📖 9 min read
I Tracked Every AI Tool’s Price for 90 Days — Here’s Who’s Secretly Getting Expensive (and the Free Alternatives That Beat Them)
By Nik Sai · March 2026 · BetOnAI.net
TL;DR
- OpenAI is building a pricing ladder to $200/mo — the new “Pro Lite” at $100/mo leaked in app code. They’re normalizing triple-digit subscriptions.
- Cursor quietly halved your requests — same $20/mo, but Pro users went from ~500 to ~225 Claude requests after June 2025. That’s a stealth price hike.
- Claude added $100-$200/mo “Max” tiers — Anthropic joined the premium pricing arms race.
- Zapier is absurdly overpriced — $49/mo for 2,000 tasks when Make.com gives you 10,000 operations for $9/mo.
- Midjourney, ElevenLabs, and GitHub Copilot held steady — rare stability in a market going haywire.
- Free alternatives exist for almost everything — and some are genuinely better than what you’re paying for.
Why I Did This
In December 2025, I started a spreadsheet. Nothing fancy — just the price I was paying for every AI tool in my stack, checked monthly. By March 2026, the pattern was impossible to ignore: the AI industry is quietly repricing itself upward while hoping you don’t notice.
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Some tools raised prices. Others kept the sticker price but slashed what you actually get (looking at you, Cursor). A few quietly added premium tiers that make the “Pro” plan feel like the free trial.
Here’s the full breakdown — every tool, every price change, and a free alternative for each one that actually works.
🤖 AI Chatbots & Assistants
ChatGPT (OpenAI)
| Plan | Dec 2025 | Mar 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | — |
| Plus | $20/mo | $20/mo | Stable |
| Pro | $200/mo | $200/mo | Stable |
| Team | $25/user/mo | $25/user/mo | Stable |
| Enterprise | Custom (~$60/user) | Custom (~$60/user) | Stable |
What changed: The sticker prices didn’t move, but OpenAI added two new tiers — “Go” at ~$35-40/user/mo (a weird mid-tier for businesses) and a leaked “Pro Lite” at $100/mo found in app code in February 2026. The strategy is clear: build a pricing ladder so $200/mo feels like a natural step up rather than insanity.
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OpenAI also launched GPT-5.4 Thinking exclusively for Plus and above. The free tier is increasingly a demo, not a product.
🆓 Free alternative: Google Gemini (free tier is genuinely powerful with Gemini 2.5), DeepSeek (open-source, self-hostable), or HuggingChat (runs Llama, Mistral, etc.). For most daily tasks, the free Gemini tier legitimately rivals ChatGPT Plus.
Claude (Anthropic)
| Plan | Dec 2025 | Mar 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | — |
| Pro | $20/mo | $20/mo | Stable |
| Max 5× | N/A | $100/mo | 🆕 NEW |
| Max 20× | N/A | $200/mo | 🆕 NEW |
| Team | $25/seat/mo | $25-$125/seat/mo | ⬆️ Premium seats added |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | — |
What changed: Anthropic launched Max tiers at $100 and $200/mo — 5× and 20× the usage of Pro. They also introduced Premium Team seats at $100-$150/mo that include Claude Code (the developer environment). Translation: if you’re a developer who actually needs Claude’s best features, you’re now looking at $100+/mo, not $20.
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The $20 Pro plan still exists and is still excellent for writing and analysis. But the message is clear: power usage costs power money.
🆓 Free alternative: Claude’s free tier is still quite usable. Beyond that, Perplexity (free tier with citations), Mistral Le Chat (free, fast), or running Llama 3.3 locally via Ollama if you have the hardware.
Gemini (Google)
| Plan | Dec 2025 | Mar 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | — |
| Advanced (Google One AI Premium) | $19.99/mo | $19.99/mo | Stable |
| Ultra | N/A | $124.99/3mo (~$42/mo) | 🆕 NEW |
What changed: Google added a higher “Ultra” tier and continues to bundle AI into Google One. The free tier is arguably the best free AI chatbot available right now — access to Gemini 2.5, Deep Research, and integration with Google Workspace. Google is playing the long game: subsidize AI, lock you into the ecosystem.
🆓 Free alternative: Gemini’s free tier is the free alternative. It’s legitimately that good. If you want non-Google, DuckDuckGo AI Chat gives you anonymous access to multiple models.
