Anthropic today said that customers who use Claude without a subscription can create files, use connectors, and access skills, all of which are features that used to require a paid plan.
The announcement comes two days after OpenAI said that it was starting to roll out ads for ChatGPT users who don't have a paid subscription, or who use the most affordable Go plan.
Anthropic last week promised to keep Claude ad-free, potentially luring ChatGPT users to Claude. The new free options appear to be a continuation of its effort to target people who don't want to see ads when using a chatbot.
Free users can create, edit, and work with files directly in a Claude conversation using Sonnet 4.5 (Pro users have access to the more capable Opus model). Claude is able to generate Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, and PDF files.
The new access to connectors will let Claude users connect to third-party services at no cost. There are connectors for a wide variety of apps and services, including Slack, Asana, Zapier, Stripe, Canva, Notion, Figma, and WordPress.
Skills are repeatable filesystem-based resources that give Claude domain-specific expertise. Anthropic offers PowerPoint, Excel, Word, and PDF skills, but users can create custom skills with their domain expertise and organizational knowledge.
Anthropic says that free users are also able to engage in longer conversations with Claude thanks to the addition of compaction to the free plan. Compaction allows Claude to automatically summarize earlier context so there isn't a need to start a conversation from the beginning. Anthropic does not appear to have increased the free tier cap, however, so free users will still run into usage limitations.
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