The Best AI Subscription in 2026: Five Plans Cost $20, and Each Sells Something Different

Line up the six main AI subscriptions and five of them cost $20 a month, or a cent under: ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, Google AI Pro, Perplexity Pro and Microsoft 365 Premium. xAI is the exception, with Grok at $8 or $30 as part of an X subscription.

At the same price you'd expect the same product. What you get is five different bundles with a chatbot in the middle. Google's comes with 5 TB of storage and YouTube Premium Lite. Microsoft's comes with Word, Excel and 2 TB of OneDrive. OpenAI's adds Codex and ChatGPT Work. Anthropic's adds Claude Code. Perplexity's is a search engine before it's a chatbot.

So the best AI subscription is usually the one whose extras you'd pay for anyway. After that, three things decide it, and no plan card puts them side by side: what happens when you run out, whether your chats train the model, and whether you can pay for a year at a time.

I read each company's pricing page and its help articles on plans, limits and privacy, most of them on 24 October 2026. Prices are US prices before tax.

The Short Answer

If you...	Pay for	Price
Want one app for chat, voice, images, documents and agents	ChatGPT Plus	$20 a month, no yearly plan
Mostly write, or read long documents	Claude Pro	$20 a month, or $200 a year
Keep your email, files and photos with Google	Google AI Pro	$19.99 a month
Work in Word, Excel and Outlook	Microsoft 365 Personal or Premium	$9.99 or $19.99 a month
Look things up and need the sources	Perplexity Pro	$20 a month, or $200 a year
Spend your day on X	X Plus, which includes Grok	$8 a month, or $80 a year
Want the cheapest paid plan	Google AI Plus	$4.99 a month
Ask AI a few things a week	Any of the free plans	$0

AI Subscription Comparison: Every Price Side by Side

This is what each company charges one person paying for themselves, from the free plan to the top tier.

Company	Free plan	Cheapest paid plan	Main plan	Main plan, paid yearly	Top personal plan
ChatGPT (OpenAI)	Yes, may show ads	Go, $6	Plus, $20	Not offered	Pro, $100, $200 or $500
Claude (Anthropic)	Yes	Pro, $20	Pro, $20	$200	Max, $100 or $200
Gemini (Google)	Yes	AI Plus, $4.99	AI Pro, $19.99	Not listed in the US	Ultra, $99.99 or $199.99
Perplexity	Yes	Pro, $20	Pro, $20	$200	Max, $200
Copilot (Microsoft)	Yes, may show ads	Microsoft 365 Personal, $9.99	Microsoft 365 Premium, $19.99	$199.99	Microsoft 365 Pro, $99.99
Grok (xAI)	Yes	X Plus, $8	X Premium, $30	$300	X Ultra, $200

The top tiers are for people who run out on the main plan every week, so I leave them out from here on. Claude Pro vs Max and ChatGPT Pro 500 cover them.

Paying for a year saves about $40 on Claude Pro, Perplexity Pro and Microsoft 365 Premium, and $60 on X Premium. OpenAI doesn't sell yearly personal plans, and Google's US plan pages show only monthly prices.

What Each $20 Plan Actually Includes

All five $20 plans have a deep research mode that searches the web and writes you a report. Past that, they differ on three counts: which models you get, how much text those models read at once, and what else comes in the box.

ChatGPT Plus, $20: The Most in One App

OpenAI's Plus card lists GPT-6 reasoning models, expanded deep research, memory, projects, scheduled tasks and custom GPTs, more Codex, and ChatGPT Work on desktop, web and mobile. Compared with the $6 Go plan, Plus adds Sites, image generation with Thinking, and interactive tables and charts, and it shows no ads. OpenAI's pricing page gives Plus a 256K-token window, about 320 pages, when it reasons, and 54K for quick answers.

Two things about the models are worth knowing before you pay. GPT-6 is still "rolling out in Chat" to Plus, according to OpenAI's help centre, and Plus gets its Medium and High settings, not Extra High or Pro. GPT-6 Astra, OpenAI's strongest model, is on Plus only inside ChatGPT Work and Codex, and OpenAI's own estimate is 5 to 45 Astra messages per five hours.

OpenAI publishes no number for the chat limit on Plus. "If you reach a Thinking limit," its help centre says, "ChatGPT may continue with another available model." For Codex, ChatGPT Work and the Word, Excel and PowerPoint add-ins you can buy credits, and Plus can also pay for an instant reset, which "pulls your normal weekly allowance forward." Billing is monthly only. The plan-by-plan detail is in ChatGPT Go vs Plus vs Pro.

