Can you gift Claude to someone?

Not right now. Anthropic’s support article on gifting says gift subscriptions are currently unavailable to purchase, for all accounts. That was still the case when we checked on October 6, 2026, and the article gives no date for their return.

When they are on sale, gifts cover Claude Pro, Max 5x and Max 20x for 1, 3, 6 or 12 months, delivered by email or as a shareable link that the recipient redeems at claude.ai/gift/redeem, and the recipient has 365 days from the purchase date to redeem one. The rest of this page covers what the plans cost, the rules that apply when gifts are on sale, and what to give in the meantime.

What a Claude gift includes and costs

A gift is a fixed-length subscription to one of three plans. On the Claude pricing page, Pro is $20 a month, or $200 a year when billed annually. It includes Claude Code, more usage than the Free plan, Projects, scheduled tasks, the Design, Slides and Docs tools, and the Chrome and Microsoft 365 extensions. Max 5x is $100 a month and Max 20x is $200 a month, each with five or twenty times the Pro plan’s per-session usage, and Anthropic’s Max plan article says Max is sold as a monthly subscription only.

Anthropic’s gifting article does not list gift prices, so the plan prices above are the reference point. Every paid Claude plan has session limits that reset every five hours and a weekly cap, per the Pro plan article. A gift of Max suits someone who already runs into Pro’s limits; Pro suits everyone else.

The rules when gifts are on sale

Anthropic’s article is short, and most of the problems people search for, from gift links that fail to the question of gifting Claude to yourself, trace back to one of these lines in it.

Most Pro and Max subscribers can buy. Free users cannot, and neither can members of Team or Enterprise organizations.
The gift expires 365 days after the purchase date. A gift bought one December for a birthday the following December will have expired before it can be redeemed.
Gifts do not stack. Recipients cannot redeem several gifts at once or combine them, so one 12-month gift beats four 3-month gifts.
Mobile subscribers have to wait. Anyone with an active iOS or Android Claude subscription must let it end before redeeming.
Delivery is by email, with a personal message and a redeem button, or by a link you pass on yourself.

The article does not say whether you can buy a gift for your own account, what happens to an existing web subscription when a gift is redeemed, or whether the plan renews on the recipient’s card when the gift ends. It has no refund terms either. Ask Anthropic support before buying if any of those matter to you.

What to give instead

A seven-day guest pass. Pro and Max subscribers get a limited number of guest passes that give someone new to paid Claude seven days of Pro, including Claude Code, Cowork and Claude Design. The recipient must enter a payment method, and the pass converts to a paid Pro subscription if they do not cancel. That makes it a trial rather than a gift, and you should say so when you send it.

Usage credits and bundles. Subscribers can buy usage credits that apply once their plan’s limits are used up, billed at standard API rates, with a $2,000 daily redemption limit. They generally do not expire; the exception Anthropic names is Japan, where credits bought from September 10, 2026 expire after six months. Usage bundles prepay those credits at a discount: $50 of usage for $45, $250 for $200 and $1,000 for $700. Both pages describe purchases for your own account, and neither mentions sending them to someone else.

API credits. Developers can prepay for the Claude API in the Console, and Anthropic’s billing page says those credits are non-refundable and expire one year after purchase. That makes them a poor gift unless the recipient will use them soon.

Other labs’ gifts. OpenAI sells ChatGPT gift cards of $15 to $250 through US retailers and gift credit links that must be claimed within 30 days. The details are in Where to buy a ChatGPT gift card and what it covers.

A multi-model pack. If the person switches between Claude and other models, Brass sells prepaid packs of $10 to $250 that across Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek, never expire, and can be sent as a link that returns to you if it goes unclaimed for 90 days (US only, 18 and over).

For a programmer, the hardware and book options in Gift ideas for programmers in 2026 sit alongside these, with prices.

Sources

Related guides

Gift ideas for programmers in 2026
Sixteen gifts a programmer will use, with October 2026 prices checked on the makers’ own pages: books from $35, desk hardware from $45, courses and prepaid AI.
Where to buy a ChatGPT gift card and what it covers
OpenAI sells digital ChatGPT gift cards of $15 to $250 through US retailers such as Best Buy. How to redeem one, what the balance pays for and what it will not.
Do OpenAI API credits expire?
Yes. OpenAI’s prepaid API credits expire one year after purchase, are non-refundable and cannot be extended. What that covers and how to check your balance.