Chatbot Pricing in August 2026: What Changed and What Didn't
Microsoft Copilot Pro is dead. The standalone $20-a-month plan reached its final day of support on August 1, and there's no like-for-like replacement at that price. It's the most consequential structural change since About.chat's May pricing index, but it isn't the only one. Google split its top-end tier in two, Anthropic cut its flagship model's price in half, and xAI shipped a new model priced to undercut everyone. Here's what actually moved across the seven platforms the May index tracked, and what didn't.
The Data
Pricing as of August 6, 2026.
| Platform | Free | Mid-tier | Premium |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | GPT-5.4 mini (limited GPT-5.6 access) | Go $8/mo · Plus $20/mo | Pro $100/mo (5x) or $200/mo (20x) |
| Claude | Haiku 4.5 | Pro $20/mo ($17/mo annual) | Max from $100/mo (5x) or $200/mo (20x) |
| Gemini | Gemini 3.6 Flash | AI Plus $4.99/mo · AI Pro $19.99/mo | AI Ultra $99.99/mo or $199.99/mo |
| Grok | Limited access | X Premium $8/mo · SuperGrok $30/mo | SuperGrok Heavy $300/mo |
| Microsoft Copilot | Included in M365 apps | (Copilot Pro discontinued) | Microsoft 365 Premium $19.99/mo |
| Perplexity | 5 Pro searches/day | Pro $20/mo | Max $200/mo |
| Poe | Limited daily points | Starter $4.99/mo · Premium $19.99/mo | Premium Plus $49.99 · Pro $99.99 · Pro Max $249.99 |
Microsoft killed the plan, not just the price
Copilot Pro is no longer available for purchase: existing subscribers kept it until they canceled or until support ended on August 1, 2026, which is now. Microsoft announced the wind-down back in October 2025, folding Copilot's features into Microsoft 365 Premium instead, but the August 1 date is what turns this from an announcement into an actual change for anyone still holding onto the old plan. Microsoft 365 Premium costs $19.99/month, covers up to six people, and bundles Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook with Copilot Chat built in and 1TB of storage per person. If you were paying $20 for Copilot alone, you're now paying roughly the same for Copilot plus a full Office subscription. If you never wanted the Office apps, there's no cheaper standalone Copilot option left.
Google's $249 tier became two tiers
In May, Google AI Ultra was one plan at $249.99/month. At Google I/O in May, Google split it into a $99.99/month tier (5x Pro's usage limits) and a $199.99/month tier (20x Pro's limits, plus Deep Think and Project Genie), a straightforward mid-tier addition beneath what used to be the only option. Google also cut AI Plus from $7.99 to $4.99/month in June and doubled its storage allowance to 400GB. AI Pro, the plan most people actually buy, is untouched at $19.99/month. Google's lineup now has a real budget option and a real mid-tier at the high end, and the $20 plan most subscribers care about didn't move at all.
Anthropic cut Opus 5's price in half
Claude's consumer subscription prices didn't change. Pro is still $20/month, or $17 if you pay annually, an option Anthropic's pricing page now surfaces alongside monthly billing, and Max still starts at $100. What did change is the price behind the flagship model itself: Opus 5, launched July 24, runs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output, half of the prior flagship's rate. We covered the effort-toggle mechanics behind that cut in detail in July. It doesn't touch what subscribers pay, but it's the reason Claude got meaningfully cheaper for anyone building on the API rather than paying for Pro or Max directly.
Grok 4.5 undercuts on cost, not on price
xAI's SuperGrok ($30/month) and X Premium ($8/month) are unchanged from May. What's new is Grok 4.5 itself, launched July 8 as xAI's first model built specifically for coding and agentic work. Its API pricing, $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output, undercuts Claude's flagship on output cost by a wide margin. As with Opus 5, this is a developer-facing change: SuperGrok subscribers get Grok 4.5 access in stages, but the sticker price of the consumer plan hasn't moved an inch.
Poe's two tiers became five
May's Poe was simple: a new $5 entry tier and the pre-existing $20 plan. Poe's pricing page now lists five paid tiers: Starter ($4.99), Premium ($19.99), Premium Plus ($49.99), Pro ($99.99), and Pro Max ($249.99). The bottom of the range is effectively unchanged from May. The new tiers above $20 give heavier users of Poe's model-routing setup somewhere to go without switching to a single-model subscription elsewhere.
What held steady
ChatGPT's own subscription prices didn't move: Free, Go at $8, Plus at $20, and Pro at $100 or $200 depending on the usage toggle. OpenAI shipped GPT-5.6 in July, its new flagship, and cut API pricing on its cheaper Terra and Luna tiers later in the month (we covered the launch in detail), but none of that reached the ChatGPT subscription price tag. Perplexity is the quietest platform on this list: Pro at $20 and Max at $200, unchanged since the Max tier launched back in mid-2025.
The one change that actually matters
Everything above except Microsoft is a change to what powers a subscription, not what the subscription costs. Opus 5 and Grok 4.5 both got dramatically cheaper to run, which matters if you're building on top of these models but does nothing to your monthly bill. Google's Ultra split is a real product change, but it only affects the small slice of users already paying $250 a month. Copilot Pro's death is the one item here that forces an actual decision: if you were on it, that decision is five days overdue.
For current pricing across chatbot.gallery's full catalog, see chatbot.gallery. For recommendations organized by task rather than by price, for.chat has more specific guidance. And for how these numbers looked three months ago, see May's index.
Pricing verified against vendor sources as of August 6, 2026.