Domain 6 · Task Statement 6.1
Plan Selection & Feature Availability
TL;DR
Navigate Claude's plan tiers from Free to Enterprise, understand which Cowork features unlock at each level, and know the critical distinctions between Team Standard and Team Premium seats.
What You Need to Know
Claude's plans form a ladder, and each rung unlocks capabilities that the lower tiers can't access. Choosing the wrong tier doesn't just mean overpaying or underpaying — it means missing critical governance controls, lacking Cowork features your workflow depends on, or discovering on rollout day that the capability you promised your team doesn't exist on the plan you purchased.
The plan ladder
Free ($0) — limited Cowork access. Enough to explore the interface, but rate limits and feature restrictions make it unsuitable for professional workflows.
Pro ($20/month) — full Cowork access, 5x free usage, rate limits that reset every 5 hours. This is the entry point for individual professionals. Computer Use (research preview, macOS and Windows x64) and Scheduled Tasks are available here. Dispatch is a Team-plan feature, not Pro.
Max ($100-200/month) — 5-20x Pro usage depending on tier, conversation memory, priority access during high demand. For power users who hit Pro's rate limits regularly. Same Computer Use access as Pro.
Team Standard ($25/seat) — all Pro features plus admin tools, SSO, domain verification, centralised no-training defaults, and Dispatch. The entry point for organisational deployment. Computer Use is not included — Team and Enterprise plans do not currently have Computer Use access.
Team Premium ($100-150/seat) — includes Claude Code and full Cowork capabilities. Required for teams that need the complete agentic feature set.
Enterprise (custom pricing) — everything in Team Premium plus SAML SSO, SCIM provisioning, role-based access controls (RBAC) for Cowork capabilities, group spend limits, the Cowork Analytics API, expanded OpenTelemetry monitoring, tenant restrictions, and custom data retention policies. Lesson 6.6 covers the new enterprise governance surface in depth.
Exam Trap: Standard vs Premium Team Seats
Team Standard and Team Premium aren't the same. Standard ($25/seat) includes Pro features plus admin tools and SSO. Premium ($100-150/seat) adds Claude Code and full Cowork. Purchasing Standard seats expecting full agentic capabilities will leave your team without the features they need. Always check which tier includes the specific capabilities your workflow requires.
Rate limit resets: the 5-hour window
Pro plan rate limits reset every 5 hours, not daily. This means a heavy user can hit the ceiling mid-morning, wait it out, and get a fresh allocation by mid-afternoon. Understanding this window helps teams plan workloads — batch the heaviest processing for early morning, and have lightweight tasks ready for the post-limit period.
The Cowork access toggle: Team is all-or-nothing, Enterprise gained per-group control in April 2026
On Team plans, the Cowork access toggle is organisation-wide: it is either on for everyone or off for everyone. No per-user, per-department, or per-role granularity. You can't enable Cowork for Engineering while keeping it off for Finance.
On Enterprise plans, this changed with the April 2026 GA release. Admins can now organise users into groups — manually or via SCIM from your identity provider — and assign each group a custom role defining which Cowork capabilities its members can use. Roll Cowork out to one team first, watch how it lands, then expand. Lesson 6.6 covers the role and group model in detail.
The practical implication: if you need selective rollout and you're on Team, you have two choices — delay for everyone, or enable for everyone and rely on policy + training. If you need selective rollout on Enterprise, RBAC now does the work technically rather than through trust.
Exam Trap: 'All-or-nothing' is plan-tier specific
The exam will test whether you know the per-tier nuance. As of April 2026, "Cowork is all-or-nothing across the organisation" is true for Team plans but false for Enterprise plans. Enterprise admins can use groups and custom roles to selectively enable Cowork capabilities. Older study material that says "no per-user granularity on any plan" reflects pre-GA state.
Data training: the opt-out difference
Team and Enterprise plans have no-training defaults — conversation data isn't used to improve models, enforced centrally by the administrator. Pro and Max are individual plans where each user must manually opt out in Settings > Privacy.
