Anthropic said today that customers using Claude without a subscription can create files, use connectors and acquire skills, all features that previously required a paid plan.
The announcement comes two days after OpenAI said it was starting to roll out ads to ChatGPT users who don’t have a paid subscription or who use the most affordable Go plan.
Last week, Antropic promised to keep Claude ad-free, potentially attracting ChatGPT users to Claude. The new free options appear to be a continuation of its efforts to target people who don’t want to see ads while using the chatbot.
Free users can create, edit and work with files directly in the 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 approach to connectors will allow Claude users to connect to third-party services for free. There are connectors for a wide variety of apps and services, including Slack, Asana, Zapier, Stripe, Canva, Notion, Figma, and WordPress.
Skills are file system-based repeatable resources that provide domain-specific expertise to Cloud. Anthropic offers skills in PowerPoint, Excel, Word and PDF, but users can create their own skills with their domain expertise and organizational knowledge.
Anthropic says 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’s no need to start the conversation from scratch. However, Anthropic doesn’t seem to be increasing the free tier limit, so free users will still run into usage restrictions.