Anthropic's Claude offers a free tier with access to Sonnet 4.6 and Haiku 4.5 models, but excludes the premium Opus 4.8. Free users get web search, file uploads (20 files per chat, 500MB per file), Projects, and Artifacts. The free tier remains ad-free, unlike some competitors, but comes with usage limits based on a rolling five-hour window, typically allowing 15-40 messages per session.

Usage limits depend on prompt complexity and token consumption, with longer queries consuming more resources. Anthropic doesn't publish exact limits but implements a rolling five-hour window that doesn't reset at midnight. The company recommends concise prompts to conserve tokens. Users may have been enrolled in model training by default and should opt out from the Privacy settings if they prefer not to contribute.

The most significant omissions from Claude's free tier are Claude Code and Claude Design. The former, Anthropic's agentic coding tool, remains exclusive to paid tiers, along with its offshoot Claude Cowork. While free users can still ask coding questions and get debugging help, they miss out on automated coding assistance. The company maintains these limitations to manage computational costs while keeping the free tier genuinely useful.