Anthropic launches the Claude Team plan and iOS app

Background

Claude was already reachable through a web interface at claude.ai, and Anthropic offered an individual Pro subscription alongside it.^[1] The 1 May 2024 announcement extended that line in two directions at once: toward organisations that need several accounts under one administrator, and toward phones.^[1]

What was announced

Anthropic announced two products on the same day: the Claude Team plan and a Claude iOS app.^[1] The two were separate offerings — the Team plan was a paid subscription aimed at workplaces, while the iOS app was free and open to everyone.^[1]

The Team plan

The Team plan cost $30 per user per month, with a minimum of five seats.^[1] Sign-up went through claude.ai.^[1]

What subscribers got, relative to the individual Pro tier, was more usage and a wider set of models: access to Claude 3 Opus, Sonnet and Haiku.^[1] The plan also carried a 200K-token context window, meaning the amount of text a model can hold in view at one time when working on a request.^[1] Team accounts included administrative tools for managing users and billing, the part that makes a shared subscription practical for an organisation rather than just a group of individuals paying separately.^[1] Team also included everything in Pro, which covered priority access during high-traffic periods and early access to new features.^[1]

The iOS app

The iOS app was free for all users, not only paying ones.^[1] It was available on the Apple App Store to users on all plans, including Pro and Team.^[1]

Two capabilities defined it. Chat history synced with the web, so a conversation started on a laptop could be continued on a phone.^[1] And the app supported photo and file uploads for image analysis, letting users send images to the model rather than only typed text.^[1]

Features still to come

Anthropic said several Team features would arrive "in the coming weeks".^[1] These included citations from reliable sources, integrations with data repositories such as codebases or CRMs, and collaboration on AI-generated documents.^[1] In other words, the launch-day plan was partly a promise: the parts that connect Claude to where a company's information already lives, and the parts that let colleagues work on the same output, were announced rather than shipped.^[1]

Why it matters

A team tier changes who a chatbot subscription is for. An individual plan is bought by one person for one person; a plan with a five-seat minimum, per-user pricing and admin tools for users and billing is bought by an organisation, which then has to decide who gets access and pay for it centrally.^[1] Bundling in the full Pro feature set and a larger usage allowance made that organisational purchase a straightforward step up rather than a separate product to evaluate.^[1]

The iOS app addressed a different kind of gap. The synced history meant the phone and the browser were the same workspace rather than two disconnected ones, and image upload widened the range of material a user could put in front of the model.^[1] Offering the app free across all plans, including the paid ones, made it an extension of the existing service instead of a new thing to buy.^[1]