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Frontier ModelsFeature

The 17 Best AI Subscriptions

Ranked and parsed for your pocket's power.

9 min read · 2,044 words · 44 sources
A child's bedroom with drawings scattered across the floor and a soccer ball by the bed, the room empty
A child's bedroom with drawings scattered across the floor and a soccer ball by the bed, the room empty. Photo · Pexels
“Twenty dollars a month buys the model at the top of the Artificial Analysis index, and $200 a month at OpenAI buys 200 messages a week of its strongest reasoning setting. Should you pay for the best reasoning on sale, or for the plan you can use all day?”

A boy hands his room to his robot. How that goes is in the comic at the end of this piece, below a board that ranks 18 AI subscriptions by what they cost and what they do. Anthropic made Opus 5.5 the default on its $20 plan on September 225. OpenAI sells GPT-6 Pro on plans from $100, at 50 or 200 messages a week17. Google charges $19.99 for four times its free limits18. Which of them earns your money this month?

The AILately.com Desk built a board to answer that. It lists 18 plans, from a free tier to a $300 seat, and ranks 17 of them, each scored from 0 to 100 on reasoning, on everyday output and on what verified users said in September, then divided by a price weight the reader can move. Every number traces to a page opened this month.

First panel of four. A voice from off-panel calls, 'Honey, tidy up in there, please!' A boy in glasses surveys a floor of books, markers, a soccer ball and headphones beside his robot and admits, 'Sure is a bit sloppy in here.' The other three panels are blurred here and wait at the end of the piece.Panel 1 of 4 · the rest waits at the end
Clean Your Room. Click the panel to jump to the whole strip.

The top ten

Rank is value at the default weight on the board above, where a $20 plan counts at 71 percent of a free one and a $200 plan at 30 percent.

# Plan Price a month What puts it here
1 Claude Free $0 Sonnet 5.5 scores 56 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. That ranks third of every model tested16.
2 Claude Pro $20 Opus 5.5 leads the same index at 58. The LMArena text board ranks it first at 150912.
3 ChatGPT Plus $20 GPT-6 Astra leads Terminal-Bench 4.0 at 58.2 percent. On GPQA Diamond, the model scores 96.3 percent326.
4 DeepSeek $0, or API use DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash scores 39 on the index. At $0.27 a task, it costs the least per task1.
5 Alibaba Token Plan Lite $6 Qwen3.8 Max scores 45 on the index. Lite dropped from $8 for a limited time143.
6 Google AI Pro $19.99 Gemini 3.8 Flash scores 41 on the index. The plan carries four times the free limits118.
7 Meta Muse Power $20 Muse Spark 1.3 ranks ninth on the LMArena text board. Its score there is 1494221.
8 GLM Coding Plan Lite $18 GLM-5.3 scores 45 on the index. Lite includes 10,000 credits a week120.
9 ChatGPT Go $8 Go is OpenAI's cheapest paid seat. It runs the small GPT-6 Luna model4241.
10 Kimi Plus $19 Moonshot's K3 model scores 44 on the index. Each task there costs $2.00144.

Seven more are ranked on the board, from Mistral Pro at $14.99 down to ChatGPT Pro at $2002217. TypeSafe's Jev sits below them, unranked: it is a decision model sold at 4.2 cents per million input tokens with output free, and the reasoning boards leave it out23.

Who wins what

Best paid value goes to Claude Pro. A free plan counts in full at any weight, so Claude Free tops the raw board, and among plans a person pays for, twenty dollars buys the model at the top of the composite index, the text arena and Artificial Analysis's own Humanity's Last Exam run, where Opus 5.5 scores 61.4 percent to Astra's 54.71225. The same $20 at OpenAI routes Astra through Work and Codex19.

Reasoning belongs to GPT-6 Astra, by board count. It holds rank 1 on Terminal-Bench 4.0, ARC-AGI-2, GPQA Diamond and Scale's Humanity's Last Exam, where its 54.80 carries a contamination warning342627. Opus 5.5 takes the two composite reads, and Terminal-Bench had yet to score it as of September 21, a day before it shipped3.

The strongest tool on sale is Claude Max 20x, at $200: Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1 on up to half the weekly limit, Claude Code and higher output limits than Pro6.

