AI Subscription Prices Compared: Every Plan, Every Source, August 2026

TL;DR: Five standard AI plans cost $109.98 a month combined in August 2026: ChatGPT Plus $19.99, Claude Pro $20.00, Google AI Pro $19.99, SuperGrok $30.00 and Perplexity Pro $20.00. Every figure carries its source below, and the same five model families sit in one subscription at $14.99.

Five standard AI subscriptions cost $109.98 a month together, and Perspective AI covers the same five model families in one subscription for $14.99. Those two numbers are the whole comparison. What makes this page different from every other price table is the third column: every figure below names the URL it came from and the date it was read, because on 18 August 2026 four of the six vendors checked refused to show an automated client their own price list. This page belongs to the comparisons hub.

What do AI subscriptions cost, side by side?

ChatGPT Plus costs $19.99, Claude Pro $20.00, Google AI Pro $19.99, SuperGrok $30.00 and Perplexity Pro $20.00. Together they total $109.98 a month.

• Google AI Plus: 2x free usage limits plus 400 GB of storage, the cheapest paid step in the market, $4.99/mo.
• ChatGPT Go: budget access to GPT above the free caps, $8.00/mo.
• SuperGrok Lite: entry access to Grok, $10.00/mo.
• ChatGPT Plus: the mainstream GPT plan, $19.99/mo.
• Google AI Pro: Gemini with a 1M context window and 5 TB of storage, $19.99/mo.
• Claude Pro: Claude with a 200k context window on every consumer tier, $20.00/mo.
• Perplexity Pro: cited research as the default answer format, $20.00/mo.
• SuperGrok: Grok with real-time social data, $30.00/mo.

Which vendors publish a price a machine can read?

Two of six did. Anthropic and Google served complete, readable price lists on 18 August 2026. OpenAI, xAI, Perplexity and Meta returned HTTP 403 to the same automated client.

The consequence runs through every AI price comparison on the internet, including the ones that look authoritative. A figure nobody can fetch is a figure that propagates by copying, and copying preserves errors indefinitely. Three specific failure modes follow from it: prices that were true a year ago read as current, billing periods get dropped so an annual figure appears as a monthly one, and tier names that a vendor has since split keep being quoted as one product. This site prints a source and a date beside every number for exactly that reason, and omits figures rather than importing them. A comparison site sits one layer further from the source again, and even a well-sourced ranking still leaves you buying the plans it names one at a time, which is the gap our SubChoice alternative guide works through.

The $20 tier is five different products wearing one price

Four vendors price their standard plan within one cent of $20.00, and the four plans overlap far less than the prices suggest.

Google gives five times Anthropic's context window and bundles 5 TB of storage at one cent less. Anthropic gives the same 200k window on its free plan that it gives on Max 20x, so the $20.00 buys usage rather than capability. Perplexity gives citations by default, which the other three produce on request. The prices converged; the products did not.

Where each free plan stops

Google runs the strongest free tier of the five, publishing Gemini Flash, with varying access to Gemini Pro, image generation, Deep Research and Gems at $0 with 15 GB of storage. Anthropic's free plan carries the full 200k context window and an unpublished usage ceiling. OpenAI, xAI and Perplexity all operate free tiers whose current caps sit behind pages that refused automated verification on 18 August 2026.

The pattern worth taking from that: free tiers are where vendors compete hardest and disclose least. Every one of the five gives away enough to be genuinely useful, and none of the three blocked vendors publishes its cap anywhere a comparison engine can read it. Test a free tier against a real week of your own work before paying anyone, because the upgrade trigger is always the same and it is never the model quality. It is the reset timer.

Five standard plans add up to $109.98 a month

The arithmetic, once. $19.99 plus $20.00 plus $19.99 plus $30.00 plus $20.00 equals $109.98 a month, or $1,319.76 a year. Perspective AI is $14.99/mo for all five of those model families with switching inside one conversation. The monthly difference is $94.99, and the annual difference is $1,139.88.

Almost nobody holds all five, and the comparison stays useful anyway because the realistic stack is two. Two standard plans run $39.99 to $50.00 a month depending on which pair, against $14.99 for a subscription covering all five families. The subscription audit is the exercise that turns this table into a decision, and the cost-cutting guide covers what to cancel first. The per-vendor detail sits at Claude pricing, ChatGPT pricing, Gemini pricing, Grok pricing and Perplexity pricing.

What Five Separate Plans Cost Against One Subscription Over a Year

That annual figure is the honest size of the consolidation decision, and it deserves three qualifications rather than a victory lap. It assumes all five plans, which few people hold. It compares standard tiers only, so anyone on a $200.00 plan is looking at a much larger number. And it counts price alone, not the specific capability that made someone subscribe to a second vendor in the first place.

Run the comparison against your own statement instead. Add the AI lines on last month's card, subtract $14.99, and multiply by twelve. Two plans produce a gap of roughly $300 a year, three produce roughly $540, and the five-plan case produces $1,139.88. The decision is the same at every size and only the magnitude changes: pay per vendor, or pay once and switch models inside the thread. Consolidating AI subscriptions covers the mechanics, and the full plan and price reference holds every tier this page summarised.

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