AI Price Per Answer: What a Single Answer Costs on Each Plan

TL;DR: Divide a plan's monthly price by the answers you actually get and the ranking changes. At 420 answers a month, published consumer AI plans price a single answer between $0.036 and $0.48, a 13x spread for the same question, and holding two plans instead of one subscription roughly doubles the figure without buying a single extra answer.

At 420 answers a month, the published consumer AI plans price a single answer anywhere between $0.036 and $0.476. That is a 13x spread across products that answer the same question, and no vendor publishes it, because publishing a price per answer means publishing how many answers you get. The arithmetic also settles a question nobody prices directly: what it costs to hold two lab plans instead of consolidating the same work into one subscription, since the second plan raises the numerator and leaves the denominator exactly where it was. Compare the third column rather than the second and the ranking stops matching the price list. This index does the division anyway, using Perspective AI and the vendor plans that state a monthly price in dollars. It belongs to the pricing hub, where the monthly figures come from.

What Does One AI Answer Cost?

One AI answer costs between 3.6 cents and 48 cents on published consumer plans, at a usage level of 420 answers a month. The plan's monthly price does not predict its position in that range.

The Index at 420 Answers a Month

One answer means one model response, of any length. The baseline is 20 answers per working day across 21 working days, which is a moderately heavy individual user and a deliberately unflattering denominator for cheap plans.

Three things fall out of that table immediately. The four cheapest rows sit within eight tenths of a cent of each other, which means the entire mid-market is priced identically at this volume and the monthly figures that look meaningfully different are not. The ordering is not the ordering of the monthly prices once you account for what each meter actually permits. And the top of the range is not a premium version of the bottom, it is a different product sold to a different denominator.

Read down the third column rather than the second. The $200 plan is not thirteen times better at answering a question than the $14.99 one. It is sized for someone whose real denominator is far above 420, and at their volume its position in this table is completely different. That is the finding: price per answer is a property of you, not of the plan.

Sources Behind Every Row

Every monthly price above was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 18 August 2026. Claude's plan prices came from claude.com/pricing, Venice AI's from venice.ai/pricing, and Poe's compute point allowances and annual-billed monthly rate from poe.com/subscription_plans. Perspective AI's plans are our own and are listed at $14.99, $49.99, and $499 per month.

What Could Not Be Verified

ChatGPT is absent, and the reason is worth stating rather than papering over: OpenAI's pricing page returns a 403 to automated retrieval, so we could not read a price from the source on the day of writing. A widely repeated figure is not a verified one, and an index whose credibility rests on doing the arithmetic in public cannot import a number it did not check. If you are pricing ChatGPT into this table yourself, read the figure off the page and divide it by your own denominator.

Two further caveats. Poe's plans page displayed annual-billed monthly equivalents at the time of reading, so $16.67 is not the month-to-month rate. And Venice AI's credit allowances vary sharply by tier against a published conversion of 100 credits to the dollar, so its higher tiers buy something structurally different from what a flat plan buys, which is set out tier by tier in what Venice AI credits include at Pro, Pro Plus and Max.

The Break-Even Line Between a Small Plan and a Large One

The interesting question is not which plan is cheapest per answer. Every flat plan is cheapest per answer at infinite volume. The question is where a larger plan stops being a waste.

Stack Two Plans or Consolidate Into One Subscription: the Per-Answer Test

There is a second break-even worth running, and it is the one that decides whether an aggregator is worth anything to you at all. Stacking subscriptions multiplies the numerator without multiplying the denominator, because your total answers per month stay roughly what they were: you are the same person with the same working week. Two $20 plans held simultaneously at a combined 420 answers a month price each answer at $0.095, not $0.048, because the second plan bought you access rather than volume. Three of them reach $0.143. Against $0.036 on a single multi-model plan at the same 420 answers, the stack is paying roughly four times per answer for the privilege of choosing between labs, and that gap is the entire commercial case for consolidation stated as a unit price rather than as a saving.

