Nobody decides to spend seven hundred dollars a year on AI. It happens one twenty dollar decision at a time, and because each one is small, the total never gets looked at. This page looks at it.
Full disclosure
We build MODUS, which appears at the end as one of the options. Every competitor price below was read off openai.com, claude.com and one.google.com on 1 October 2026.
The standard tier bill
| Subscription | Monthly | Annual option |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT Plus | $20.00 | Not published |
| Claude Pro | $20.00 | $200 upfront, which is $17/mo |
| Google AI Pro | $19.99 | $199.99 |
| All three | $59.99/mo | About $720/yr at monthly rates |
Sixty dollars a month. For comparison, that is more than most people pay for their phone plan, and it buys three programs that largely do the same thing.
The top tier bill
| Subscription | Monthly |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT Pro | From $100.00 |
| Claude Max | From $100.00 |
| Google AI Ultra | $99.99 |
| All three | From $299.99/mo |
Three thousand six hundred dollars a year, at the starting price, and both ChatGPT Pro and Claude Max go up from there. This is not a theoretical stack. It is what a researcher or a founder who wants the best of each lab ends up holding.
Why people end up with more than one
It is rarely indecision. The three common reasons are all rational on their own.
- Different tools for different work. Claude for the writing, ChatGPT for everything else, Gemini because it is already inside the documents.
- Checking an answer. You got something that mattered and you wanted a second opinion, so you pasted it into another one. Then you kept the subscription.
- A release you did not want to miss. A lab ships something and you subscribe to try it. Cancelling is a chore and twenty dollars is below the threshold where a chore gets done.
The third one is how most of these bills actually get built. A subscription nobody decided to keep is still a subscription that renews.
What you can actually cut
Before anything else, go and look. Each of these bills separately and none of them will remind you.
- Pay annually on the one you are certain about. Claude Pro drops from $20 to $17 a month that way. Over a year that is $40, which is not life changing but it is free.
- ChatGPT Go at $8 is real. If your use is mostly chat and you rarely touch deep research or Codex, the $12 a month difference against Plus is worth an honest look. It may include ads.
- Count the Google storage. If you were already paying for Google One storage, part of the $19.99 is money you were spending anyway, and comparing it against a bare $20 chat subscription overstates the cost.
- Drop the one you keep for second opinions. If a second subscription exists so you can paste a question into it occasionally, that is $240 a year for a feature rather than a product.
The other shape of the same bill
That last point is the one MODUS was built around. If the reason for the second and third subscription is wanting more than one model on the same question, then the thing you want is a feature, and it does not need to cost another twenty dollars a month to get it.
| Monthly | What it covers | |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0, no card | The open models on a rolling window: Llama, DeepSeek and Gemini Flash |
| MODUS | $24.00 | Models from every provider auto routed, plus images, voice, mail, calendar and drive |
| PILOT | $59.00 | The frontier models picked by hand, plus compare mode across many at once |
| Three standard subs | $59.99 | Three separate apps, one lab each |
| Three top subs | From $299.99 | Three separate apps, one lab each |
PILOT at $59 is a dollar less than the three standard subscriptions and about a fifth of the three top ones. Eleven models across five labs, the exact model named on every answer, and compare mode running one prompt across many of them at once.
Where this comparison stops
A price table is not a like for like comparison and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. ChatGPT Plus includes Codex, custom GPTs and Sora. Google AI Pro includes 5TB of storage and sits inside Gmail and Docs. If you are paying for those specific things, you are not only paying for a chat box, and the right comparison is against the product you actually use rather than the price alone.
What the table does settle is the arithmetic. Three standard subscriptions is $59.99 a month. Three top tiers is at least $299.99. Whatever you decide to do about that, the first useful step is knowing the number, because almost nobody paying it does.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to subscribe to ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini at the same time?
What is the cheapest way to use several AI models?
Is ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro better value at $20?
Does paying annually save money on AI subscriptions?
How do I stop paying for AI subscriptions I do not use?
Prices and model lists were verified against each product’s published pricing on . This category moves fast. If you spot something out of date, tell us and we will correct it.