If you can only pay for one AI subscription, which one should you choose?
Tell us what you actually do, how much you use AI, what capabilities you cannot give up and what you can spend. We rank one primary subscription and one conditional alternative.
Oct 9 model update: Google AI Plus is phasing out selectable Pro-model access. Recommendations use the new entitlement; the switch-over date can differ by account.
1. What is your main workload?
Pick the job that would hurt most if your only subscription handled it poorly.
2. How high is your quality requirement?
This controls how much we penalize plans with a lower reasoning/model ceiling.
3. How many hours per week do you really use AI?
We use this to estimate sustained capacity and likely limit friction.
4. Which capabilities are must-haves?
Select only things your one subscription really needs to cover.
5. Maximum monthly budget for the one subscription?
Your recommendation
What is Effective Usable Capacity?
It is not the advertised quota. It is our estimate of how much of your expected monthly work the included plan capacity can actually sustain after burst/session capacity, weekly/sustained constraints and metering uncertainty. We then translate it into estimated usable workdays and cost per usable workday.
What changed / what is changing
We separate durable provider documentation from announcements and community measurements, so a headline multiplier does not silently become a weekly-limit claim.
Current plan data
Providers increasingly meter by compute, context, model and feature, so exact message counts are often not fixed. Session/burst and weekly/sustained limits are shown separately. Community estimates are labeled and are never treated as guaranteed quota.
| Plan | Price | Model access / API credit | Session / rolling limit | Weekly limit | Overage / extra usage | Last verified |
|---|
Official provider data drives the ranking. Official announcements are shown as upcoming changes. Community measurements and anecdotal reports are labeled separately and are used as caution/context, not as guaranteed quotas.
API prices are separate from subscription costs
Official USD list prices per 1M tokens. An AI chat subscription does NOT automatically include unlimited API usage. Our plan ranking never subtracts promotional API credits from the subscription cost.
| Provider | Model | Prompt band | Input / 1M | Cache read / 1M | Output / 1M | Source |
|---|
Separate Claude Max and Team API credits
Claim after seven active days; resets every billing cycle, no rollover. Not usable for Claude Chat/Code/Cowork extra usage. Team credits are pooled up to $500/mo.
| Plan | API credit | Team subscription charge (separate) | Source |
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