What AI Tools Actually Cost in 2026: 30 Tools, One Price Sheet

Of the 30 active AI tools we track, 24 have a free tier and six require payment before you can use them at all. Across all 30, the median cheapest paid plan is $20/month. The cheapest is Gemini's Google AI Plus at $4.99/month; the most expensive entry plan is Semrush's SEO tier at $139/month.

Those two numbers — the median entry price and the spread around it — explain most of the confusion in this market. Entry prices are low almost everywhere, but what you get for them varies enormously: a $20 plan can mean a full coding agent or a single-purpose chatbot with a message cap.

This page is the price sheet we maintain for every active tool in our catalog. Every figure below comes from the vendor's own pricing page, and every tool review carries the date its pricing was last verified. Prices are list prices in USD, billed monthly unless marked otherwise.

The full price sheet

"Cheapest paid plan" means the lowest self-serve tier with a published list price. Free tiers are excluded from that number, custom and enterprise quotes are excluded, and plans priced per user are marked per seat.

Tome is excluded: the product was discontinued, which is why the sheet has 30 rows rather than 31.

What the price sheet doesn't tell you

1. Annual billing moves the number

The table uses monthly list prices. Most vendors discount for annual prepayment, and the gap is large enough to change a buying decision:

• Claude Pro is $20/month, or $17/month billed annually ($200 upfront) — 15% less.
• Midjourney Basic is $10/month, or $96/year ($8/month) — 20% less.
• Runway Standard is $15/month, or $12/month billed annually — 20% less.
• Lovable Pro is $25/month, or $21/month billed annually — 16% less.
• Writesonic Starter is $99/month, or $79/month billed annually — 20% less.
• Synthesia Starter is $29/month, or $18/month billed yearly — 38% less.

The pattern is consistent: if you are confident you will keep a tool for a year, annual billing is usually the single biggest discount available. If you are still evaluating, pay monthly — the annual prepayment is exactly what makes switching expensive.

2. Per-seat pricing is the real budget risk

Ten of the 30 tools price at least one tier per user. Most entry plans are single-user, but the moment a second person needs access, the arithmetic changes:

• ChatGPT Business is $25/seat with a two-seat minimum, so the real floor is $50/month.
• Cursor Teams is $40/seat, double the $20 Pro plan.
• v0 by Vercel Business is $100/seat, five times the $20 Premium plan.
• Grammarly Business is $40/seat, against $30 for individual Pro.
• Otter.ai Pro and Jasper Pro are per-seat even at entry level: $16.99 and $69 respectively.

If you are pricing a tool for a team, multiply before you compare. The single-user plan on the pricing page is rarely the plan a team ends up on.

3. Credits and caps decide whether the entry plan is usable

A monthly price only means something next to the limits attached to it. From the plan data we track:

• Runway Standard includes 625 credits/month — roughly 52 seconds of Gen-4.5 video.
• Midjourney Basic includes 3.3 fast GPU hours (about 200 minutes) per month and no relaxed mode.
• Lovable Pro includes 100 credits/month plus 5 daily bonus credits.
• Bolt.new Free caps at 300K tokens/day (1M/month); Pro removes the daily cap and starts at 10M tokens/month.
• Synthesia Starter includes 1,200 credits/month, about 10 minutes of finished video.

An entry plan that looks cheap per month can be expensive per output. Before committing, estimate your volume in the unit the tool meters — credits, messages, tokens, or minutes — not in dollars.

The cheapest stack that covers a solo builder

If you need one tool per job and nothing more, the entry plans in our catalog add up like this:

That total is arithmetic, not a bundle: it is the sum of five independent entry plans, and each one carries the limits described above. The free tiers of all five tools can take this closer to zero if your volume is low.

There is a legitimate single-vendor alternative. ChatGPT Plus at $20/month includes image generation and code execution alongside chat, so one $20 subscription can replace the assistant and image line items. Add Canva Pro at $18 and Notion Plus at $10 and you are at $48/month for three tools instead of five. Neither stack is better in the abstract — the point is that both land near $50, and both are built from prices you can verify.

Where upgrading actually buys something

Not every upsell is worth taking. In our data, the upgrades with a concrete, countable difference are:

• GitHub Copilot Pro to Pro+: $10 to $39, and 1,500 to 7,000 AI credits per month.
• Claude Pro to Max 5x: $20 to $100, and five times the Pro usage allowance per session.
• Gemini Google AI Plus to Google AI Pro: $4.99 to $19.99, with the 1M-token context window and four times the free limits.
• Cursor Pro to Pro+: $20 to $60, aimed at people running agents daily rather than occasionally.

If you cannot name the limit you keep hitting, the upgrade is probably not for you yet.

How these numbers stay honest

Every price on this page comes from the vendor's pricing page and is re-checked at least every 60 days; each tool review shows the date its pricing was last verified, and the best-by-category pages surface the most recent verification across their category. Scores and plan details live in a machine-readable dataset at /api/tools.json (CC BY 4.0), so you can audit the numbers rather than trust a table.

If you spot a price that has moved, the fastest check is the tool's own page linked above, followed by our methodology for how we rank and re-verify. For a quick estimate of what a stack costs at your volume, the AI cost calculator does the arithmetic.