This distinction matters enormously at scale. With 100 Pro accounts, you are relying on 100 individuals to remember to opt out. A single forgotten opt-out could expose sensitive data to the training pipeline. Team plans eliminate this risk with a centralised default.
Tenant restrictions: Enterprise only
Tenant restrictions use HTTP header injection via a network proxy to prevent personal Claude accounts on corporate devices. Without this, any employee can bypass organisational controls by logging in with a personal email.
This capability exists only on Enterprise. Team plans offer SSO and domain verification for managed accounts, but can't technically prevent employees from switching to personal accounts on the same device.
Common Mistakes
Common Mistake
Purchasing Team Standard seats at $25/seat expecting full Cowork and Claude Code capabilities — then discovering on rollout day that these features require Team Premium at $100-150/seat.
Instead: Check the feature matrix before purchasing. Team Standard includes Pro features plus admin tools. Team Premium adds Claude Code and full Cowork. Match the tier to the specific capabilities your workflow requires.
Common Mistake
Assuming the Cowork admin toggle can be enabled for specific departments while keeping it off for others — then discovering it's all-or-nothing.
Instead: The Cowork toggle is organisation-wide with no per-user override. Assess readiness across all departments before enabling. If some teams aren't ready, use policy and training controls alongside the toggle, not instead of it.
Common Mistake
Comparing Pro ($20/month) against Team Standard ($25/seat) purely on price, without factoring in the governance value of centralised no-training defaults.
Instead: The $5/month per user difference buys centralised privacy control. With 100 Pro accounts, one forgotten opt-out exposes the organisation. Team's no-training default eliminates this risk — a governance feature with measurable risk reduction value.
Delegating work to Cowork
Before
Write a Python script to organise my Downloads folder and tell me how to run it.
After
I've mounted my 'Project_Alpha' folder. Scan the files, create a 'Summaries' subfolder, and generate a text summary for every PDF. Execute this now.
Hands-On Activity
Hands-On Activity
Explore Plan Features and Sandbox Boundaries
Locate the admin Cowork toggle, test the sandbox boundaries with a scoped folder, and verify that Claude can't access directories outside the mounted workspace.
What you will learn
- Locate the organisation-wide Cowork toggle in admin settings
- Demonstrate the VM sandbox model with a dedicated test folder
- Verify that Claude can't access files outside the scoped directory
- Understand the security implications of folder scoping
- 01
Open Claude Desktop and navigate to Settings. If you have admin access, locate the Cowork toggle under Capabilities and note its current state.
Why: Understanding where the org-wide Cowork toggle lives is essential for any administrator. This is the single control that governs Cowork access for the entire organisation.
Expected: The Capabilities panel with the Cowork toggle visible. On Team plans, it should be enabled by default during research preview.
- 02
Create a folder on your Desktop called "Sandbox-Test". Add a text file inside it with some sample content. Open Cowork and mount only this "Sandbox-Test" folder as your working directory.
Why: Scoping Cowork to a dedicated folder demonstrates the VM sandbox model. Claude will only see files inside the folder you explicitly share.
Expected: Cowork activates with "Sandbox-Test" as its working directory.
- 03
Ask Claude: "List all files in my Documents folder." Observe the response when it attempts to access a directory outside the mounted workspace.
Why: This test verifies that the sandbox enforces file access boundaries. Even though your Documents folder exists, the VM can't reach outside the explicitly shared directory.
Expected: Claude either refuses the request or reports that it can't access the Documents folder. It can only see files within the mounted "Sandbox-Test" directory.
Practice Question
Practice Question
A regulated financial services firm wants to deploy Cowork for 50 analysts. Their requirements include blocking personal Claude accounts on corporate laptops and ensuring no conversation data is used to train AI models. Which plan meets both requirements?
Sources
- Plans & Pricing — Anthropic
- What is the Pro plan? — Anthropic
- Claude Cowork Security Guide — Harmonic Security