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A free guide by Mariah Brunner ↗ INSTAGRAM ↗ TIKTOK

5 Claude Updates
Worth Using

Claude shipped a lot in September. Here are the five that change how you work, who can turn each one on, and a free weekly-brief skill to put the best one to work.

$4 / $20

Opus 5.5 per million tokens in and out, 20% under Opus 5

43

Ready-made workflows in the Small Business plugin

1

Conversation for chat, Cowork, Docs, Slides and Design

Two of these you can use in ten minutes, two need an admin or a developer, and one is still rolling out. I’ve marked each so you don’t hunt for a button that isn’t there yet.

Plans, Quickly

Opus comes with every paid plan, starting at Pro for $20 a month. Free gets Sonnet and Haiku. Most of what’s below needs a paid plan. Prices checked November 1, 2026 on Claude’s pricing page.

1. Opus 5.5, Your New Default

Opus 5.5 launched September 22 at $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output. That’s 20% under Opus 5, and Anthropic says it costs about 40% less on typical workloads because it needs fewer tokens per task. It also writes more than 30% faster.

Fable 5.1 is still the priciest model, but Anthropic says Opus 5.5 performs at Fable’s level on most work and scored higher than Fable on every benchmark in its launch comparison. For most people, that makes Opus 5.5 the default.

How to switch: pick it from the model menu in the message box on claude.ai. Anthropic also raised the five-hour usage limits on Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise with this launch.

Do this today: re-run the three longest jobs you normally hand to Fable on Opus 5.5. If the quality holds, that work costs 60% less at list price.

2. One Claude Instead Of Two

On September 16, chat and Cowork became one Claude. You stop picking a mode before you start. Claude works out what a task needs and pulls in the agent side on its own, with your context, skills and connectors.

Two new things came with it. Claude Docs writes a document with you inside the conversation, and Claude Slides drafts a deck in the same thread. Claude Design now works in conversations too. Decks download as PowerPoint or PDF.

Availability. Rolling out to Pro, Max and Ultra on web, desktop and mobile, with Team and Free to follow. Enterprise went live October 23, when admins turn it on. All of it is in beta, and there’s nothing to enable.

Do this today: point Claude at a folder of scattered notes from last quarter and say "write the client recap the way I usually do it. Flag anything that slipped, then put the highlights into five slides."

3. Claude For Small Business

This is the one most of you will get the most out of. On September 15, Anthropic expanded Claude for Small Business to 43 workflows and added 27 new integrations.

It connects to Shopify, Stripe, Square, PayPal, QuickBooks, Xero, Gusto, HubSpot, TikTok, Zapier, Slack, Gmail and more. The Monday Brief works with all 37 partner connectors, and most workflows also run from an uploaded spreadsheet if you haven’t connected anything.

  1. Open the Small Business plugin page and click Install. It opens in the Claude desktop app.
  2. Type /smb-onboard or say "set me up." Connect the two or three tools your money actually runs through.
  3. Run one workflow by hand before you trust it on a schedule.

It Asks First

Workflows start in approval mode, so Claude stages the work and waits for your OK. Some stop before the last step on purpose. Payroll, for example, gets staged in Gusto for you to submit. It’s on every paid plan, and Anthropic suggests Team if more than one person needs it.

4. Projects That Run Themselves

Projects in Claude Code arrived September 17. You give it a goal, it scopes the work, splits it across parallel threads, then reviews and assembles what comes back. Each thread is a cloud session, so it keeps running after you shut your laptop.

Read this before you go looking. This is Claude Code, the developer tool. Your chat sidebar Projects keep working as they do today and get upgraded later. It’s in beta for select Pro and Max users on cloud sessions, with a waitlist for the rest, and Team and Enterprise come after. Several threads run at once, so it eats usage limits faster.

5. Salesforce Inside Claude

Salesforce in Claude opened in beta on September 15, out of the Claudeforce partnership Salesforce and Anthropic announced in August. It ships with 37 sales skills and runs on two connectors: Salesforce for CRM records, and Slack for the deal channels where the real context lives.

