price stacks on top of whatever you already pay for Business Standard or Premium. The total cost per head is therefore higher than those thirty dollars. On the other hand, it is worth considering if your company already keeps its documents in SharePoint and OneDrive, communicates through Teams and runs on Exchange Online.
Claude pays off where people regularly read, compare and rewrite longer material. A good test task: compare two versions of a contract and list the differences, find discrepancies between technical documentation and the actual configuration, assemble a briefing document from five internal files. The output is always checked by someone who understands the subject.
ChatGPT tends to be more practical as an all-round working environment — alongside text, it handles file and spreadsheet analysis, image generation, web research and shared projects. What decides it, though, isn’t the number of items on the feature list but how many of them your people will actually use. Most companies use three features out of thirty.
Copilot has the advantage that you don’t have to copy an email out of Outlook or manually upload a document from OneDrive. That advantage, however, lives and dies by how tidy your permissions are. If your accountant has access to a payroll folder they shouldn’t see, Copilot won’t fix that — it will just find it for them faster than they would have themselves.
For a broader cost comparison, including the option of running your own AI, see the article what AI costs a business.
A Claude subscription is not the same as the API
Pro and Team are application subscriptions for a person. If you want to process incoming forms automatically, sort emails, create CRM records or connect Claude to your own system, you need the API — and that means a separate account and a separate invoice.
The API isn’t billed per user but by the volume of tokens processed (roughly: a token corresponds to anything from a syllable to a short word, and rather less in Czech). Indicative rates per million tokens across the Claude model families sit around 1 USD for input and 5 USD for output on Haiku, 3 and 15 USD on Sonnet, and 5 and 25 USD on Opus. Output tokens are therefore fundamentally more expensive than input tokens — and that is exactly where a poorly designed automation delivers its end-of-month surprise.
But the token price is not the automation budget. Add integration, error handling, logging, credential storage, cost monitoring and a human being for the cases where the model isn’t sure. And above all: an employee’s subscription does not cover the API consumption of a corporate system. These are two different wallets. For what can sensibly be automated this way and what can’t, see this overview of seven processes suited to AI automation.
How to tell whether a higher plan pays off
Don’t buy Max or premium seats pre-emptively. First find out whether people are genuinely hitting the limits and whether that is pushing work to the next day.
To choose between Claude, ChatGPT and Copilot, put together ten to twenty real tasks your company does repeatedly. Strip out any sensitive data and give every service exactly the same brief. Judge them on:
- factual accuracy;
- how many of the requirements in the brief the model overlooked;
- the time needed to fix the output;
- whether the Czech is usable without a rewrite;
- how they handle your document and spreadsheet formats;
- the ability to admit uncertainty instead of filling in the blanks;
- how comfortable they are in everyday use.
The prettiest demo answer decides nothing. The better tool is the one whose output an employee can check and finish faster.
Calculate the return roughly, but honestly:
monthly benefit = hours saved × internal hourly cost − licence − time spent checking
If someone saves a few minutes a month, even a five-hundred-crown licence doesn’t pay for itself. If it regularly cuts hours off preparing documents or reviewing them, the difference between a 25 and a 30 dollar plan stops being a topic of discussion.
Risks you won’t find in the price list
A business plan with data protection doesn’t mean you can pour anything into it. Before you go live, decide whether people may enter personal data, trade secrets, client contracts, source code or credentials.
On Claude’s business plans, inputs and outputs are not used to train models by default; ChatGPT Business and Microsoft 365 Copilot declare similar protection. Watch out, though, for submitted feedback, external connectors and third-party tools — these may operate under different terms than the main service, and they are usually the ones that let data travel further.
The operational risks are concrete and recurring:
- people set up private accounts the company can neither revoke nor audit;
- a password, national ID number or unsigned contract ends up in a prompt;
- the model invents a fact that goes out to a client unchecked;
- a connector exposes more documents than the user expected — see permissions above;
- an automation repeats a faulty action two hundred times before anyone notices;
- nobody tracks add-on credits or actual monthly consumption.
So start with a limited pilot, write down the rules for data, and name one person responsible for checking the results. Additional licences and automated steps come after that.
How to start without unnecessary licences
- Pick two people and one specific process, not „AI across the company".
- Run a business plan on monthly billing for a month, with no annual commitment.
- Measure the original time, the time with AI, and the time needed for corrections.
- Check data handling, permissions and billing.
- Order the annual plan only once the pilot has been evaluated.
- Handle the API and automation separately from user licences — different budget, different owner.
If after a month you still don’t know which tool to deploy, what you’re missing is a comparison on your own tasks, not another price list. Corporate training that ends with a list of prompts won’t solve this; you need to verify what Claude, ChatGPT and Copilot can handle on your data, where human oversight has to stay, and what is even worth automating. That’s what AI training for businesses and designing corporate automations from ITHOPE build on.
Frequently asked questions
What does Claude Pro cost in the Czech Republic?
Claude Pro costs roughly 20 USD per month, or about 200 USD per year when paid annually. The final amount in crowns depends on the exchange rate on the day of payment, your bank’s conversion fee and the VAT regime.
What does Claude Team cost for a small business?
A standard business seat runs on the order of 25 USD per user per month paid annually and 30 USD billed monthly, so roughly 550 to 700 CZK excluding VAT per head. Verify the minimum team size directly in the order — Anthropic has changed it in the past.
Is Claude cheaper than ChatGPT?
Practically speaking, no — business seat pricing is in the same range for both services. Decide based on results on your own tasks, on which features your people will actually use, and on how each connects to your company data.
Is Claude worth it instead of Microsoft 365 Copilot?
Yes, if you don’t need AI directly inside Microsoft 365 apps and get more out of standalone work with documents, text or code. Copilot is more practical for a company that keeps its documents, mail and communication concentrated in Microsoft 365 — and has its permissions in order.
Is the API included in a Claude subscription?
No. User subscriptions and the API are separate billing arrangements with their own invoices. Automation via the API is paid by token consumption, and on top of that you should budget for integration, operations and checking the outputs.