Is Claude Code going to cost $100/month? Probably not—it's all very confusing

Apr 22, 2026 · ai · Source ↗

TLDR

Anthropic silently moved Claude Code to Max-only ($100+/month) on April 22, 2026, then reversed within hours after community backlash.

The pricing page was updated with no announcement; Anthropic’s Head of Growth explained it as a test on “~2% of new prosumer signups” via a single tweet.
Existing Pro and Max subscribers were stated to be unaffected, but the public-facing logged-out pricing page and docs were updated, confusing the 98% not in the test.
Anthropic reversed the visible change within hours, but Amol Avasare confirmed the experiment is still running for that 2% slice, just no longer publicly visible.
Claude Cowork, described as a rebranded version of Claude Code, remained available on the $20/month Pro plan throughout the incident.
OpenAI’s Codex engineering lead publicly positioned Codex as remaining on free and $20 plans, directly contrasting with the Claude Code pricing signal.

A 5x price jump ($20 to $100) for a widely adopted coding agent creates real switching-cost calculations for individual developers, educators, and teams outside high-salary markets.
The absence of official communication beyond one employee tweet damaged trust in Anthropic’s pricing transparency at a moment when Claude Code is credited with defining the coding-agent category and generating billions in revenue.
The experiment is confirmed still running for a subset of new signups, meaning the pricing question is not fully resolved despite the public page reversal.

Simon Willison, Simon Willison’s Weblog · 2026-04-22 · Read the original