It preps calls, scores deals and drafts the follow-up and record update. It only sees what your Salesforce permissions allow and asks before changing a record.

You can’t turn this on yourself. A Salesforce admin requests access through AgentExchange, and the company needs the latest Sales Cloud Enterprise edition. Then a Claude Owner opens Organization settings, then Connectors, picks the Salesforce (Beta) connector and enters the keys (setup guide). If that’s you, forward this to whoever owns Salesforce and ask for a small pilot.

The Monday Brief Skill

Number three is the one you can use today, and the Monday Brief is the best thing in it. My version explains what changed, never guesses a number it can’t see, and ends with three decisions.

monday-brief / SKILL.md
--- name: monday-brief description: Runs my weekly business brief from my connected tools. Use on Mondays or when I ask for a weekly brief or "how did last week go". Ends with three decisions. --- # Monday Brief You are my operations partner. Once a week you look at my whole business, tell me what actually changed, and give me a short list of things to decide. You are direct and specific. You do not pad. ## Before you start Read the CONFIG block. If any of it is blank, ask me for the missing pieces in one message. Then show me the filled-in CONFIG block so I can paste it into this skill and skip the questions next time. CONFIG - Business name: [name] - What I sell: [products or services] - Tools connected: [e.g. Stripe, Shopify, Google Workspace, HubSpot, QuickBooks] - My numbers that matter: [e.g. revenue, refund rate, new customers, cash on hand] - What a good week looks like: [e.g. $18k revenue, refunds under 3%, 40 new customers] - Who reads this: [just me / me and one other person] END CONFIG ## How to run it 1. Pull last week (Monday through Sunday) and the week before it from every connected tool. If a tool will not connect, say so plainly in a line at the bottom and carry on with what you have. Never guess a number. 2. For every number, show the value, the change versus the prior week, and the change versus the same week last month. Percentages alone hide small bases, so always show the raw number too. 3. Read the change, do not just report it. If revenue is flat but new customers are up 30%, say that average order value dropped and name the likely reason. 4. Look for the things I would not think to ask about: a refund spike, one product carrying the whole week, a customer who normally orders and did not, ad spend rising while sales stay flat, cash that will not cover payroll. 5. Check anything time-sensitive: invoices past due, subscriptions renewing, inventory that runs out inside three weeks. ## The output Give me exactly this, nothing extra. **Last week in one line.** One sentence. Was it good, flat or bad, and why. **The numbers.** A short table: metric, last week, prior week, change. Only the metrics in my CONFIG, plus anything you flagged as unusual. **What changed and why.** Three to five bullets. Each names a specific cause, not a restatement of the number. If you are not sure of the cause, say what you would check to find out. **Three decisions.** The three things worth my time this week, most valuable first. Each one gets: the decision, what happens if I do nothing, and the first step. Keep each under 40 words. **Watch list.** Anything that is not a problem yet but will be in two weeks. **What I could not see.** Any tool that failed, any number you had to leave out. Always include this section, even when it is empty. ## Rules - Never invent or estimate a number. A missing number goes in "What I could not see". - No encouragement, no summarising what I already read above. - If a number moved less than 5% and it is not unusual, leave it out of the analysis. - If the week was genuinely fine, say so in one line and keep the brief short. - Round money to whole dollars. Never use percentages without the raw number. - Ask before you write to any connected tool. Reading is fine, changing is not.
↓ Download the skill (.zip)
  1. Quick try. Copy it into a chat, fill in the CONFIG block, and say "run my Monday brief for last week."
  2. Keep it. Go to Customize (now being renamed Plugins), then Skills. Click +, then Create skill, then Upload a skill, and pick the ZIP without unzipping it. (How skills work)
  3. Connect your data first. Stripe, Shopify or your bookkeeping, or it’ll have nothing to read.