The future of AI subscriptions: soon you won't pay per AI anymore

Imagine having had to pay per website in 1995. A tenner a month for the newspaper, a tenner for the encyclopedia, a tenner for the travel guide, and each time a separate password and a separate bill. No one would have kept that up, and it did not happen either: payment shifted to the layer below, to the internet connection and later to advertising and bundled subscriptions.

That is exactly the model the AI market still uses in 2026. You pay €21.02 to OpenAI, €21.02 to Anthropic, €21.99 to Google and €21.02 to Perplexity, and then you have bought roughly the same thing four times with four different strengths. It is a structure that fits a market in which a handful of companies had a scarce product. That scarcity is disappearing, and so the structure is disappearing too.

This piece is a reflection, not a product brochure. All the figures in it are the verified prices of August 2026, but the conclusion is an opinion: paying per AI provider is an interim phase.

Why does every AI subscription cost twenty euros?

Since ChatGPT Plus launched at $20 per month in 2023, that amount has become the anchor of the entire market. Look at what is on offer now: ChatGPT Plus €21.02, Claude Pro €21.02, Perplexity Pro €21.02, Poe Premium €21.01, Cursor Pro €21.02, Google AI Pro €21.99, Microsoft 365 Premium around €21. Six providers with different models, different cost structures and different target audiences, and yet there is less than a euro between them.

That is not a conspiracy, but price anchoring. If your customers know that AI costs twenty euros, any other price is a story you have to explain. The consequence, though, is that the price no longer tells you anything as a buyer. You cannot choose on price, so you choose on features, on habit, or on what your colleague uses.

The edges are moving by now. At the bottom, ChatGPT Go ($8, €8.41) and Google AI Plus (€7.99) were added, two plans that did not exist a year ago. At the top, there are Pro Max subscriptions of $200 and SuperGrok Heavy at $300. The €21 mid-tier is slowly being hollowed out from both sides.

What happened to prices under the hood?

While the subscription does not move, the price of the models themselves is dropping sharply. These are the API prices per million tokens of the three OpenAI models that all came out on 9 July 2026.

On 30 July 2026, OpenAI cut the price of Luna by 80% and that of Terra by 20%. The result: a model that does roughly what GPT-5.5 did last year now costs $1.25 per million input tokens. And the entry-level model a free user may use without limits costs ten cents per million input tokens.

Think about that for a moment. The capability people paid €21 per month for last year is now so cheap that OpenAI has been giving it away without limits to free users since 6 August 2026, with a Think button for heavier questions. Claude does something similar by putting Claude Sonnet 5, the model paying users rely on daily, in the free tier as well.

Is the free tier eating the mid-tier?

This is the most important shift of 2026, and it gets too little attention. A free account is no longer a demo.

Unlimited text chat on GPT-5.6 Luna covers the vast majority of what a normal user asks: emails, summaries, translations, explanations, brainstorming. The remaining limits are on uploads, image generation and tools. With Claude, you get Sonnet 5 for free with a context window of one million tokens, and that is the best model for Dutch texts there is; in our language test, Claude scores 5 out of 5.

For the providers, this means the subscription can no longer be sold with "you get a better model". It has to be sold with what comes around it: Sora 2 and GPT Image 2 with ChatGPT Plus, NotebookLM and 2 TB of storage with Google AI Pro, Claude Code and Claude Cowork with Claude Pro, source citations with Perplexity. The subscription has become a package in which the model is almost the least distinctive part.

That is a shaky position. As soon as someone unbundles those extra features or offers them more cheaply, there is little left to justify €21 with. That argument is worked out further in why one AI subscription is better than just ChatGPT.

Why is aggregation the logical outcome?

In every market where the underlying product becomes cheap and interchangeable, value shifts to the layer that bundles it. That happened with music, with television, with telephony. There is no reason to assume AI models will be the exception.

Practice already points that way. Ask any user what they use and the answer is almost never "just ChatGPT": it is ChatGPT for images, Claude for texts, Gemini for documents, Perplexity when it has to be accurate. That is a perfectly rational way of working, because the models simply are good at different things. Only the market punishes it, because every model sits behind its own paywall.

The math is not subtle. ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro and Google AI Pro together cost €64.03 per month and €768.36 per year. Add Perplexity Pro and SuperGrok and you are at €116.58 per month, almost €1,400 per year. More on that in why multiple AI subscriptions are a waste of money.

Poe was the first to realize this and has bundled dozens of models behind one subscription since 2023. That it is not the final form, Poe itself shows: it charges in compute points, which means you never know in advance exactly what a question costs or how far you will get. Moreover, the bundle has been cut back — around March 2026, the free tier went from about 3,000 to about 300 points per day and Premium from 1,000,000 to 660,000 points per month — and points do not roll over. The idea is right, the execution calls for something more predictable.

What isn't getting cheaper?

An honest reflection also names the counterforces, because "everything will be free" is a lazy prediction.

The top end stays expensive. Claude Fable 5 costs $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens, and is not even included in Claude Pro: in the apps, you pay for it with prepaid credits. The newest generation is expensive again every year, even as the previous generation collapses. What is getting cheap is not AI, but last year's AI.

Agents and long-running tasks push the other way. A model that works on its own for half an hour consumes many times more tokens than a chat question, and that is exactly the direction the expensive subscriptions are moving in: Pro plans of $100 and $200 and Poe packages of up to 8.25 million points exist because there are users who use that up.

And video and images have stayed expensive. Sora 2, Veo 3.1, GPT Image 2 and Nano Banana Pro are exactly the features providers keep limits on, even for paying users.

So the likely outcome is not a world in which everything is free, but a world in which the bill becomes lopsided: everyday use becomes almost free and the heavy extras are charged separately. That is a strong argument for bundles, because a bundle can average out the cheap usage against the expensive.

What does this mean for your choice now?

Predictions are fun, but you have to choose something today. Four practical conclusions.

Do not sign up for annual subscriptions you do not need. In a market where prices can drop 80% within a month, locking in twelve months ahead is an expensive form of certainty. If you do want to stop, canceling an AI subscription explains how that works per provider.

Test the free tier first, really for a whole month. A good share of the people paying €21 per month would not notice the difference from free.

When in doubt, choose based on what does not change quickly. Where your data is processed, how well a model writes Dutch and whether you get invoices in euros are more stable criteria than which model is ahead this month. Which models exist and what they do is in all AI models at a glance, and the prices side by side in the complete comparison.

Pay for access, not for a brand. As soon as you notice you are switching back and forth between two or three providers, you are paying two or three times for the same kind of access.

That last point is why we exist: one Dutch subscription for €12.95 per month with all the models included, with fixed limits instead of compute points and invoices in euros including VAT. What we cannot promise is that we replace the extra features of the big providers. Sora 2, Microsoft's Office integration and Google's storage are not included, and if that is your main reason to pay, you are better off with that provider. Our argument is about the models, not about everything around them.

Conclusion