Most affordable is Claude Free. Sonnet 5.5 scores 56 on the index at $016. Simon Willison, an independent developer, wrote on September 28: "OpenAI's ChatGPT free tier uses Luna 5.6, which means Anthropic currently have a much more capable free offering."14 TypeSafe's Jev, an API at 4.2 cents per million input tokens, paused new sign-ups on September 22 after a surge in demand2324.

Everyday output goes to Opus 5.5, at rank 1 on the LMArena text board at 1509 with style control and 1518 with the control off, and rank 1 on WebDev at 1827, from 8.5 million human votes228.

What the people paying say

Each quote appears as posted, and each account was checked in the Arctic Shift Reddit archive for years of posting history.

On Reddit's r/ClaudeAI, u/Sharchimedes answered a buyer's question about the $20 plan on September 9: "I work all week on the $20 pro plan. If you’re clear with your requirements and compact when changing tasks, it’s actually very capable and efficient."33 The same user added that vague prompts burn tokens, and that session limits had pushed them into paid credits a few times.

Two days later on r/ClaudeCode, u/looselyhuman, on the $200 Max tier, posted the thread's top comment on Reddit: "Yeah I have a cron-driven workload that's been humming along for three months. Suddenly I hit 50% on day 2 and 90% on day 5, even after cancelling multiple crons."34

On r/codex, u/Puspendra007 on the $200 ChatGPT Pro tier, summed up the bind on Reddit: "I have $200 plan so i cannot afford to use claude. I was trying to find a correct way to use codex with current situation."35

Google's subscriber on r/GoogleGeminiAI, u/johnmgbg, priced the bundle rather than the model on Reddit: "The storage alone from Google AI Pro (5TB) is already worth about 75% of the subscription cost."36

DeepSeek's case came from u/drwebb on r/DeepSeek, in a Reddit thread asking which $20 buys the most: "There is no plan, you pay for the API with DeepSeek. That being said, $200 on flash will last you months and months of heavy usage."37 Meta's Muse and MiniMax's plan drew mixed reads in their own Reddit threads, quoted on the board3840.

Z.AI's $18 plan drew the most precise review of the month: on Reddit's r/ZaiGLM, u/dontWORRYimASIAN metered 637.8 million tokens across 9,047 calls in one month on it, at a 90.7 percent cache-hit rate39.

Coupons, credits and cashback

Besides cutting prices, Anthropic added value three ways in September: longer outputs, a saved usage reset and a cloud credit. A single request to Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 or Fable 5.1 can now generate up to 128,000 output tokens, and the Batches API raises that to 300,000 for the Opus and Sonnet lines with a beta header8. The reset arrived with Opus 5.5 on September 22, and its help center says an unused one keeps until the date on the offer7: "We're also providing subscription users a rate limit reset, which you can now save and use whenever you choose."5 A day later the Claude Developers account on X announced cloud sessions with a credit attached: "Existing subscribers get a one-time credit to try them: $100 on Pro, $250 on Max."9 gHacks reported the deadlines, October 7 to claim and November 4 to spend10.

Higgsfield, the video-model marketplace, matched spend one for one. Its cashback page states the rule: "Get $1 in cashback for every $1 you pay for API usage."11 The same page sets the limit: "New spend stops earning cashback as soon as the pool is exhausted."11 Cashback also stops at a base limit per account until the owner verifies a business, and any unused balance expires when the campaign ends11.

Both sides

Is the top tier worth its price? Kieran Klaassen, the creator of Compound Engineering at Every, wrote on September 22: "Opus is replacing Fable 5.1 as my daily driver. For product work and writing code, I find it as good as Fable and sometimes better."12 Harley Barnes, executive manager for AI technology at Quantium, gave Anthropic a number for its launch post: "A complex coding task that previously took 38 prompts over four days came in at 11 prompts over three hours."5

Armin Ronacher, the creator of Flask and founder of Earendil, made the case against on September 7, after weeks on the priciest models: "for how much more Fable costs, for how much more Astra costs, I do not feel like the results are there."13 Simon Willison, who tests each new model on his blog, wrote on September 24 that the tools add work: "The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder."15 Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School, located the gap in the person rather than the model on September 18: "My point is that, while there is a lot of debate over what future models will do, the current capabilities of existing models are barely being used, and are often not even well understood."16

