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Pick your Claude plan
Claude Code needs a paid Claude plan — the free tier doesn’t include it. This is a sixty-second decision, and the honest answer is the cheapest one.
For building your firm’s website, Claude Pro at $20/month is the right plan. It includes everything this course uses. You can cancel any time, and realistically you only need it during the weeks you are building and updating.
If you find yourself waiting on usage limits more than you are building, the Max 5x plan at $100/month removes that friction — and you can drop back to Pro the following month. Most people building one website never need it.
- Go to
claude.aiand create an account, using an email address you will keep. The plan comparison lives atclaude.com/pricing. - Open your account menu and choose the option to upgrade your plan, then pick Pro.
- Choose monthly billing, not annual — see the warning below.
- Add your payment details. That’s it — your account can now run Claude Code.
Annual billing advertises a lower monthly figure — around $17 instead of $20 — but it charges $200 up front for the full year. If you are paying for the few weeks it takes to build and launch a website, the monthly option is the one that actually lets you cancel. You can always switch to annual later if the tool earns its keep.
The whole choice, at a glance. Skip the “API” option entirely — that’s a developer product billed by usage, with no chat window.
Pro — get this
- $20 / month, billed monthly
- Includes Claude Code
- Plenty to build an entire site
- Cancel any time
Max
- Max 5x $100 / Max 20x $200 per month
- For hours of daily building
- Overkill for one website
- One-click upgrade later if you ever need it
API
- Built for developers
- Pay-per-use billing
- No simple chat window
- Skip it
There is a Team plan at $20 per person per month when billed annually ($25 if you pay monthly), and it includes Claude Code too. For a solo, ignore it. For a two- or three-attorney shop where a paralegal or an office manager will also be making website edits later, it is worth a look once the site is live — not now. Start on Pro, on your own account, and get the site built first.
Fair question, and the honest answer is: partly. OpenAI has its own coding agent, Codex, included with ChatGPT Plus at the same $20/month, and it is genuinely good. This course is built on Claude Code for one practical reason — its desktop app lets you do everything from an ordinary window with no terminal — and the free Build Kit you download in the next module is written specifically for it. You can follow this course with Codex; you will just be translating the steps yourself. For the smoothest path, get Claude Pro for the few weeks you are building.
If you see a “limit reached” message while building, nothing is lost — every file and every snapshot is saved on your own computer. Your main limit resets every five hours, so a break usually clears it.
There is also a separate weekly limit. If you hit that one, waiting an hour will not help; it resets on your weekly cycle. It is the reason this course suggests spreading a big build across two sittings rather than one marathon Saturday.
You are signed in to a paid Claude account on the Pro plan, billed monthly. Nothing is installed yet — that is the next lesson.
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