Claude Pro, $20 or $17 a Month Yearly: For Writing and Long Documents

Anthropic's Pro card says "Claude Code included" and lists more usage, Projects, handing off and scheduling tasks, Claude in Chrome and in Microsoft 365, and more Claude models. The model that matters is Opus 5.5, which Anthropic says is available on Pro. Fable, its top model, isn't part of Pro's allowance, and Pro users reach it by paying usage credits. Anthropic's help centre gives the 5.5 models a 1 million token window in chat, about four times what OpenAI lists for Plus.

Usage resets every five hours, with a weekly limit across all models on top. Anthropic publishes no message count, only that Pro gets "at least 5x more usage per 5-hour session than Free." At a limit you wait, or switch on usage credits, billed at API rates, and carry on. Claude's limits walks through both windows.

When I compared models for writing in August, Claude won long-form drafts and editing. Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 have arrived since, so treat that as a lean rather than a ruling, but it's the usual reason to pick Claude over ChatGPT at the same price. Paid yearly, Pro is $200 up front, or $17 a month.

Google AI Pro, $19.99: Storage and YouTube, With Gemini

Google's AI Pro card lists Gemini 4 Argon, its Pro and Flash models, four times the free usage, Gemini in Gmail, Docs and Vids, 1,000 Flow credits for video, Chrome auto browse, Google Home Premium Standard, YouTube Premium Lite and 5 TB of storage. Its US Google One page adds Google Health Premium, which it values at $9.99 a month. Gemini on AI Pro reads up to 1 million tokens, which Google puts at about 1,500 pages.

Look at the storage before the AI. Google's US Google One page lists two storage-only plans, 100 GB for $1.99 and 200 GB for $2.99. Every plan with more storage than that comes with Gemini: 400 GB with AI Plus at $4.99, 5 TB with AI Pro. If your photos and Drive already need more than 200 GB, you're choosing between Google's AI plans whether you want the AI or not, and AI Pro comes down to whether the extra $15 a month is worth it to you.

Usage refreshes every five hours up to a weekly limit. When a paid account reaches it, the chat continues on Flash-Lite, which Google calls its fastest model. Google's AI credits help page lists only Flow and Antigravity as what credits extend. If you're weighing Gemini against ChatGPT on the model alone, Gemini vs ChatGPT is the longer comparison.

Perplexity Pro, $20 or $200 a Year: Search First

Perplexity's Pro card lists deep research, "Access to top AI models", the choice between them, documents and apps, and more access to Computer, Perplexity's agent. Its help centre's model table, a snapshot from 17 October, lets Pro choose GPT-6.1 Sol, Claude Sonnet 5.5, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Grok 4.7, Kimi K3 or GLM 5.3 to answer a search. The flagships, Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Fable 5.1, GPT-6 Astra and Gemini 4 Argon, are on the $200 Max plan.

Perplexity publishes no counts for Pro. Its help centre lists "Weekly limits (average use)" for Pro Searches and "Monthly limits" for Research, and warns that advanced models "may be limited during weeks of especially heavy usage." For Research, it says access returns as older queries roll out of the usage window.

Pick it if most of what you ask AI is a question whose answer you'll need to check. If you mostly write or work through your own files, the plans above do more for the same $20. Perplexity vs ChatGPT goes through where each one wins.

Microsoft 365, $9.99 or $19.99: Copilot Inside Office

Microsoft no longer sells Copilot Pro. Copilot now comes inside Microsoft 365. Personal, at $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year, is for one person and includes the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote desktop apps, 1 TB of OneDrive and, in the words of Microsoft's compare page, Copilot chat "with higher usage than free". Family, at $12.99, covers up to six people with 2 TB shared, but Microsoft says the AI is for the subscription owner only. Premium, at $19.99 a month or $199.99 a year, adds what that page calls "extensive usage" and the agent features, including Researcher and Analyst.

Microsoft says consumer Copilot runs on "language and multi-modal models from Microsoft, OpenAI, and other model developers." It describes usage in levels rather than numbers, and each of the three plans comes with a free month.

If you already pay for Microsoft 365 Personal or Family, you already have Copilot, and the only question is whether Premium is worth the step up, $10 a month more than Personal. Copilot vs ChatGPT compares the two head to head.

Grok, $8 or $30: Part of an X Subscription

xAI sells Grok as The X Subscription. Plus, at $8 a month or $80 a year, includes Grok chat, voice and image generation, Cursor, a checkmark on X and fewer ads there. It doesn't include video. xAI's own FAQ says Plus "is recommended for social creators with limited AI usage" and recommends Premium "for new AI users".