The utility bill

Prices converged in September. On September 22 Anthropic cut Opus 5.5 to $4 in and $20 out per million tokens, and OpenAI halved its Sol and Luna API prices the same day541. Carl Franzen, executive editor at VentureBeat, wrote on September 22 that "The model war is no longer only about who can produce the highest score. It is increasingly about who can turn frontier intelligence into the most completed work per dollar."29 Six days later, on Sonnet 5.5, he wrote that "The price war around everyday frontier models is getting tighter"30. Simon Baxter, an analyst at TechMarketView, told The Register the same week: "Customers that want these agentic capabilities will have to adopt a consumption mindset, along with the cost governance that goes with it."31

The AILately.com Desk argued in Reasoning's Rebate that performance per dollar sets the real price of intelligence, and in Inference Is the Product Now that companies selling inference now book multiyear contracts, with CoreWeave's backlog at $104 billion by June 30. September fits both arguments: the consumer seat held at $20 while the per-token rates underneath it fell. Price settles which lab to pay this month. It leaves open which lab will supply the models inside household robots, because each of the 18 plans on this board sells model access through an app, a browser or an API.

By the numbers

  • 58 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index for Claude Opus 5.5, against 53 for GPT-6 Astra1.
  • 1509 is Opus 5.5's LMArena text score at rank 1, from 8.5 million votes across 409 models2.
  • $0.41 a task for Opus 5.5 at 93.3 percent on ARC-AGI-2, against $1.12 for Astra at 95.0 percent4.
  • 200 messages a week of GPT-6 Pro on the $200 ChatGPT Pro tier, and 50 on the $100 tier17.
  • $100 on Pro and $250 on Max in one-time cloud session credits, to claim by October 7910.

What to watch

Terminal-Bench and GPQA runs for Opus 5.5 would settle the reasoning column. The October 7 claim deadline on Anthropic's cloud credits comes next, then whether the $200 ChatGPT tier reopens to new buyers after the pause Fortune reported on September 111032. Higgsfield's pool ends the cashback the day it empties11. The next board publishes in November, with new prices, new scores and new reviews.

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Where to start

Start with the free seat. Sonnet 5.5 costs $0 and ranks third on the index, so a person can learn what a frontier model does with their own work first16. Move to the $20 Claude plan when the limits bind, because that $20 buys the index leader and a usage reset you can save for the day you hit a limit56. A developer who meters tokens starts at Z.AI's $18 plan or DeepSeek's API, where a $200 balance lasts months by one user's account3739. Pay $200 a month only for automated work that runs for hours unattended, such as scheduled coding jobs, and read u/looselyhuman's thread first34.

A plan's price leaves out the hours. Willison wrote in the same September 24 post that "unlocking their full potential requires extraordinary discipline and knowledge," and that discipline is your time, spent writing instructions and checking the output15. The comic below puts the same question to a boy and his robot. See the strip.

Comics

Clean Your Room

A boy asks his robot to clean the room, and the robot stacks the mess into one tower and blames the prompt.

