5 Claude Features Most People Never Use (and Why They Should)

Type a question, get an answer, close the tab. That’s how most people use Claude, and it leaves most of the value on the table. Five features change what Claude is good for, and according to Anthropic’s pricing page and Help Center, all five are available on the Free plan.

1. Projects: stop pasting the same background

A Project is a workspace with its own chats, files and instructions. Anthropic describes Projects as “self-contained workspaces with their own chat histories and knowledge bases”. Put your price list, policies and a few examples of your writing in a “Customers” project once, and every reply Claude drafts there starts in your voice, with your rules. Free accounts can create up to five.

Guide: how to use Claude Projects

2. Artifacts: get a thing, not just text

Ask Claude to make something (a one-page flyer, a flowchart of how orders move through your business, a quote calculator) and it opens as an Artifact beside the chat, where you refine it in plain English. Anthropic calls an Artifact “anything Claude makes for you that you’d put in front of someone”. Artifacts need the “Cloud code execution and file creation” setting turned on.

Guides: use Artifacts, build a simple app and make a flowchart

3. Uploads: ask about your own documents

Claude reads PDFs, Word files, spreadsheets and more: up to 20 files per chat, according to Anthropic’s Help Center. For PDFs of up to 100 pages it reads both the text and the charts. The trick is saying what you need: “every cost and deadline, with page numbers” beats “summarize this”.

Guides: summarize a PDF and analyze a spreadsheet

4. Web search with citations

With web search on, Claude can look things up and, per Anthropic, every web search answer includes citations. That turns “trust me” into “here’s the page”. Open the sources that matter, and prefer the original over a summary.

Guide: research a topic with Claude

5. Incognito chats for sensitive questions

Press the ghost icon in a new chat and the conversation isn’t saved to your history or Claude’s memory. Anthropic says Incognito chats aren’t used to improve Claude, even if you’ve turned on the Model Improvement setting. Worth knowing before you ask about a health worry or a delicate work situation.

Guide: keep your data private in Claude

Where to start

If you’ve only ever chatted with Claude, set up one Project this week for the job you repeat most, like customer replies or your newsletter. It’s the change that saves the most time. Then work through the beginner’s guide and the other guides on the Claude how-to page.

Built a prototype in Claude and want it turned into a real tool on your website? Get a proposal.