Premium, at $30 a month or $300 a year, has four times Plus's usage, the latest Grok models, video, Grok Bot and full X Premium+ benefits, including ad-free scrolling on most of X. xAI says Premium includes the benefits of SuperGrok, Cursor Pro and X Premium+, which cost $90 a month combined. One weekly pool covers both Grok and Cursor. Past it you buy prepaid top-ups or wait, and xAI publishes no rate for extra Grok usage. How much Grok costs has every tier.

It's worth it if you'd pay for X anyway, and hard to justify if you wouldn't.

The Cheapest AI Subscriptions

Four companies now sell a plan under $10, and each leaves out something different.

Plan	Price	What it adds over free	What it leaves out
Google AI Plus	$4.99	Choose the Flash model yourself, 2x free usage, 128K window, video, Gemini in Gmail, 400 GB	Google says Pro is leaving the plan; no extra AI credits
ChatGPT Go	$6	More messages, uploads and images than Free, longer memory, a 54K window, scheduled tasks	May show ads; no GPT-6 Sol, Sites or Thinking images
X Plus	$8	Grok chat, voice and images, Cursor, a checkmark and fewer ads on X	No video, and xAI points new AI users to Premium
Microsoft 365 Personal	$9.99	Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, 1 TB and Copilot above the free level	Researcher, Analyst and the other agent features

Claude has nothing below Pro, though Pro on a yearly plan is $17 a month. Perplexity's $10 Education Pro is only for verified students and educators, along with the other offers in AI student discounts.

Of the four, Google AI Plus is the cheapest and the simplest deal: a model you choose and storage you might have bought anyway. ChatGPT Go is cheap partly because it may show ads. X Plus makes sense if the checkmark and fewer ads on X are worth $8 to you on their own.

What Happens When You Run Out

The plan cards tell you how much you get. They rarely say what happens after.

Plan	How the limit works	When you reach it
ChatGPT Plus	No published cap in chat; five-hour and weekly windows in Work and Codex	At a Thinking limit, chat "may continue with another available model"; credits for Codex and Work, or a paid reset
Claude Pro	A five-hour session plus a weekly limit across all models	Wait, or switch on usage credits at API rates
Google AI Pro	Refreshes every five hours up to a weekly limit	The chat continues on Flash-Lite
Perplexity Pro	Weekly and monthly limits, no counts published	Wait for the window to roll on; Computer credits are for sale
Microsoft 365 Premium	"Extensive usage", no numbers	An in-product notice; Microsoft points you to Microsoft 365 Pro at $99.99
X Premium	One weekly pool shared by Grok and Cursor	Buy prepaid top-ups, at no published rate, or wait

So Anthropic sells you more of everything at a stated price, API rates. OpenAI sells more Codex and Work, plus a reset that borrows next week's allowance. Google keeps you chatting for free on Flash-Lite. Perplexity mostly makes you wait, xAI will sell you more without saying what it costs, and Microsoft's answer is a $99.99 plan. If your work comes in bursts, like a deadline week or a month-end close, this column matters more than the allowance itself. ChatGPT's limits and Grok's limits go deeper on two of them.

Which Plans Train on Your Chats

Plan	Trains on your chats by default?	How to stop it
ChatGPT Plus	OpenAI "may use your content to train our models"	"Improve the model for everyone", in Data Controls
Claude Pro	Anthropic marks it "Opt-out" on personal plans, off by default only on Team and Enterprise	The "Help improve our AI models" switch
Google AI Pro	Keep Activity is on by default for anyone 18 or over	Turn off Keep Activity, which also cuts Gmail, Docs and Drive
Perplexity Pro	"AI Data Retention is enabled by default"	The AI data retention switch, in Preferences
Microsoft 365	No. Copilot app prompts "aren't used to train foundation models"	Nothing to change
X Premium	xAI "may use your content and interactions with Grok" to train	The "Improve the model" switch

Microsoft is the only one of the six whose Copilot privacy page says your prompts and files aren't used to train its foundation models, though its general privacy statement is broader. Everyone else can train on personal-plan chats until you switch it off, and paying doesn't change that. If you put client documents into AI, change the setting on the first day, whichever plan you buy. Gemini makes that harder than the rest, because turning off Keep Activity also stops Gemini reading your Gmail, Docs and Drive.

Which AI Subscription Is Best for Personal Use?

You want one app for everything. ChatGPT Plus. Voice, images, deep research, ChatGPT Work and Sites, with no ads. Switch off training in Data Controls.