Sources

  1. Artificial Analysis, "LLM Leaderboard - Compare GPT, Claude, Gemini and other models," Artificial Analysis, Sept. 29, 2026, https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models
  2. Arena, "LLM Leaderboard - Best Text & Chat AI Models Compared," Arena, Sept. 25, 2026, https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text
  3. Terminal-Bench, "Terminal-Bench 4.0 Leaderboard," Terminal-Bench, Sept. 21, 2026, https://www.tbench.ai/leaderboard/terminal-bench/4.0
  4. ARC Prize Foundation, "ARC Prize - Leaderboard," ARC Prize, Sept. 28, 2026, https://arcprize.org/leaderboard
  5. Anthropic, "Introducing Claude Opus 5.5," Anthropic, Sept. 22, 2026, https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-5-5
  6. Anthropic, "Plans & Pricing," Anthropic, Sept. 29, 2026, https://claude.com/pricing
  7. Anthropic, "What is a limit reset?," Claude Help Center, Sept. 29, 2026, https://support.claude.com/en/articles/17007452
  8. Anthropic, "Context windows," Claude Platform documentation, Sept. 29, 2026, https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/context-windows
  9. Claude Developers (@ClaudeDevs), "Cloud sessions are officially available and out of research preview," X, Sept. 23, 2026, https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2102871550974427462
  10. Arthur Kay, "Anthropic Offers Up to $250 in Free Claude Code Cloud Credits to Pro and Max Subscribers," gHacks Tech News, Sept. 26, 2026, https://www.ghacks.net/2026/09/26/anthropic-offers-up-to-250-in-free-claude-code-cloud-credits-to-pro-and-max-subscribers/
  11. Higgsfield, "API Cashback," Higgsfield, Sept. 29, 2026, https://open.higgsfield.ai/cashback
  12. Every, "Vibe Check: Opus 5.5 Is Pulling Our Codex Converts Back to Claude," Every, Sept. 22, 2026, https://every.to/vibe-check/vibe-check-opus-5-5-is-pulling-our-codex-converts-back-to-claude
  13. Armin Ronacher, "Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?," Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings, Sept. 7, 2026, https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/7/astra-why/
  14. Simon Willison, "Claude Sonnet 5.5," Simon Willison's Weblog, Sept. 28, 2026, https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/28/claude-sonnet-5-5/
  15. Simon Willison, "Note on 24th September 2026," Simon Willison's Weblog, Sept. 24, 2026, https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/24/harder/
  16. Ethan Mollick, "The Overhang," One Useful Thing, Sept. 18, 2026, https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-overhang
  17. OpenAI, "GPT-5.6 and GPT-6 Pro in ChatGPT," OpenAI Help Center, Sept. 29, 2026, https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001354
  18. Google, "Gemini Apps limits & upgrades for Google AI subscribers," Google Gemini Help, Sept. 29, 2026, https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/16275805
  19. Engadget, "How To Use GPT-6 Astra When It Rolls Out To You," Engadget, Sept. 13, 2026, https://www.engadget.com/2252859/how-to-use-gpt-6-astra-rollout-schedule/
  20. Z.AI, "Overview," Z.AI Developer Document, Sept. 24, 2026, https://docs.z.ai/devpack/overview
  21. Sarah Perez, "Meta debuts its Muse AI agent. Will consumers trust it?," TechCrunch, Sept. 8, 2026, https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/08/meta-debuts-its-muse-ai-agent-will-consumers-trust-it/
  22. Mistral AI, "Pricing," Mistral AI, Sept. 29, 2026, https://mistral.ai/pricing
  23. TypeSafe, "Models," TypeSafe documentation, Sept. 29, 2026, https://docs.typesafe.ai/models.md
  24. TypeSafe (@typesafeai), "We have seen such an immense swell of demand that we have to temporarily pause signups for Jev," X, Sept. 22, 2026, https://x.com/typesafeai/status/2102281508950307159
  25. Artificial Analysis, "Humanity's Last Exam Benchmark Leaderboard," Artificial Analysis, Sept. 29, 2026, https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/humanitys-last-exam
  26. Artificial Analysis, "GPQA Diamond Benchmark Leaderboard," Artificial Analysis, Sept. 29, 2026, https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/gpqa-diamond
  27. Scale AI, "Scale Labs Leaderboard: Humanity's Last Exam," Scale AI, Sept. 17, 2026, https://labs.scale.com/leaderboard/humanitys_last_exam
