Getting started and pricing

0:00 I'm talking researching, scripting, strategy, brainstorming, knocking out tasks that used to take me an hour in literally 5 minutes. It is the tool I have open more than anything else and the reason for that is simple. Everything you need is already built in. You don't need to connect 30 different tools and watch 20 different tutorials before it's actually useful. You open it, you set it up right, and it just works. [music] So, this is the full Claude guide.

0:22 Let's get right into it. All right, let's start from the very beginning. If you don't have a Claude account yet, this is going to take you about 2 minutes. If you already have one, skip ahead. I'll put timestamps in the description, but even if you have an account, I recommend you stick around for the plan breakdown because most people are on the wrong plan for what they're actually trying to do. All right, so here's the pricing.

0:44 Now, the free plan is genuinely good. You get Claude Sonnet, web search, file uploads, artifacts. It's great for trying everything out before spending money. As you can see, you have all of the features right here. I'm currently at claude.com/pricing. You can find the pricing page there. I'll even leave a link in the description if you want to access that quickly. Now, the thing I recommend to every person wanting to actually get into AI and use it is to actually get some skin in the game.

1:07 Like, start putting some money into this. I don't get anything for you doing this. I just remember when I went from free to the next plan up, the $17 or the $20 a month if billed monthly, this is when everything started to change because this is like, okay, I'm invested now, you know? Like, you need to kind of get invested to get the genuine benefits out of all of these plans. But, really don't overthink it. You can watch this video, start free.

1:30 If you hit the limits within a week, upgrade, and that's signal that, okay, yeah, you've moved on. But, what you can do is you can hit try Claude on any one of these, and if you're not signed in, it's going to take you to a sign up where you can sign up with I believe Apple or Google, and it's just like any other sign up process. But, now you're in Claude and you've probably been here before.

1:54 This is your prompt bar in the middle of the screen. This is where you type into the intelligent models. You have your model selector right here. So, I'm usually on either Opus 4.6 or Sonnet 4.6. Sonnet is good for everyday tasks. Opus is for for like, as you can see, ambitious work. Uh they even have a voice model right here where you can use voice mode. I'll show that later. And the plus button where you can access a bunch of the features.

2:19 Now, over on the left-hand side is where you can create a new chat. You can open up your sidebar to view all of your past conversations. You can kind of navigate around your Claude workspace. We're going to be going over a lot of this stuff today in this video. So, when I open up my sidebar, what you're going to see is I have some projects here, which we're going to get into projects, and I have all of my chat threads.

2:42 So, I can click into one of these and view my past conversations that I've had with Claude, which is very cool. I'll ask, what's the weather like in Southwest Michigan today? I can use that for Sonnet, and then I can send it off. As you can see, it pulls up a nice view of what the weather looks like in Southwest Michigan. Gives me a nice little day-by-day, and then in the sidebar, as you can see, I have my chats over here.

3:05 And if you click into your chat, you can do a couple of things. You can star it, so it stays up top pinned. You can rename it, so I can just name this weather for the week. I can hit save, and I can even add it to a project, which we'll get into later. Okay, so you're in. Now, before I show