6 min · +90 XP
Get Claude First (Account & Plan)
Two minutes in your browser, before we touch the terminal.
By the end of this lesson
You'll have a Claude account and a plan — the thing Claude Code logs in with.
Before Claude Code can build anything for you, it has to log in as YOU. So the very first step isn't the terminal — it's a two-minute sign-up in your browser, exactly like signing up for any app. Skip this and the install step later will hit a wall, so let's do it now.
Do this in your browser (2 minutes)
- 1Go to claude.ai and create an account (email or your Google login).
- 2Click your initials / profile picture (bottom corner) → 'Upgrade' or 'Plans', and subscribe to a paid plan — Claude Pro is the normal starting point; Max if you plan to build a lot. Subscribe on the WEBSITE, not inside the phone app — app-store prices are higher.
- 3That's all. This exact same login is what powers Claude Code in the terminal later.
Claude Code does real work — building, running, fixing, for long stretches — and that needs a paid plan, not the free chat tier. Concretely: Pro is about $17–20 a month — the same ballpark as a ChatGPT Plus you may already pay for. It's the one thing you pay for in order to BUILD (putting a tool on the public internet later costs a few extra dollars for a server — and that part is optional). Cancel anytime, so treat month one as the experiment: build three tools, then judge.
Two things nobody warns you about. (1) Pro has a usage budget that refills every few hours — on heavy building days you can hit it mid-task. That's normal, not a scam: wait for the refill or upgrade. (2) In some countries, paying for claude.ai needs a workaround (a foreign-issued card) — and in a few, claude.ai won't let you create an account at all: that's a region block, not something you broke. Either way, sort the account out NOW, before installing anything — ask the chat AI you already use for the current options in your country; it's a solved problem.
Both fair — and both miss what you're buying. Free chats (DeepSeek, the free ChatGPT) are brains without hands: great for questions, useless for building on your computer. And a ChatGPT Plus subscription doesn't power Claude Code — different company, different tool. This subscription isn't 'another chatbot fee': it pays for an agent that works on your machine for hours at a stretch. Keep your other chats if you like them; this one is the builder. (And why not some free agent? Because unattended multi-step building is exactly where weaker models stall and break mid-task — the frontier model is the difference between 'finished tool' and 'abandoned half-build'.)
Start with the smaller paid plan (Pro). If you ever hit a limit, you upgrade in one click. Don't let 'which plan?' freeze you — pick Pro and move on.
Why do you need a paid Claude plan before installing Claude Code?
Ready
Account made, plan active. NOW the terminal step will make sense — because Claude finally has someone to log in as. Next: meet the terminal.
Author
Evgeny Arsentyev
PhD · Chief Product Officer at a healthtech company