Last updated: September 2026
Individually, AI subscriptions look cheap. Twenty dollars here, ten there. Then you audit a year later and find six of them, half unused. This is the budget conversation the marketing pages skip.
The sticker prices, side by side
| Tool | Entry paid tier (as of July 2026; ChatGPT and Claude as of September 2026) |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT Go | About $8/month |
| General assistant (ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro) | About $20/month |
| Claude Pro, billed annually | About $17/month, $200 up front |
| Grammarly Pro | From about $12/month billed annually |
| Canva Pro | From about $120/year |
| Otter Pro | From about $8/month billed annually |
| Zapier | From about $20/month |
| Jasper | From about $39/month per seat |
| ElevenLabs | From about $5/month, usage-based above |
All prices are “about” and dated September 2026 on purpose: this market reprices constantly, and it now repackages as often as it reprices. Check before you commit; the shape of the math below changes more slowly than the numbers.
The $20 default has a floor under it now
For two years the paid assistant had one price. That stopped in January 2026, when OpenAI took ChatGPT Go worldwide at about $8 a month (as of September 2026). Go is not a trimmed-down Plus so much as a much larger free tier: roughly ten times the free limits on messages, images and file uploads, longer memory, more voice. It can also carry ads, which Plus does not. What stays behind the $20 line is the wider access to the strongest models and the higher ceilings on everything.
Claude has moved the other way and put its discount on the calendar rather than on a tier: Pro is about $17 a month if you pay $200 up front, $20 if you pay by the month (as of September 2026). Above that the next step is steep, the Max plans at $100 and $200.
The practical consequence for a budget: the honest entry line for one assistant is now $8, not $20, and the difference over a year is $144 per person (as of July 2026). Whether that $144 buys anything depends on how often the cheaper ceilings actually stop you, which is a measurement, not a guess.
The three effects that inflate the bill
Stacking. No single tool hurts. An assistant plus Grammarly plus Canva plus Otter plus Zapier runs around $70/month, roughly $840 a year, per person, before anyone has bought a specialized tool (as of July 2026). Each purchase was rational; the total was never decided by anyone.
Per-seat multiplication. Jasper at about $39 per seat is a very different product at one seat than at eight (as of July 2026). Per-seat pricing turns a tool decision into a headcount decision. Always compute the team price, not the demo price.
Usage-based tails. ElevenLabs from about $5/month looks like the cheapest line here, and for heavy audio production it can become the most expensive (as of July 2026). Character quotas, per-minute video limits, per-task automation pricing: anything metered deserves a real forecast of your volume, not a hopeful one.
The annual-billing trap and gift
Most of these prices are “billed annually”. The discount is real (often two months’ worth) and so is the commitment: an annual plan for a tool you abandon in October is the most expensive subscription you own. Rule of thumb: monthly billing for the first three months, annual only after a tool has survived a quarter of real use.
A sane budget, by profile
- Freelancer: $0 to $20/month (as of July 2026). Free tiers plus, eventually, one paid assistant, and try the $8 tier before the $20 one. Everything else waits until a limit bites.
- Small team (5 people): $100 to $250/month all-in. One paid assistant per heavy user, Canva Pro, and one connector; specialized tools only against a named bottleneck.
- Content or marketing team: add the specialist (Jasper, ElevenLabs, a video tool) only after computing per-seat and usage costs at your real volume, and put a calendar reminder to re-justify it in 90 days.
Our recommendation
Audit before you add. List what you already pay for, cancel what nobody opened last month, and only then evaluate the next shiny tool. Start one rung lower than the marketing suggests, since a cheap tier that frustrates you is easy to upgrade and a costly one you barely touch is not easy to notice. The cheapest AI subscription of 2026 is still the one you did not duplicate.
The small business stack and the free tools guide apply this arithmetic to two concrete budgets, and which subscription to buy first applies it to the very first purchase.
Before renewing a chat plan, is ChatGPT Plus worth it tests the cheap-tier versus full-price question directly.