ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini: plans, limits and pricing (September 2026)

Ask three different people which AI assistant they pay for and, this year, you'll get three answers that all cost about the same. ChatGPT Plus is $20. Claude Pro is $20. Google AI Pro is $19.99 — a cent cheaper, if you want to be precise about it. Three companies landed on almost the identical number without coordinating, which means the decision that actually matters isn't the price on the page.

| Provider | Entry paid plan | Standard plan | Power plan |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Go — $8/mo | Plus — $20/mo | Pro — $200/mo |
| Claude | (none) | Pro — $20/mo | Max — $100/mo (5x) or $200/mo (20x) |
| Gemini | AI Plus — $4.99/mo | AI Pro — $19.99/mo | AI Ultra — $99.99/mo or $199.99/mo |

All three still give away a usable free tier with daily limits and an older or smaller model — worth remembering before you reach for a card.

Two things moved this year that are worth knowing about even if they don't change the headline number. OpenAI slotted ChatGPT Go in underneath Plus at $8/month, which quietly answers the "I don't need Plus, I just want more messages" complaint that used to push people to the $20 tier by default. And Anthropic split what used to be a single premium plan into Max at $100 and $200, priced by *how much* you use rather than what features you unlock — a genuinely different model from OpenAI and Google's flat power-tier pricing.

Where they actually diverge is usage ceiling and ecosystem, not price. Claude Pro earns its keep on long documents and large codebases — writers and developers who need the model to hold a lot of context tend to hit ChatGPT or Gemini's practical limits first. ChatGPT Plus has the broadest surface area: custom GPTs, the deepest third-party integration list, voice and image generation without switching apps. Gemini AI Pro is the one to default to if you already pay for Google Workspace or Google One, since the subscription folds into storage you're already buying and shows up inside Docs, Gmail and Sheets instead of living in a separate tab.

The catch none of the three advertise loudly: all three $20 plans cap you with rolling message or usage limits, and hitting them mid-task is what actually pushes people toward the $100–$200 tiers — not a deliberate upgrade decision, just running out of room at a bad moment. If your day is genuinely built around one of these tools — coding all day, researching all day — price the power tier from the start rather than discovering you need it three weeks in.

There's no wrong $20 here. Pick Claude if depth matters more than breadth, ChatGPT if you want the widest toolkit, Gemini if you're already living in Google's apps — and put each one through a week of your actual work on the free tier before you commit to any of it.