You need Claude Pro or Max. The website subscription also allows you to use the command line tool—the rate limits are shared—and the command line tool includes IDE integration, at least for VSCode.
Claude Code is currently best-in-class, so no point in starting elsewhere, but you do need to read the documentation.
Actually, to try it out, prepaid token billing is fine. You are not required to have a subscription for claude code cli. Even just $5 gave me enough breathing room to get a feeling for its potential, personally. I do not touch code often these days so I was relieved not to have to subscribe and cancel again just to play around a little and have it write some basic scripts for me.
I wouldn't be too prescriptive. I have Pro, and it's fine. I'm not an incredibly heavy user (yet?); I've hit the rate limits a couple times, but not to the point where I'm motivated to spend more.
I haven't tried it myself, but I've heard from people that Opus can be slow when using it for coding tasks. I've only been using Sonnet, and it's performed well enough for my purposes.
Claude Code is currently best-in-class, so no point in starting elsewhere, but you do need to read the documentation.