Comparing AI subscriptions: the complete 2026 guide

Twenty euros. That's what virtually every AI provider charges for its standard subscription in 2026, and it's no coincidence: ever since ChatGPT Plus went to $20 in 2023, the whole market has adopted that amount as its anchor. The result is that the price no longer tells you anything. The question is no longer what does it cost, but what do I get for that amount — and above all: how many subscriptions do I actually need?

This guide puts all subscriptions of August 2026 side by side, with prices as a Dutch consumer sees them on their bank statement: converted to euros and including 21% VAT. If you're not looking for a subscription but a different provider, start with our overview of ChatGPT alternatives.

All AI subscriptions at a glance

Below is the subscription a typical user would choose with each provider. The "List price" column is what the provider itself communicates; the "Per month in €" column is what you actually pay.

What stands out immediately: the spread between the best-known providers is minimal. Between ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, Google AI Pro, Perplexity Pro and Microsoft 365 Premium there's less than two euros of difference. The real outliers are at the edges: Mistral's Le Chat is consistently cheaper, SuperGrok consistently more expensive.

Why dollar pricing is a hidden price increase

Five of the eight providers bill in dollars: OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, xAI and Mistral. That has two consequences you don't see on the pricing page.

First, 21% VAT is added on top. At an exchange rate of $1 = €0.8687, a $20 subscription becomes €17.37 excluding VAT and €21.02 including VAT. Second, your monthly cost moves with the dollar exchange rate. A five-cent change in the dollar already makes a difference of more than three euros a month across three subscriptions — not dramatic, but annoying if you have a fixed monthly budget.

Google and Microsoft do it differently: they price their consumer subscriptions in the Netherlands directly in euros including VAT. Google AI Pro costs €21.99 and stays €21.99, regardless of what the dollar does. In what does an AI subscription cost we work out each subscription separately, including the annual amounts.

What you get for those twenty euros

Comparing prices is easy; comparing value is the real work. This is what's included in the standard subscriptions:

So the differences are mostly in the extras. Google AI Pro is really a storage subscription with AI included. Microsoft 365 Premium is an Office subscription with AI included. Claude Pro is the only plan that includes a full programming environment, which makes it the cheapest of the bunch for developers.

The problem: nobody uses just one model

This is where it gets uncomfortable. Ask any Dutch AI user what they use and the answer is almost never "just ChatGPT". It's: ChatGPT for images, Claude for texts and code, Gemini for PDFs, Perplexity when it has to be accurate.

That's a perfectly logical way of working — the models simply excel at different things, as we explore in detail in GPT-5.6 vs Claude 5 vs Gemini 3.5. But the market's subscription structure penalizes it, because each model sits behind its own paywall.

With the three best-known providers you're at €64 per month, or €772 per year. Add Perplexity and Grok and you're above €115 per month. That's more than most people pay for phone, streaming and internet combined — and in why multiple AI subscriptions are a waste of money we calculate how much of that capacity you actually use.

The bundle option: one subscription for everything

There are two ways out of this stacking trap.

The American way is Poe. Since 2023, Quora has bundled dozens of models behind one subscription and charges using compute points. For $19.99 you get 660,000 points per month. That works, but it has two practical drawbacks: the points system is unpredictable — you never know whether you can still ask questions at the end of the month — and Poe was scaled back considerably in 2026. The free tier went from about 3,000 to about 300 points per day and the Premium bundle from 1,000,000 to 660,000 points. On top of that, everything around it is in English: the interface, the invoices and customer service.

The Dutch way is what we're building. The same bundling idea, but with fixed, understandable limits instead of points, invoices in euros including VAT, and a Dutch interface. You choose the best model for each task without taking out a subscription with each provider; what that costs is on our pricing page.

Which subscription is right for you?

If you really want just one subscription, this is the honest advice for each situation:

• You write a lot of Dutch texts → Claude Pro. Sonnet 5 and Opus 5 deliver the most natural Dutch of all the models, as our test of which AI speaks the best Dutch shows.
• You work with lots of documents and reports → Google AI Pro. The one-million-token context window plus NotebookLM is unbeatable for document work, and you're already using that 2 TB of storage anyway.
• You want images, video and voice → ChatGPT Plus. Sora 2 and GPT Image 2 aren't in any other subscription in this price range.
• You write code → Claude Pro for Claude Code, or GitHub Copilot Pro ($10) if you want to stay in your editor. We compare the options in coding with AI.
• Privacy is your main criterion → Mistral's Le Chat Pro. A French company, EU processing, GDPR (AVG in Dutch) without discussion, and at $14.99 also the cheapest. See also which AI services are GDPR-compliant.
• You're price-conscious but still want something → Google AI Plus for €7.99. You get Gemini 3.1 Pro with higher limits and 200 GB of storage.
• You use multiple models → a bundle subscription. Two separate subscriptions already cost more than all the models together with us.

What changed in 2026

Three developments matter if you come across an older comparison.

Entry-level subscriptions have arrived. ChatGPT Go ($8) and Google AI Plus (€7.99) didn't exist a year ago. For light users, the €21 class is no longer the starting point.

The free versions have become serious. Since 6 August 2026, free ChatGPT users get unlimited text chat on GPT-5.6 Luna plus a Think button for harder questions. Claude gives free users Sonnet 5, one of the best models on the market. For many people a subscription is therefore simply no longer necessary.

The mid-range has collapsed. GPT-5.6 Terra is about as strong as last year's flagship GPT-5.5, but costs a fraction. In July 2026 OpenAI cut the price of Luna by 80% and of Terra by 20%. The models that were worth €20 a month last year are now almost free — the cost is in the newest generation.

Conclusion