💻 AI Coding Tools
Cursor
| Plan | Dec 2025 | Mar 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free (Hobby) | $0 | $0 | — |
| Pro | $20/mo | $20/mo | ⚠️ STEALTH NERF |
| Business | $40/user/mo | $40/user/mo | Stable |
What changed: Here’s the one that burns. Cursor kept Pro at $20/mo but slashed premium requests from ~500 to ~225 after switching to usage-based “fast request” counting in June 2025. Same price, roughly half the output. That’s not a price freeze — that’s a 100% effective price increase.
Oh, and someone got hit with a $7,225 invoice that “broke the internet.” Cursor’s usage-based overages can spiral if you’re not watching.
🆓 Free alternative: Continue.dev (open-source, bring your own API key), Cody by Sourcegraph (free tier), or VS Code + Copilot Free tier (2,000 completions/mo). For serious work, self-hosting with an open model via Ollama + Continue gets you 90% of Cursor for $0.
GitHub Copilot
| Plan | Dec 2025 | Mar 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 (2,000 completions) | $0 (2,000 completions) | — |
| Pro | $10/mo | $10/mo | Stable |
| Business | $19/user/mo | $19/user/mo | Stable |
| Enterprise | $39/user/mo | $39/user/mo | Stable |
What changed: Nothing. And that’s the story. GitHub Copilot is the only major AI coding tool that hasn’t played pricing games. $10/mo, 300 premium model requests, agent mode included. The free tier with 2,000 completions/month is generous enough for students and hobby projects.
The catch: Pro users report hitting the 300-request limit mid-month when using agent mode (which eats multiple requests per task). But at least they’re transparent about it.
🆓 Free alternative: Copilot’s own free tier is solid. Also: Codeium/Windsurf (free tier with unlimited autocomplete), Tabnine (free tier), or Amazon Q Developer (free for individual use).
🎨 AI Image Generation
Midjourney
| Plan | Dec 2025 | Mar 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $10/mo | $10/mo | Stable |
| Standard | $30/mo | $30/mo | Stable |
| Pro | $60/mo | $60/mo | Stable |
| Mega | $120/mo | $120/mo | Stable |
What changed: Prices held steady. They launched V7 with personalization profiles and V8 is rolling out — both included in existing plans at no extra cost. Stealth Mode (private generations) still costs $20 extra, Pro and Mega only. No free tier exists. The 20% annual discount remains.
Midjourney is rare in AI right now: the product keeps improving while the price stays put.
🆓 Free alternative: Leonardo.ai (150 free daily tokens), Playground AI (free tier), Stable Diffusion via ComfyUI (free, local, unlimited — if you have a GPU), or ChatGPT’s built-in image generation on the free tier. For most social media images, these are more than enough.
🎬 AI Video Generation
Runway
| Plan | Dec 2025 | Mar 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Limited credits | Limited credits | — |
| Standard | $12/mo | $12/mo | Stable |
| Pro | $28/mo | $28/mo | Stable |
| Unlimited | $76/mo | $76/mo | Stable |
Pika
| Plan | Dec 2025 | Mar 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 80 credits | 80 credits | — |
| Standard | $10/mo | $10/mo | Stable |
| Pro | $35/mo | $35/mo | Stable |
| Unlimited | $70/mo | $70/mo | Stable |
What changed: Both held pricing. Runway launched Gen-4 with cinema-quality output and 4K ProRes exports. Pika countered with Pikaffects (physics-based effects like melt, inflate, pop) and turbo renders in 12 seconds vs Runway’s 18.
The real cost is hidden: credit-based systems mean your actual per-video cost varies wildly. Gen-4 at maximum quality eats credits 3-4× faster than standard gen. Both tools are honest about base pricing but opaque about effective pricing.
🆓 Free alternative: Kling AI (free tier, surprisingly good), Haiper (free tier), or PixVerse (free credits). None match Runway’s quality ceiling, but for social content they’re perfectly fine.
