What AI subscriptions cost a year, and what the money actually buys

The cheapest paid AI subscription we could verify on 19 August 2026 is Google AI Plus at $4.99 a month, which is $59.88 a year. The tier most people actually buy costs about $20 a month, and four vendors have converged on almost exactly that figure: ChatGPT Plus at $19.99, Claude Pro at $20.00, Google AI Pro at $19.99 and Perplexity Pro at $20.00. Only two of them sell a discounted annual prepay, and both land on $200.00 a year. Above the $20 line the ladder gets steep and it is priced in multiples — ChatGPT Pro 5x at $100.00 a month and Pro 20x at $200.00, Claude Max 5x at $124.99 and Max 20x at $249.99. That naming is the whole story of the category in 2026. At the top of these ladders you are not buying a longer feature list. You are buying a larger allowance of the same thing.

What actually changed

This desk publishes when a price moves. In AI subscriptions the movement in 2026 has mostly not been in the sticker.

ChatGPT now runs a five-rung ladder — Free, Go at $8.00, Plus at $19.99, Pro 5x at $100.00, Pro 20x at $200.00 — and the top two rungs are named after usage multiples rather than after anything you can do with them. Claude does the same thing one rung up, selling Max as an invitation to “choose 5x or 20x more usage than Pro”. Google restructured its consumer AI plans at I/O in May 2026, and its own announcement describes adding a second, cheaper Ultra tier while cutting the price of the existing one; its plans page now describes the whole ladder in the same units, as “2x access”, “4x access” and “up to 20x access” to Gemini.

Four separate companies have independently decided that the honest way to name a tier is with a multiplication sign. When that many vendors agree on a unit, the unit is the product.

The pattern: you are buying an allowance

Four of the sixteen tiers have a multiplier in the product name. The rest describe themselves the same way in slightly more words.

GitHub Copilot is the most legible of the lot, because it prices the allowance in dollars too. Its plans page states “$15 monthly total credits” on the $10.00-a-month Pro tier, “$70 monthly total credits” on Pro+ at $39.00, and “$200 monthly total credits” on Max at $100.00. Read those pairs together and the structure is undisguised: at Pro+ and Max the subscription costs less than the allowance it contains, and the tiers are described as “4x+ included usage than Pro” and “2.9x+ included usage than Pro+” rather than as new abilities.

Then there are the top-ups. On the same purchase screens that sell the subscriptions, OpenAI sells credit packs in 100, 500 and 1,000-credit sizes, Anthropic sells them in 20, 50 and 250, and Perplexity sells five sizes from 500 up to 10,000. A subscription that also sells you more of itself by the unit is not a feature tier. It is a meter with a standing charge.

For a bill-reader that has one consequence worth writing on the wall: in this category a price you can read is not a cost you can predict. The number on the button is now a floor.

The $20 line and the only discount in the category

Monthly and annual prices checked 19 August 2026 and taken from the ledger above. The twelve-month column is our arithmetic on the monthly price, not a price anyone quotes you. “None on the screen we read” means exactly that — an annual option may exist elsewhere; it was not on the surface we could verify, and this desk does not print a figure it has not read.

Two products out of five let you buy a year at a discount, and both save you roughly 17%. That is the entire supply of discounts in this category, and it lives at the bottom of every ladder. Not one of the seven tiers priced at $100.00 a month or more offered an annual prepay on any screen we could read. The customers spending $1,200.00 to $2,999.88 a year have the fewest ways to spend less.

The same plan, two prices, depending on which screen you buy it on

This is the one finding here that is purely about the bill, so it gets its own heading.

Claude Pro is $200.00 a year on the vendor’s own site and $214.99 a year through the iOS app — the same plan, $14.99 apart, or 7.5%. Paid monthly the two are identical at $20.00, so the gap opens only on the annual plan, which is also the only version of the plan with a discount on it.

The store is simultaneously the more precise document and the dearer one. Anthropic’s own page groups Max under a single “from” price; the App Store list prices Max 5x and Max 20x separately at $124.99 and $249.99. If you want to know exactly what a tier costs, the store tells you. If you want to pay the least, the website does.

What the heavy tiers cost if you hold them a year

None of these can be prepaid, so the annual figure is twelve payments and nothing else, checked 19 August 2026:

• GitHub Copilot Max — $1,200.00
• ChatGPT Pro 5x — $1,200.00
• Claude Max 5x — $1,499.88
• Google AI Ultra — $2,399.88
• ChatGPT Pro 20x — $2,400.00
• Perplexity Max — $2,400.00
• Claude Max 20x — $2,999.88

From $59.88 to $2,999.88 is a spread of $2,940.00 a year, which is fifty times, in a category where every tier answers roughly the same request typed into roughly the same box. Perplexity’s own step is the steepest: Pro at $20.00 a month to Max at $200.00 is a tenfold jump, and nothing on the purchase screen explains what the tenfold is in.

The one we could not price

Midjourney belongs in this category and is not on the ledger. Its pricing page did not return to us on 19 August 2026, and it has no first-party app on the store whose purchase list we could read instead. Plenty of comparison tables will tell you what it costs. Copying one of those is how a stale price survives for two years and how a desk like this loses the only thing it has, so Midjourney gets a name, a link and no number until we can read a checkout screen.

Worth saying anyway: Midjourney has historically sold GPU time rather than a monthly message quota, which is the same idea as everything above with the unit written on the tin. It was metering compute before the assistants started calling it “usage”.

About that renewal column

Every one of the sixteen rows above reads Not published. We looked for a stated renewal price on each surface we could reach and did not find one, and that sentence describes our check rather than any vendor’s pricing.

But there is a real reason not to lose sleep over the renewal column here, and it is not a flattering one. In VPNs — the category this desk complains about most — the trick is a first term at $2.99 a month that renews at $12.99. AI subscriptions do not need that trick, because the quantity is adjustable. If the price stays at $19.99 and the allowance behind it moves, the vendor has repriced you without touching a number anyone publishes. Google’s own I/O announcement this year did both at once: it cut a headline price and restated the whole ladder in access multiples.

So the question to ask an AI subscription is not “what does it renew at”. It is “what does this buy, how would I know if that changed, and where would it be written down”. On the evidence of sixteen purchase screens, the answer to the third part is: nowhere you will be sent a copy of.

The verdict, on price only

Cheapest paid tier in the category: Google AI Plus at $4.99 a month, $59.88 a year, and it is the only tier under $10.00 with storage attached to it. If all you want is the caps lifted a little, that is the cheapest way to do it that we could verify.

Cheapest way to buy a standard assistant: prepay $200.00 a year, at ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro. Both beat paying monthly by about $40. Buy Claude Pro on the web rather than in the app and keep the other $14.99. If you want an assistant for writing code specifically, GitHub Copilot Pro at $10.00 a month is the cheapest way in, at $120.00 a year — half the monthly rate of a general assistant at the $20 line, and about a quarter of Copilot Pro+ at $39.00.

Everything above $100.00 a month is a usage decision, not a product decision, and the vendors have been unusually straight about that — they wrote the multiplier into the name. Do not buy a 20x tier because it sounds like the professional one. Buy it when you have hit the ceiling of the 5x tier and can say what that cost you.

And the standing advice of this desk applies with more force than usual: if a prepay exists and you intend to keep the thing for a year, take it. If it does not exist — which is true of thirteen of the sixteen tiers here — then the vendor has decided your subscription is a monthly meter, and you should treat it as one, including the part where you can turn it off.

Which of these models is better at what you do is a question we are unqualified to answer and did not try to. The billing question we can answer, and the answer is that these are metered utilities that still send you a flat invoice.