Claude for Financial Advisors Pricing: What an RIA Actually Pays in 2026

1. The Short Answer

The plugin is free. What an RIA pays for is the Claude plan it runs on, plus the time or fee it takes to set up well.

Anthropic recommends its Enterprise plan for registered investment advisers. Seats cost $20 per user per month with a 20-seat minimum, and usage is billed separately at API rates. Anthropic's head of asset and wealth management put active firms at roughly $70 to $120 per user per month.

Add that range to the seat fee and a 10-person firm pays about $13,200 to $19,200 a year before setup. The rest of this guide shows the arithmetic, the cheaper route and how to cap the bill.

2. The Plugin Costs Nothing to Install

Anthropic publishes the plugin's source on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license, as plain Markdown and JSON files. There is no plugin fee, per advisor or per firm.

Free has one string attached. The README calls the plugin a "reference implementation. Not actively maintained or monitored, and not accepting contributions," so a firm that adapts it to its own rules also owns the upkeep.

Plugins run on every paid Claude plan: Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise (Anthropic Help Center). Enterprise customers install this one from the plugin browser in Cowork, and on other plans you can add it from GitHub as anthropics/claude-for-financial-advisors.

So your number comes down to two questions: which plan, and how hard your people use it.

3. Enterprise Seats and the 20-Seat Minimum

Anthropic's launch post is direct: "We recommend Enterprise plans for registered investment advisers, because it includes the audit logs that support recordkeeping." Enterprise also includes the Compliance API, which the Team plan lacks and which archiving vendors such as Smarsh use to capture Claude conversations.

InvestmentNews quoted the price from Anthropic's website: "an annual seat fee of $20 per user per month with a required minimum of 20 seats, plus usage billed separately at API rates." The seat covers Claude on the web, desktop and mobile apps, Claude Code and Cowork, and it includes no usage (Anthropic Help Center).

Do the floor math once: 20 seats × $20 × 12 months = $4,800 a year. Every Enterprise customer pays at least that, whether it has 20 people or four.

Most RIAs sit below the floor. The Investment Adviser Association's 2026 industry snapshot found that advisers focused on individual clients average about eight employees, so a typical firm on Enterprise pays for 20 seats and fills eight.

Above 20 people, seats scale in a straight line: 40 people × $20 × 12 = $9,600 a year.

4. Usage: The Line That Moves

Usage is billed at standard API rates and pooled across the organization, so heavy and light users draw on one pot (Anthropic Help Center). It is the part of the bill that moves.

For a ballpark, Peter Nolan, Anthropic's head of asset and wealth management, put it at roughly $70 to $120 per user per month for firms that use it actively, TechTimes reported. Over a year, that is $840 to $1,440 per person ($70 × 12 and $120 × 12).

This guide adds that range on top of the $20 seat, which is how Anthropic's own launch webinar presented it: seats paid up front for the year, usage billed separately at API rates, and a typical Cowork user at about $70 to $120 a month. TechTimes described the figure as an all-in estimate. If that reading is right, your bill sits below the estimates here, and for a budget, erring high is the safer mistake.

Where you land in the range depends on how much Claude reads and writes. A /pre-meeting brief can draw on six systems for one household (the CRM, the portfolio platform, Wealth.com, meeting notes, email and the MoneyGuide plan), while a check of a two-line email draws on almost nothing.

One multiplier to know: US-only inference, if your firm requires it, costs 1.1 times the standard rate.

5. What It Costs at 5, 10, 20 and 40 People

Here is the arithmetic at four firm sizes. Each line assumes every person is an active user at Anthropic's ballpark; real usage varies, and spend limits cap it.

• 5 people: $4,800 in seats (the 20-seat floor) plus $4,200 to $7,200 in usage (5 × $840 and 5 × $1,440) comes to $9,000 to $12,000 a year.
• 10 people: $4,800 plus $8,400 to $14,400 comes to $13,200 to $19,200.
• 20 people: $4,800 plus $16,800 to $28,800 comes to $21,600 to $33,600.
• 40 people: $9,600 in seats plus $33,600 to $57,600 comes to $43,200 to $67,200.

The floor makes small firms pay more per head. At the high end, five people cost $2,400 each a year ($12,000 ÷ 5) and 10 people $1,920 each ($19,200 ÷ 10). From 20 people up, the figure stops falling at $1,680 each: a $240 seat plus $1,440 of usage.

An outside estimate lines up with the 10-person usage figure. Aaron Steinberg, CEO of ThrivAI, told InvestmentNews that a 10-advisor RIA at Anthropic's ballpark would spend "somewhere between $8,400 and $14,400 a year, before setup, before training, before anyone's time spent configuring nine-plus connectors and deciding what the compliance skill should actually be checking for." The gap between his range and this guide's is the $4,800 seat floor.

6. The Team Plan: Cheaper, and What It Gives Up

The Team plan is the obvious way under the 20-seat floor. It needs only two members and allows up to 150 (Anthropic Help Center).

Standard seats cost $25 per member per month billed monthly or $20 billed annually, and premium seats $125 or $100. Team includes Cowork, Claude Code, connectors for workplace tools, single sign-on, role-based permissions and spend controls, and a standard seat carries 1.25 times the Pro plan's per-session usage (premium 6.25 times), with weekly limits.

