Everything you do with Claude starts with an account. This lesson takes you to exactly one place: a working account on claude.ai and a first conversation in the browser. Claude Code, the version that works on your own files in a terminal, is a separate topic and a separate install, but nothing starts without this account.

It’s an ordinary, boring task you do once and never again – except there are two points in it where you make a decision that can’t be undone, and nothing warns you about either. That’s why this lesson is longer than setting up an account deserves.

Take your time, and don’t worry if something looks different from this description. Claude changes the look of its pages fairly often, but the order of the steps has held for a long time.

What to have ready before you click anything

Two things, both probably within reach:

  1. An email address you’ll still have access to in a year and in five years. You can’t swap it later – the account stays tied to whichever address you create it with.
  2. A mobile phone, in case Claude asks you to verify it by text – it doesn’t always: whether it does depends on how it reads the risk of that particular sign-up, and going through Google tends to skip it. If it does ask: once verified, the number is attached to the account permanently and there’s no way to change it or move it to another account.

You don’t need a payment card. You’re creating the account on the free tier, and that’s where we’ll stay for the rest of this lesson.

If either of those two things is stopping you right now, better here than halfway through signing up. Come back when you have both.

The first screen: two ways in

Go to claude.ai. You’ll see a page split in half: on the left, a sign-in form, on the right, a photo.

There are two routes in that form and both end up in the same place:

  1. Continue with Google – click it, a Google window pops up, pick your Google account, done. The fastest route if you have Gmail.
  2. Enter your email – the text field below it, with a Continue with email button underneath. Type your address, click it, and move on to the next step.

If you take the second route, note one thing that surprises people: you never set a password of your own for Claude. There’s nowhere to put one. Signing in always happens through a link or a code sent to your inbox. (Going through Google there is of course a password, but it’s the one guarding your Google account, not Claude.) If it’s an option for you, we’d recommend the Google route – it’s the more convenient one, since it runs through an account you’re already logged into most days anyway.

The code from your inbox

After you click Continue with email, Claude sends a message titled “Secure link to log in to Claude.ai”. Check your inbox, and check spam too, because that’s where it likes to land the first time.

What happens next depends on where you open that email:

  • You open it on the same computer where you started signing up – click the link and you’re back in Claude, signed in. Step over.
  • You open it on your phone while signing up on a computer – then the email shows you a code to type back on the computer, in the box waiting for it on the Claude page.

That second case is the one that confuses people, because it looks like something failed. It didn’t. The link and the code are the same thing in two forms, and Claude has no way of knowing which device you read email on.

Phone number and the text message

Here’s that second point worth pausing at – if you even get there. Claude doesn’t ask for a phone number at every sign-up; sometimes it asks right away, sometimes only after you’ve been using the account for a while, and sometimes not at all (going through Google usually skips it). If it does ask: it sends a six-digit code to that number by text, you type the code on screen, and that’s it.

Two things worth knowing before you type that number in:

  • It can’t be changed later. The number stays with the account permanently, so use the one you actually use, not a work number from a job you might not be in two years from now.
  • One number, one account – that’s Anthropic’s stated policy, at least. If you see a message saying the number is already in use, it means some Claude account has already been verified with it. That isn’t an error to work around, it’s information – you need a different number, or access to that other account. In practice this doesn’t seem to be airtight, since some accounts never go through this step at all – but don’t count on that for your own sign-up.

Text codes are only valid for a few minutes. If you type one in and see a message that it’s expired, that’s not an error. Just ask for a new one.

Your first conversation

After verification you land on the chat screen: a large text box in the middle, a list of conversations down the left (empty for now). That’s the whole interface. Write anything – ask for help drafting an email to a client, say – and send it.

There’s no good or bad first question here, and nobody is grading this. (Free accounts do have usage limits, but they’re about how much you can fit into a given stretch of time, not about what’s worth asking.) You’ll also see a handful of ready-made conversation starters underneath the text box – click one of those instead of coming up with a question from scratch, if you’d rather. If you want something useful to start with, try: “Explain in three sentences how you differ from a search engine.”

Settings worth a look right away

You don’t need to change anything now, just know where to find these later. In the bottom-left corner of the interface you’ll see your name – click it, and choose Settings from the menu that opens.

Inside there are several tabs, three worth remembering:

  • General – this is where you can change, among other things, your name, the one you see in that corner and the one Claude addresses you by.
  • Billing – this is where your plan lives, and where you’d change it too. You’re on the free one, and that’s the right place to start. A paid Pro plan only becomes relevant once you start working with Claude Code on your own files, since Claude Code is included from Pro upwards. When that moment comes: click Upgrade plan, pick a plan and a billing period – monthly or annual – and enter your card details. Done. For everything you do in the browser, a free account is plenty – and when it’s time to choose between plans, we’ve got a separate piece on which plan to choose.
  • Privacy – this is where you decide whether your conversations may be used to train models. It’s worth simply knowing where that switch lives, especially if you’ll be pasting company material in. You don’t have to decide now.
Claude pricing

Checklist

Tick these off as you go. The state is remembered in your browser, so you can come back to this list tomorrow.

  • An email address I’ll have reliable access to for years
  • A phone within reach, in case a verification text comes
  • Sign-in method chosen on claude.ai
  • Address confirmed with the link or code from email
  • Phone number verified with the code from the text message (if Claude asked for one)
  • First message sent and an answer came back
  • I know where to find account settings – name, plan, and privacy