How Much Does AI Cost? Pricing for 10 Tools Checked at Source
Every provider counts differently: per seat, credits, minutes or characters. We checked the official pricing pages for ten AI tools and recorded the dates.
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Comparing AI tool prices is harder than it looks, and not because the prices are high. Every provider counts differently: one charges per seat, another per credit, a third per minute, and a fourth per character. On top of that, some bill for usage after you exhaust your allocation, so the bill doesn’t end with the subscription.
That’s why we maintain a separate article for each tool, with prices copied from the official pricing page and the date we checked. We don’t convert currencies or divide annual bills into months, because that’s where errors creep in that then circulate around the web.
AI Tool Pricing We’ve Checked at Source
- Midjourney image and video generation from text
- Claude text assistant, plans from free to enterprise
- Suno music generation, billed in credits
- ElevenLabs speech synthesis, limits counted in characters
- Runway video generation, billed in credits
- Canva Pro graphics, some AI features billed separately
- Notion AI add-on billed differently than Notion itself
- Cursor code editor with usage-based billing
- DeepL Pro translation, file limits and custom glossary
- HeyGen avatars and video, limits in minutes
AI Chat Subscriptions: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, Perplexity
Prices from official pricing pages, checked September 25, 2026. Each row links to a separate article with limits and gotchas for that plan.
| Tool | Free Plan | Basic Paid Plan | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | yes, GPT-5.6 Luna | Go $9, Plus $26, Pro from $114 | ChatGPT pricing, GPT-6 Astra availability |
| Claude | yes | Pro $20, Max from $123 | Claude pricing |
| Gemini | yes | Google AI Plus $6, AI Pro $25; students get Plus free for a year | Gemini pricing, Gemini for students |
| Mistral Vibe (Le Chat) | yes | Pro from $14.99 net | Le Chat / Mistral Vibe |
| Perplexity | yes | Pro $20 | Perplexity Pro |
| Microsoft Copilot | yes | in Microsoft 365 packages | Microsoft Copilot |
| GitHub Copilot | yes, with limit | Pro $10 net | GitHub Copilot |
| Cursor | Hobby | Pro $20 | Cursor pricing |
We maintain a comparison of all subscriptions in one table with recommendations in the article AI subscriptions, and what you get without paying in the article free AI tools.
What to Watch Out for in AI Pricing
Credits are not the same as time. When generating images, video and music, you pay per run, not per month. Failed generations also consume your allocation, so the real cost depends on how many attempts you need.
Usage billing after exhausting your plan. Some tools don’t block work after you exceed the limit, they just add charges. It’s convenient and that’s exactly the risk, because the bill grows without warning.
Per-seat pricing for team work. With business plans, you multiply by the number of people, and not everyone on the team needs full access.
Annual plan paid upfront. It’s cheaper per month, but it’s a commitment for a year with a tool that might look different in six months.
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With most of these tools, the free version is enough to assess whether it even does what you expect. What you actually get without paying, we’ve collected in our review of free AI tools, and for text assistants in the Gemini pricing and in the article about free ChatGPT.
If you’re planning production work, calculate the cost before you buy a subscription. We measured that the same nine-hundred-word article costs from $0.00039 to $0.18913, depending on the model. With that kind of spread, choosing the right tool can matter more than the subscription itself.
See also: How much Kling AI costs - video generator pricing.
See also: AI tool guides with pricing
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