A larger plan only earns its price when the smaller one would have stopped you. Against Perspective AI's own tiers, $49.99 costs 3.3x what $14.99 does, so it needs to be delivering more than 3.3x the work before it is the better per-answer deal, and below that crossover the extra allowance is simply unused. The same test applies to any upgrade you are offered: multiply the price ratio, and ask whether your month contains that multiple of real work. Most months do not, which is why upgrade prompts arrive framed as capability rather than volume.

Why Per-Month Pricing Hides the 13x Spread

A monthly price is one number with a hidden denominator. Vendors that express usage as "limits" inside a rolling window are not being evasive by accident: an uncountable allowance cannot be divided, so no cost-per-answer figure can be computed from their own materials, and none is ever published. You find the denominator by hitting it.

Annual billing compounds the concealment rather than relieving it. A plan advertised at a lower monthly rate on annual terms has not become cheaper per answer; it has become cheaper per answer only if you use it for twelve months, and the discount is priced precisely because most people will not. Poe's plans page illustrates the mechanic clearly: the tiers on display were annual-billed monthly equivalents, so the number a shopper reads and the number they would pay month to month are different numbers on the same page. Running the index on annual figures and comparing against a monthly competitor is the most common way to arrive at a confidently wrong ranking.

Metered plans are the opposite case. When the meter is dollar-denominated and shown per action, the denominator is visible on every message, and the price per answer is not an estimate at all. That transparency is the actual argument for credit-based metering as a unit, and it is the difference between an index like this one being a reconstruction and being a receipt.

Where Metered Plans and Flat Plans Diverge

Plot cost per answer against volume and the two shapes are unmistakable. A flat plan is a falling curve: fixed cost divided by rising usage, cheaper per answer every day, until the cap turns it vertical. A metered plan is roughly a flat line: each answer costs what it costs, whether it is your fifth or your five hundredth.

There is a third shape that the table cannot show, and it is the one that catches people out. A capped plan's true cost per answer is not its price divided by the answers you wanted, it is its price divided by the answers you got. Every answer the cap refused still cost you money and delivered nothing, so the effective figure jumps at exactly the moment you needed the product most. That is why a cap discovered in the middle of a deadline is expensive in a way no pricing page can express, and why the plans that look best at moderate volume are frequently the worst plans to be holding on a heavy week.

Which shape you want depends on which end of the curve you live at. Consistent heavy users on one lab do well from the falling curve, right up until the throttle. Everyone whose usage swings month to month does better on the flat line, because they stop subsidising the months they barely used the product. A stack of three $20 subscriptions is three falling curves paid for in full whether or not you walked down any of them, which is the arithmetic behind consolidating AI subscriptions into one plan.

What the Index Says at 40 Answers a Month

Move the denominator from 420 to 40, a light but real usage pattern, and every figure multiplies by 10.5. Claude Pro becomes $0.50 an answer. Perspective AI Starter becomes $0.38. The $200 tier becomes $5.00 an answer, which is roughly the price of a coffee per question and is the clearest possible signal that the plan was not built for that person.

Run it the other way as well. At 1,200 answers a month, which is a genuinely heavy professional pattern, Claude Pro reaches $0.017 an answer and Perspective AI Starter reaches $0.012, and the plans that looked extravagant at 40 answers start to look like the only ones sized correctly. The order of the rows never changes, because every figure divides by the same denominator. What changes is whether the differences are worth anything: at 40 answers a month the gap between the cheapest and dearest row is $4.62 an answer, at 420 it is $0.44, and at 1,200 it is $0.15. The index is not a leaderboard. It is a function with your usage as its input, and its job is to tell you at which volumes the choice matters at all.

Nothing about the products changed between those two paragraphs. Only the denominator moved, and it moved the whole ranking's economics with it. Before comparing the monthly sticker price behind every plan in this index, count a normal week of your own answers and multiply by four. That number is the one that decides which plan is expensive.

Perspective AI is $14.99/mo for the whole catalog in one subscription, and each action publishes its price before it is charged, so the denominator in this index is never hypothetical. Start a thread and watch the per-answer cost yourself.

FAQ