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 Pro
Vendor pricing page (claude.com/pricing) — read on 19 August 2026.
$200.00 a year · list price
Also sold at $20.00/mo — $240.00 a year if you keep it for twelve months.
Not published renewal price
- Billed
- $200.00/yr
- Renews at
- Not published
- Free tier
- Claude Free, $0, listed on the same pricing page.
- Price read from
- Vendor pricing page (claude.com/pricing)
- 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 Pro is $200.00 a year, billed up front, or $20.00 a month. We read both on the vendor’s own pricing page on 19 August 2026, where the annual price is presented as “$17 per month with annual subscription discount ($200 billed up front)” — a monthly-looking number attached to a single yearly charge, which is a habit worth being alert to.
Twelve monthly payments come to $240.00, so prepaying saves $40.00, or about 17%.
One thing this record deliberately does not do is average the annual price back into a monthly figure. You are not charged $17 a month; you are charged $200 once.
Buying the same plan through the iOS app costs more — that is a separate record. No renewal price was stated on the page 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.