Most of your AI time is writing. Claude Pro. Opus 5.5, a 1 million token window on the 5.5 models, and the best long-form drafts and edits when I tested writing in August. Pay yearly once you're sure, and it's $17 a month. The two head to head are in ChatGPT Plus vs Claude Pro.

Your email, files and photos are with Google. Google AI Pro, especially if you need more than 400 GB of storage. If you only want the chatbot, try AI Plus at $4.99 first.

You work in Word, Excel and Outlook. Microsoft 365 Personal at $9.99 already includes Copilot. Move to Premium only if you'll use Researcher and Analyst.

You research and need the sources. Perplexity Pro, and pay yearly for $200 if it sticks.

You're on X every day. X Plus at $8. Move to Premium if you want video or Grok Bot.

You ask AI a few things a week. Don't pay yet. The next section explains when to start.

You'd use two of these. Paying both companies is $40 a month. The section on izzedo below is the cheaper way to do it.

Is It Worth Paying for AI at All?

Every company here has a free plan. ChatGPT Free has unlimited everyday text chat, with ads in some countries and a 27K-token window, about 12 pages by OpenAI's count. Free Gemini includes Deep Research and image generation but mostly answers with Flash-Lite and reads 32K tokens at a time. Claude Free has Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 on a five-hour session limit. Perplexity's free plan gives you 3 Pro Searches a day and one Research report a month.

Pay when one of these happens more than once a week:

• You hit the free limit in the middle of something you needed finished.
• A document or a long thread no longer fits.
• The free model gets something wrong that the paid model gets right.
• You need a feature only the paid plan has, such as video in Gemini, Researcher in Copilot, or Sites in ChatGPT.

Until then, the free plans are the cheapest way to find out which company's model you like.

Monthly or Yearly?

Pay monthly for the first month or two. Yearly plans save about $40 on Claude Pro, Perplexity Pro and Microsoft 365 Premium, and $60 on X Premium. OpenAI has no yearly personal plan, and Google's US pages list AI Pro by the month.

The bigger reason to wait is how often these plans change. Since late September, OpenAI has split ChatGPT Pro into three tiers, xAI has moved new customers from SuperGrok to The X Subscription, and Google has changed which models its free and AI Plus plans get. A year up front is a bet that the plan you buy today is the plan you'll want next autumn.

Where izzedo Fits

izzedo chat is a different kind of subscription: one chat with models from most of these companies. The free plan has GPT-6 Luna, Claude Haiku 5.5, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Grok 4.7, DeepSeek, Kimi and Qwen, with agent mode and 50+ connectors. The $6 Hobby plan adds every other chat model izzedo has, including GPT-6.1 Sol, Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Fable 5.1 and Gemini 4 Argon. You choose the model for each message, and the next model reads the whole thread.

In the thread below, Claude Opus 5.5 wrote an email for a small yoga studio raising its monthly membership from $89 to $99. Then GPT-6.1 Sol read it as a member on a tight budget.

Both models caught something real. Opus flagged its own weak spot: it had invented the reasons for the rise and said to swap in the true ones. Sol found the line that lands worst on the members most likely to cancel. "Keep paying our teachers fairly" makes a member who can barely afford $99 feel guilty for hesitating. I'd take Sol's cut, follow Opus's warning, and write the real reason in myself.

The AI providers behind izzedo don't train on what you send through it, so there's no training setting to find. The allowance is shared across all models, and a flagship like Opus or Fable draws on it several times faster than an everyday model, so if you'd spend all day in one company's top model, that company's own plan gives you more of it. If you split your week between models, or want a second opinion on the work that matters, Hobby at $6 or Pro at $12 costs less than any one of the $20 plans. Current allowances are on the pricing page. If you already pay for two of these, the subscription audit shows what you'd keep and what you'd drop.

The Bottom Line

At $20 a month, the AI companies have stopped competing on price and started competing on bundles. Google sells storage with Gemini attached, Microsoft sells Office with Copilot, xAI sells X with Grok, and OpenAI and Anthropic sell agents around their chatbots.

So start from what you already pay for. If it's Google storage or Microsoft 365, part of the AI bill is already covered. If it's nothing, ChatGPT Plus covers the most ground and Claude Pro was the better writer when I last tested. Switch off training on whichever you buy, pay monthly until you're sure, and check the date on any comparison you read, this one included. At least three of these six companies have changed their plans in the last six weeks.

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Can't pick one? Try izzedo chat free, with GPT, Claude and Gemini models in one chat, no credit card required.