For an eight-person firm on standard seats billed annually, that is 8 × $20 × 12 = $1,920 a year, and you can install the plugin from GitHub. Even with every seat premium, the same firm pays 8 × $100 × 12 = $9,600.

On Enterprise, those eight people cost $11,520 to $16,320 by this guide's math ($4,800 in seats plus 8 × $840 to 8 × $1,440 in usage). The gap is real.

What Team gives up is the part your CCO cares about. It has no audit log export and no Compliance API, so no archiving vendor can pull Claude conversations the way Smarsh does on Enterprise, and records depend on people filing final outputs by procedure. That is weaker, and whether it is good enough is your CCO's call.

Settle two more questions before you choose Team: whether each partner connector you need works outside Enterprise (ask Anthropic and the vendor, Schwab in particular), and whether weekly limits hold up in review season.

Solo advisors have one more route. Plugins also run on the individual Pro plan, but it carries no admin controls, and it sits under Anthropic's consumer terms, where each user chooses whether chats can help train models, so check that setting before any client data goes in. The records question does not go away when you are your own CCO.

Danny Lohrfink, Wealth.com's co-founder and chief product officer, gave InvestmentNews the case for paying more: "enterprise plans come with that additional layer of data privacy and security." The small-RIA guide runs the Team and Enterprise math for three, five and eight people.

7. Costs Outside the Anthropic Bill

Connectors plug Claude into systems you already pay for, using your existing account with each vendor. Anthropic's install tutorial adds a caution: "Access to these connectors may require a separate subscription or API key from the respective provider."

So ask each vendor one narrow question: is the Claude connector included in what we pay today, or is it an add-on?

Schwab has answered it. Financial Planning reported that RIAs using the Schwab connector pay through their Anthropic licenses, with no extra payments to Schwab, though the plugin's README still lists the Schwab connector as coming soon, with skills using paste or upload until it lands.

8. Setup: Staff Time or a Fixed Fee

The plugin sets itself up, up to a point. The /onboarding skill learns your firm and tech stack, walks each advisor through connecting tools, and runs a demo on a fictional household, the Millers, so no real client data is used.

For a solo advisor with a simple stack, that covers most of it. A firm has more to decide: the plan and seat count, single sign-on and distribution, least-access connectors, the Compliance API and the archive, a policy addendum, and the firm's own rules in its copy of the plugin.

That is the list Steinberg's number left out. You can cover it with staff time or a fixed fee, and either way it is a one-time cost, while seats and usage recur every year.

9. Spend Limits and the September Credit

Usage billing sounds open-ended, but you can cap it. Enterprise lets you set spend limits for the whole organization and for individual users (Anthropic Help Center), and Team includes spend controls.

A simple starting point is to set the organization's monthly limit at your high usage estimate and give each user room at the top of Anthropic's range. For a 10-person firm, that means $1,200 a month for the organization ($14,400 ÷ 12) and $120 per user.

Because usage is pooled, one heavy user can draw down the whole pot, which is what per-user limits are for. Read actual usage after the pilot and adjust, leaving some room, since a cap set too tight interrupts an advisor mid-prep.

Anthropic also ran a launch offer: firms that requested a new license before the end of September 2026 were offered a one-time usage credit to help them get started (launch post). The offer ran to September 30, 2026, so budget without it.

10. How to Estimate Your Own Number

Six steps, using the same figures:

1. Seats. Count everyone who needs access. On Enterprise, multiply the larger of that count and 20 by $20, then by 12.
2. Active users. Count the people who will use it every week, since occasional users add little usage.
3. Usage. Multiply active users by $840 for a low case and by $1,440 for a high case.
4. Data residency. If you need US-only inference, multiply the usage figure by 1.1.
5. Connectors. Add any connector subscription you do not already pay for.
6. Setup. Add staff time or a fixed fee.

Worked through for a 12-person firm where nine people will use it weekly: seats are $4,800 (the floor), usage is $7,560 to $12,960 (9 × $840 and 9 × $1,440), and the total is $12,360 to $17,760 a year before connectors and setup. If that firm also needs US-only inference, usage becomes $8,316 to $14,256 (× 1.1) and the total $13,116 to $19,056.

Your estimate will be off in one direction or the other, and that is fine. Run the pilot for a month with spend limits on, then replace the ballpark with your own number.

11. What to Compare the Cost Against

A cost means little until you set it against what it buys back. Anthropic's launch post cites Kitces research: "A typical advisory practice spends only a sixth of its time in client meetings." The prep, notes and follow-up around those meetings are what most of the eight skills target.

Turn that into a test. At the high end of Anthropic's range, one active user at a firm above the seat floor costs $140 a month ($120 in usage plus the $20 seat), and at a five-person firm the empty seats lift that to $200 per person ($12,000 ÷ 5 ÷ 12).

So ask one question per advisor: does this give back more than $140 to $200 of that person's time each month? Measure prep time before and after the pilot, and you will have an answer within weeks.

Then check what you already own. Merit Financial Advisors' chief product officer, Brian Green, told Financial Planning that most of the underlying capabilities already exist across advisor technology platforms, so if your CRM or notetaker already covers the skill you care about most, that is the price to beat.

The most expensive seat is the one nobody opens. The training guide covers getting every advisor using it within 30 days.