🎤 AI Voice
ElevenLabs
| Plan | Dec 2025 | Mar 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 10,000 chars | 20 min/mo | Switched to minutes |
| Starter | $5/mo | $5/mo | Stable |
| Creator | $22/mo | $22/mo | Stable |
| Pro | $99/mo | $99/mo | Stable |
| Scale | $330/mo | $330/mo | Stable |
What changed: ElevenLabs switched from character-based to minute-based billing, which is actually more transparent. The free tier now gives 20 minutes/month for non-commercial use. Starter gives 30 minutes with commercial rights for $5/mo. Honestly, ElevenLabs is one of the fairest-priced AI tools out there.
🆓 Free alternative: Coqui TTS (open-source, self-hosted), Bark by Suno (free, open-source), Edge TTS (Microsoft’s free TTS API — surprisingly good quality), or Google Cloud TTS free tier (1M characters/month free). For podcasts and YouTube, Edge TTS is shockingly competent.
✍️ AI Writing Tools
Jasper
| Plan | Dec 2025 | Mar 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Creator | $49/mo | $49/mo | Stable |
| Pro | $69/mo | $69/mo | Stable |
| Business | Custom | Custom | — |
The verdict: Jasper is still charging 2023 prices for what is essentially a ChatGPT wrapper with brand voice features. At $49-$69/mo, it’s the most overpriced tool in this entire list relative to what you get. The “brand voice” and “marketing workflows” are nice but not $50-$70/mo nice when ChatGPT Plus does 90% of the same work for $20.
Copy.ai
| Plan | Dec 2025 | Mar 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 2,000 words/mo | 2,000 words/mo | — |
| Pro | $49/mo | $49/mo | Stable |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | — |
Writesonic
| Plan | Dec 2025 | Mar 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Limited | Limited | — |
| Individual | $19/mo | $19/mo | Stable |
| Standard | $49/mo | $49/mo | Stable |
🆓 Free alternative for ALL writing tools: ChatGPT Free + a good prompt template. Seriously. Or Claude Free tier for longer, more nuanced writing. Or Rytr (free plan with 10,000 characters/mo). The entire “AI writing tool” category is being disrupted by the chatbots themselves. If you’re paying $49+/mo for Jasper or Copy.ai in 2026, you’re overpaying.
⚡ Automation
Zapier
| Plan | Dec 2025 | Mar 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 100 tasks | 100 tasks | — |
| Professional | $29.99/mo | $29.99/mo | Stable |
| Team | $103.50/mo | $103.50/mo | Stable |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | — |
Make.com
| Plan | Dec 2025 | Mar 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 1,000 ops | 1,000 ops | — |
| Core | $9/mo | $9/mo | Stable |
| Pro | $18.82/mo | $18.82/mo | Stable |
| Teams | $34.12/mo | $34.12/mo | Stable |
The gap is absurd. Zapier charges $49/mo for 2,000 tasks. Make.com charges $9/mo for 10,000 operations. That’s 5× more volume at 1/5th the price. Zapier’s advantage is a bigger integration library and simpler UX, but in 2026, Make.com supports nearly everything Zapier does.
🆓 Free alternative: n8n (open-source, self-hosted, unlimited). This is the real answer. If you can spin up a Docker container, n8n gives you unlimited automations for free. Activepieces is another open-source option with a cleaner UI. Make.com’s 1,000 free operations also covers light use.
🧠 AI Productivity Add-ons
Notion AI
| Plan | Dec 2025 | Mar 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI Add-on | $10/user/mo | $10/user/mo (or bundled in Business at $20) | Bundling shift |
What changed: Notion AI is increasingly bundled into higher-tier plans rather than sold as a standalone add-on. The Business plan ($20/user/mo) now includes full AI access including AI Agents (launched Sept 2025) and Ask Notion. For a 10-person team, that’s $200/mo for a workspace + AI — which is actually reasonable.
🆓 Free alternative: Obsidian + an AI plugin (local, free, private), Notion’s own free tier (limited AI credits), or Logseq with a local LLM integration.
Canva AI
| Plan | Dec 2025 | Mar 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Limited AI features | Limited AI features | — |
| Pro | $12.99/mo | $12.99/mo | Stable |
| Teams | $14.99/user/mo | $14.99/user/mo | Stable |
What changed: Canva keeps bundling more AI features into Pro — Magic Studio, text-to-image, background remover, AI presentations — without raising the price. At $12.99/mo, Canva Pro is arguably the best AI value in this entire list. You get a design tool, an image generator, a video editor, a presentation maker, and AI writing features all in one.
