The short answer
We checked the public pricing pages of 116 AI products in the SOTA catalog on October 1, 2026. Nearly nine in ten offer some free usage, $20 a month is the most common entry price, and half meter usage with credits instead of selling unlimited plans. Developer infrastructure is the exception: every product we checked there bills by usage.
| Segment | Products | Some free usage | Credits | Usage-based | Per seat | Median entry price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Consumer and creator tools | 34 | 28 | 27 | 4 | 10 | $19 (21 priced) |
| Productivity and research | 32 | 29 | 13 | 8 | 14 | $20 (18 priced) |
| Coding agents and app builders | 29 | 27 | 16 | 14 | 12 | $20 (19 priced) |
| Developer infrastructure | 21 | 17 | 2 | 21 | 2 | $34 (12 priced) |
| All products | 116 | 101 | 58 | 47 | 38 | $20 (70 priced) |
How we collected the data
We opened the /pricing page of every product in the SOTA catalog in a browser on October 1, 2026 and recorded the same fields for each: whether there is a free option, how usage is billed, the cheapest self-serve paid plan, any stated annual discount, whether unused credits roll over, and whether there is a contact-sales tier. Claude and Claude Code share one pricing page, so they count once.
116 pages listed prices we could read. We left out products that sell only through app stores, products that only quote through sales, open-source libraries without a hosted plan, and pages that did not render prices for us. Entry prices are compared only for the 70 products that show a monthly-billed price in US dollars; pages that displayed another currency or only an annual-billed rate are excluded from those figures.
This is a snapshot of list prices, not of what customers actually pay, and promotions and regional pricing change often. The full dataset, with a link to every pricing page, is available as a CSV under Sources & method.
Free access is the default
101 of the 114 products whose pages showed it (89%) let people use the product without paying. 85 offer a lasting free plan, and 16 offer a trial or a one-time grant of credits instead. Only 13 list no free option at all, mostly tools aimed at professional teams, such as Augment Code, Factory and Luma AI.
Free plans are rarely unlimited. They are usually capped by a daily or monthly allowance and limited in features: Suno's free plan gives 50 credits a day without commercial rights, Otter.ai includes 300 transcription minutes a month, and Bolt caps free usage by tokens per day and per month.
$20 a month is the usual entry price
Among the 70 products that show a monthly-billed price, the median cheapest paid plan is $20 a month, and 25 of them (36%) charge exactly $20. Another 19 sit between $10 and $19, and only 11 start at $30 or more.
The cheapest entry plans in the sample are Khanmigo at $4, Kagi at $5 and ElevenLabs at $6 a month. Developer infrastructure starts higher, at a $34 median, but there the subscription mostly sets a usage allowance rather than buying the product outright.
Many pages show the annual-billed price per month by default. When you compare products, check which billing period a price refers to: the same plan often looks 20% or more cheaper on the annual toggle.
Credits have replaced unlimited plans
Half of the products (58) meter usage in credits, under many names: credits, tokens, Sparks, compute units or message credits. 96 products (83%) combine two or more billing elements, such as a subscription with included credits and paid top-ups. Only 8 sell a plain subscription with no metered component, and 12 are pure pay-as-you-go APIs.
Whether unused credits carry over is usually not stated. Of the 58 credit-based products, only 9 say so on their pricing page: 5 roll credits over in some form (for example Bolt, and Lovable for one month) and 4 say they do not (for example Recraft and Udio).
The clearest pages translate credits into outcomes. Liner lists how many credits each feature costs, and invideo AI and Krea estimate how many videos or images a monthly allowance produces.
Seats, teams and annual discounts
38 products (33%) price at least one plan per seat. Some deliberately avoid it: Augment Code charges a flat team price for up to 50 seats, and Lovable and Gumloop include unlimited users and charge for usage instead.
59 pages state an annual discount. The median is 20%, ranging from 8% (Khanmigo) to 51% (Otter.ai).
102 products (88%) offer a custom or contact-sales tier, and 18 (16%) also offer an open-source or self-hosted option, almost all of them developer tools.
What this means if you are pricing an AI product
A free tier is now expected. Decide what it is for, such as trying the core result or building a habit, and cap it with a clear allowance rather than hiding limits.
$20 a month is the anchor buyers will compare you with. Pricing above it works when the product replaces paid work or serves teams, but say why on the page.
If you use credits, publish what one credit buys and whether unused credits roll over. Most products in this sample do not, and it is the first question a careful buyer asks.
Show the monthly price next to the annual one, and keep your pricing page readable without logging in. People increasingly ask AI assistants to compare prices, and they can only use what they can read.
Sources & method
Official documentation was checked on 2026-10-01. Selection advice is our assessment. Interfaces and requirements may change; check the linked source for the version you intend to use.
- Full dataset (CSV): 116 AI product pricing pages, checked October 1, 2026
- Liner pricing and credit deduction guide
- Suno pricing
- Augment Code pricing
- Otter.ai pricing
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