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.
GitHub Copilot Pro+
Vendor plans page (github.com/features/copilot/plans) — read on 22 August 2026.
$39.00 a month · list price
Not published renewal price
- Billed
- $39.00/mo — $468.00 a year
- Renews at
- Not published
- Free tier
- Copilot Free, $0, with 2,000 code completions a month.
- Price read from
- Vendor plans page (github.com/features/copilot/plans)
- Checked
- Vendor
- github.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.
GitHub Copilot Pro+ is $39.00 per user per month, read on 22 August 2026 from the vendor’s own plans page. Twelve months is $468.00, and no annual price was shown when we checked.
The page describes the tier as “4x+ included usage than Pro” and states “$70 monthly total credits for Pro+”. Read those two lines together and the pricing is unusually legible: $39.00 buys $70.00 of credits, so the headline subscription is cheaper than the allowance it contains.
That is a deliberate structure, not a mistake, and it is the clearest evidence on this ledger that the ladder is built out of usage. Nothing in the tier description promises a capability the $10.00 tier lacks — it promises more of it.
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.