🆓 Free alternative: Canva’s free tier is genuinely useful. Beyond that: Photopea (Photoshop clone, free), Microsoft Designer (free AI design tool), or Figma free tier + AI image generators.
🏆 Winners & Losers
🟢 Winners (Best Value in March 2026)
- Canva Pro ($12.99/mo) — The most features per dollar of any AI tool. Period.
- GitHub Copilot ($10/mo) — Transparent pricing, no games, solid free tier.
- Make.com ($9/mo) — Embarrasses Zapier on value. 10,000 ops for $9.
- ElevenLabs ($5/mo) — Fair pricing, clear billing, great quality.
- Google Gemini (Free) — The best free AI chatbot. Google is subsidizing your productivity.
- Pika ($10/mo) — Cheaper than Runway, faster renders, more creative controls.
- Midjourney ($10/mo) — Price hasn’t moved in years. Product keeps improving.
🔴 Losers (Overpriced or Getting Worse)
- Jasper ($49-$69/mo) — A ChatGPT wrapper charging 3× ChatGPT Plus. The emperor has no clothes.
- Cursor ($20/mo) — Stealth-nerfed from ~500 to ~225 requests. Same price, half the product. And those usage-based overages? Terrifying.
- Zapier ($29.99-$103/mo) — 5× more expensive than Make.com for the same job. Brand tax at its finest.
- OpenAI’s pricing ladder — $20 → $100 → $200/mo. They’re boiling the frog.
- Copy.ai ($49/mo) — Still $49/mo for what ChatGPT does for free. In 2026. Why.
- Claude Max ($200/mo) — For the 1% of users who need it. For everyone else, $20 Pro is still great. But the tier’s existence sets a dangerous precedent.
The Big Picture: Where AI Pricing Is Heading
Three trends are shaping 2026:
1. The Freemium Squeeze. Free tiers are getting weaker. ChatGPT Free is increasingly a demo. Midjourney killed its free tier entirely. The “try before you buy” window is shrinking.
2. Usage-Based Gotchas. Flat-rate pricing is dying. Cursor, OpenAI API, and others are shifting to token/request-based billing that can spike unpredictably. Read the fine print — or get a $7,000 surprise invoice.
3. The $100/mo Normalization. OpenAI Pro Lite at $100, Claude Max at $100-$200, premium Cursor seats — the industry is testing whether knowledge workers will pay triple-digit monthly subscriptions. If enough people pay, this becomes the new normal.
My advice? Build your stack around free tiers and open-source tools. Pay for 1-2 tools where the paid version genuinely unlocks 10× more value. For everything else, there’s a free alternative that’s 80% as good — and 80% is more than enough.
The Free Stack That Beats $300/Month in Subscriptions
Here’s what I actually use when I’m not testing paid tools:
| Category | Free Tool | Replaces |
|---|---|---|
| AI Chat | Gemini Free + Claude Free | ChatGPT Plus ($20) |
| Coding | Copilot Free + Continue.dev | Cursor Pro ($20) |
| Images | Leonardo.ai Free + Stable Diffusion | Midjourney ($10) |
| Video | Kling AI Free | Runway ($12) |
| Voice | Edge TTS + Bark | ElevenLabs ($5) |
| Writing | Claude Free tier | Jasper ($49) |
| Automation | n8n (self-hosted) | Zapier ($30) |
| Design | Canva Free + Photopea | Canva Pro ($13) |
| Notes + AI | Obsidian + local LLM | Notion AI ($10) |
Total saved: ~$169/month or $2,028/year.
Is the paid version better? Usually, yes — by about 20%. Is that 20% worth $2,000/year? For most people, no.
What To Do Next
👉 Check out our complete Free AI Tools directory — every free alternative mentioned here (and dozens more), organized by category, with honest ratings.
Bookmark this article. I’ll update it quarterly as prices change. Because they will — and probably not in your favor.
Got a price change I missed? Hit me up. This list is only as good as the data behind it.
— Nik Sai, BetOnAI.net
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Written by BetOnAI Editorial
BetOnAI Editorial covers AI tools, business strategies, and technology trends. We test and review AI products hands-on, providing real revenue data and honest assessments. Follow us on X @BetOnAI_net for daily AI insights.