What AI subscriptions cost a year, and what the money actually buys
Sixteen paid tiers from five vendors, priced by the year and dated. The pattern underneath all of them is that you are no longer buying a feature set, you are buying an allowance.
ChatGPT Pro 5x
Apple App Store in-app purchase list (ChatGPT app) — read on 21 August 2026.
$100.00 a month · list price
Not published renewal price
- Billed
- $100.00/mo — $1200.00 a year
- Renews at
- Not published
- Free tier
- ChatGPT Free, $0, with lower message limits.
- Price read from
- Apple App Store in-app purchase list (ChatGPT app)
- Checked
- Vendor
- chatgpt.com
“Not published” means we did not find a renewal price stated by the vendor on the date we checked. It is not a claim that the price changes on renewal, and it is not a claim that it doesn’t.
ChatGPT Pro 5x is $100.00 a month, read on 21 August 2026 from the in-app purchase list for the ChatGPT app. Held for twelve months that is $1,200.00 — six times what a year of ChatGPT Plus costs on the annual prepay.
No annual option for this tier appeared on the list, so there is no way to prepay your way out of the monthly rate.
The interesting thing here is not the number, it is the label. Pro 5x is a price with a multiplier in its name. Whatever else is true of this tier, the vendor is describing it by how much of something you get rather than by what it can do, and that is the shape the whole category has moved into.
We found no stated renewal price, so the renewal column reads Not published.
Where we have written about this
This is a price record, not a review. We do not rate the product, we track what it charges. The method is on how we check prices; mistakes end up in the corrections log.