How-to·May 19, 2026, 19:45

AI subscriptions converge on $100 as a new middle tier

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Google has cut the price of its Ultra subscription to $100 a month, and according to Business Today, OpenAI has introduced a new Pro plan at the same price. Anthropic also has a $100 plan.

If you use AI chatbots heavily, you can now choose among several subscriptions at around $100 a month. The price sits between the cheaper $20 plans and the most expensive $200 ones. All prices are in US dollars, and plans and names change frequently.

Google has lowered its price

Google's AI Ultra subscription has been cut from $250 to $100 a month, which Engadget describes as a reduction of about 60 percent. It was announced at the Google I/O developer conference on May 19, 2026.

Google now has four plans: Free, AI Pro at $20, Ultra at $100 and Ultra Premium at $200. Ultra gives five times the usage limits of the cheaper plan. Ultra Premium gives access to Project Genie.

At the same time, storage in the Ultra plan has dropped from 30 TB to 20 TB.

OpenAI adds a middle tier

According to Business Today, OpenAI has introduced a new ChatGPT Pro plan at $100 a month. It sits between Plus at $20 and the existing Pro at $200. It offers five times more usage of Codex, OpenAI's programming tool, than Plus.

At the same time, the temporary extra Codex usage for Plus users ended, which lowered Plus users' limits. Thibault Sottiaux, head of Codex at OpenAI, describes the plan as a middle step for many users, according to Business Today.

OpenAI's prices are reported here only through Business Today's coverage.

Anthropic has the same structure

At Anthropic, the company behind Claude, there is a free plan with limited usage per 5 hours and per week. Claude Pro costs $20 a month, or $17 with annual billing, and includes Claude Code, among other things.

Claude Max costs $100 a month. It gives five times the Pro usage and $100 in monthly API credits, which are used by developers who build their own applications on top of Claude. The top plan, Ultra, costs $200, gives ten times the Pro usage per week and removes the 5-hour limit for verified accounts.

What it means

The pattern is the same: a free plan, one at $20, one at $100 and one at $200. For ordinary users, the $20 plans are still the natural choice. The middle tier is for those who run out of usage, especially when they use AI for programming.