Five everyday workflows and what each costs

Most Claude usage falls into five jobs. Each one below is described as a project — a saved instruction plus files — so you set it up once and reuse it. The cost note at the end of each is the honest version: what the free tier handles, and when paying starts to make sense.

1. Writing and editing

Create a project called *Writing* with a style instruction ("British English, short paragraphs, no marketing adjectives") and two or three samples of your own writing as files. Then every chat is a draft or an edit in your voice. Ask for edits as a diff — "list the changes you would make, then the revised text" — so you can reject what you disagree with.

Cost: Free covers a few drafts a day comfortably. Long-form work with many revisions is the first thing that pushes people to Pro, because every revision re-reads the whole piece.

2. Research and summarising

Upload sources to a project, ask for a fixed-format brief of each ("three findings, one caveat, one quote"), then open a new chat to compare the briefs. Enable web search only when you need something after the training cutoff. Always ask for the supporting quote; Claude is good at pulling it and it is your check against a confident mis-summary.

Cost: This is where the million-token window earns its keep. Free handles a handful of documents; a weekly research habit with big PDFs is squarely Pro territory.

3. Coding

For questions and snippets, the app is fine: paste the function, state the language and the failing case. For real work in a repository, use Claude Code, which reads the codebase itself. Ask for the smallest change that fixes the problem and for the test that proves it; both instructions cut the size of the answer and the number of follow-ups.

Cost: Occasional snippets are free-tier work. Claude Code is where Pro's allowance runs out fastest, and the only workflow in this list where Max is a rational purchase. Compare it against the alternatives in Claude vs Cursor for coding.

4. Data and spreadsheets

Paste a CSV or upload a spreadsheet and ask for the analysis you want in the shape you want: "a table of monthly totals, then the three biggest anomalies with a one-line explanation each". For repeated reports, save the question as the project instruction. For anything you will run every week on fresh data, that is an API job — lesson 7.

Cost: Free for one-off looks. Weekly reports on the same template are the classic case for moving to the API with a cached prompt.

5. Planning and decisions

Give Claude the constraints, not the question. "Plan a launch" gets a template. "Plan a launch for a two-person team, $3,000 budget, six weeks, no paid ads, here is what worked last time" gets a plan. Ask it to argue the other side afterwards; the second answer is often more useful than the first.

Cost: Almost always free-tier work. Short, high-value, low-volume.