  28. Arena, "WebDev AI Leaderboard - Best AI Models for Web Development," Arena, Sept. 25, 2026, https://arena.ai/leaderboard/code/webdev
  29. Carl Franzen, "Anthropic releases Claude Opus 5.5, beating Fable 5.1 on key agentic benchmarks at 60% cheaper API price," VentureBeat, Sept. 22, 2026, https://venturebeat.com/technology/anthropic-releases-claude-opus-5-5-beating-fable-5-1-on-key-agentic-benchmarks-at-60-cheaper-api-price
  30. Carl Franzen, "Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5.5 with 30% cost reduction per-task due to faster speeds and fewer tool calls," VentureBeat, Sept. 28, 2026, https://venturebeat.com/technology/anthropic-launches-claude-sonnet-5-5-with-30-cost-reduction-per-task-due-to-faster-speeds-and-fewer-tool-calls
  31. Carly Page, "Microsoft's Copilot super app comes with a meter attached," The Register, Sept. 28, 2026, https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/09/28/microsofts-copilot-super-app-comes-with-a-meter-attached/5299515
  32. Fortune, "OpenAI paused its $200 ChatGPT sign-ups as ‘unprecedented’ demand for Astra strains its system," Fortune, Sept. 11, 2026, https://fortune.com/2026/09/11/openai-astra-chatgpt-pro-pause/
  33. u/ivydude10, with a reply by u/Sharchimedes, "Is it worth buying Claude Pro right now?," Reddit, r/ClaudeAI, Sept. 9, 2026, https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wc2dc9/is_it_worth_buying_claude_pro_right_now/p8umk06/
  34. u/No_Consequence4312, with a reply by u/looselyhuman, "Did usage change this week? 20x max plan?," Reddit, r/ClaudeCode, Sept. 11, 2026, https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1wdklro/did_usage_change_this_week_20x_max_plan/p97jrpc/
  35. u/Puspendra007, "Astra 6 vs Sol 6 vs Luna 6 with $200 plan," Reddit, r/codex, Sept. 24, 2026, https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1wpcoq9/astra_6_vs_sol_6_vs_luna_6_with_200_plan/
  36. u/SteampunkBeagle, with a reply by u/johnmgbg, "Is Google AI Pro worth it, currently paying Claude Code?," Reddit, r/GoogleGeminiAI, Sept. 16, 2026, https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleGeminiAI/comments/1whg711/is_google_ai_pro_worth_it_currently_paying_claude/pa37zk1/
  37. u/Blank_123o, with a reply by u/drwebb, "Which one's worth the most: Claude Pro, GPT Plus or Deepseek (API ~ $20 credit)," Reddit, r/DeepSeek, Sept. 29, 2026, https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSeek/comments/1wt1sez/which_ones_worth_the_most_claude_pro_gpt_plus_or/pcqf1lk/
  38. u/sporty_outlook, "Does OpenAI have any plans to release something like Muse, either as a standalone app or as part of the ChatGPT app?," Reddit, r/OpenAI, Sept. 27, 2026, https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1wrswrq/does_openai_have_any_plans_to_release_something/
  39. u/dontWORRYimASIAN, "Lite Plan ($18/mo) gave me $102 of API usage (5.68X): A 1 month review and additional thoughts," Reddit, r/ZaiGLM, Sept. 28, 2026, https://www.reddit.com/r/ZaiGLM/comments/1wstrqy/lite_plan_18mo_gave_me_102_of_api_usage_568x_a_1/
  40. u/afanasenka, with a reply by u/Realistic_Mango6982, "Minimax is actively testing M3.1-Flash-Preview (release coming soon)," Reddit, r/opencodeCLI, Sept. 27, 2026, https://www.reddit.com/r/opencodeCLI/comments/1wrddp1/minimax_is_actively_testing_m31flashpreview/pccnvvc/
  41. Thomas Claburn, "Frontier AI keeps racing despite calls to slow down," The Register, Sept. 23, 2026, https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/09/23/frontier-ai-keeps-racing-despite-calls-to-slow-down/5298448
  42. OpenAI, "Pricing," OpenAI (ChatGPT), Sept. 29, 2026, https://openai.com/chatgpt/pricing
  43. Alibaba Cloud, "Token Plan (Personal Edition)," Alibaba Cloud Model Studio, Sept. 28, 2026, https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/model-studio/token-plan-personal-overview
  44. Moonshot AI, "Kimi - Kimi K3 is Live," App Store, Sept. 29, 2026, https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id6474233312

Cite this piece

Ryan Elliott Dennis, "The 17 Best AI Subscriptions," AI Lately, Sep 29, 2026, https://ailately.com/articles/best-ai-subscriptions-october-2026

Tags: model pricing · Claude Opus 5.5 · GPT-6 Astra · AI subscriptions · value board · benchmarks · Higgsfield

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