The cheapest way to run Claude right now: every route in our catalog, from $0 to $200 a month
Claude is not one price. Depending on where you point your API key, the same model can be free with rate limits, metered by the request, bundled into a subscription, or discounted through a credit scheme. We maintain a structured catalog of 42 AI providers, and seven of them list Claude models by name, with an eighth route via BYOK tooling. One caveat up front: the catalog tracks plans, allowances, and credit math as structured data, but it does not carry per-million-token prices for Claude itself. So this article compares what we can actually verify, and says so where the data stops.
Every route to Claude we track
| Provider | Route to Claude | Cost | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub Models | Claude 3.5 Sonnet on the free tier | $0, no credit card | Rate-limited, and scoped to personal use and prototyping |
| Kilo Code | Free plan with sign-in; Claude 3.5 Sonnet in the model list | $0 | 200 requests/hour cap; BYOK when you outgrow it |
| LLM Gateway | Free tier, then pay-per-token routing to Claude | $0 to start, no credit card | A 5% fee rides on token spend after the free tier |
| AI Router | Smart routing to Claude 3.5 Sonnet with fallbacks | Free entry at 1K requests/month; Starter is €20/mo for 20K requests | Above the included volume you pay per request (€0.0015 on Starter) |
| CrofAI | Straight pay-as-you-go Claude 3.5 Sonnet | No monthly charge at all | The Hobby tier caps at 500 requests/day |
| OpenRouter | Claude 3.5 Sonnet, paid | Usage-based | The famous 50 req/day free pool excludes Claude; the free models rotate, and Claude is not one of them |
| Anthropic | Direct: Pro, Max 5x, Max 20x | $20 / $100 / $200 per month | No free tier and a card is required; the Max tiers buy headroom, not newer models |
| Kilo Pass | Monthly AI-credit subscription inside Kilo Code | $19 / $49 / $199 per month | Credits, not unlimited use; the 50% bonus credit is what makes the math interesting |
Cheapest for light use: genuinely free
If your Claude usage is a few dozen prompts a day, the cheapest answer in the catalog is GitHub Models: Claude 3.5 Sonnet on a free tier, no credit card, with paid usage beyond the free limits. The catch is scope: the plan is documented for personal use and prototyping, so a product backend does not belong on it. Kilo Code gives you 200 requests per hour just for signing in, and LLM Gateway starts free and only charges token spend (plus that 5% fee) once you pass its free tier. AI Router's entry lane is 1,000 requests a month, which is evaluation volume, not a lifestyle. The free-tier hub tracks all of these in one place, and the plans table shows what each one costs once you stop being free.
Cheapest for heavy use
If Claude is a daily tool rather than an experiment, the math inverts. Anthropic's own Pro plan is $20 a month with Claude Code access and every Claude model in the catalog, from Claude 4.5 Sonnet up to Claude 4.1 Opus. The Max 5x ($100) and Max 20x ($200) tiers multiply the allowance and add priority access at peak, but the model lineup is identical at $20. Kilo Pass is the other structure worth doing arithmetic on: $19 a month buys up to $26.60 in credits, $49 buys up to $68.60, and $199 buys up to $278.60, a 50% bonus on each tier, and Kilo's Auto Model routes each request to a capability and cost tier instead of burning everything on the flagship. If you want pure metered billing with zero monthly commitment, CrofAI is the only provider in the catalog that sells Claude as straight pay-as-you-go with no subscription wrapped around it.
Two honest notes. First, OpenRouter is usually the default answer to 'cheap access to everything', and it is excellent for open models: 50 free requests a day without a card, 1,000 once you add $10 in PAYG credit. But Claude sits outside that free pool, so it does not win this particular contest. Second, per-million-token Claude pricing is exactly the kind of field we do not track yet; Anthropic's catalog entry describes its API as usage-based with no monthly subscription required, and when providers publish token prices we add them. The provider directory and our pricing page carry whatever is current, and the AI hub is the front door to all of it.