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 5x
Apple App Store in-app purchase list (Claude app) — read on 21 August 2026.
$124.99 a month · list price
Not published renewal price
- Billed
- $124.99/mo — $1499.88 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 5x is $124.99 a month in the app, read on 21 August 2026 from the in-app purchase list for the Claude app. Held for a year that is $1,499.88, and no annual prepay was offered on the list we read.
This is the one tier where the two surfaces are hard to line up. The vendor’s own pricing page describes Max as a single plan starting from a lower monthly figure and invites you to “choose 5x or 20x more usage than Pro” without pricing the two separately on screen; the App Store list prices them individually. Where a vendor publishes one number and a store publishes two, we print the ones we could read exactly, and say where we read them.
No renewal price was stated, 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.