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.
Claude Max 20x
Apple App Store in-app purchase list (Claude app) — read on 20 August 2026.
$249.99 a month · list price
Not published renewal price
- Billed
- $249.99/mo — $2999.88 a year
- Renews at
- Not published
- Free tier
- Claude Free, $0, listed on the same pricing page.
- Price read from
- Apple App Store in-app purchase list (Claude app)
- Checked
- Vendor
- claude.ai
“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.
Claude Max 20x is $249.99 a month in the app, read on 20 August 2026 from the in-app purchase list for the Claude app. Twelve months of it is $2,999.88, which is the largest annual figure anywhere on this ledger.
Max 20x and Max 5x are the same plan at two allowances, $125.00 apart each month. The difference between them is stated by the vendor as a multiple of usage rather than as a list of things one can do and the other cannot.
There is no annual prepay on this tier. As with ChatGPT, the discount for committing a year lives at the bottom of the ladder and vanishes at the top.
No renewal price was stated on the list we read, so the renewal column is 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.