The AI Subscription Erosion Tracker: Every Dated Price and Allowance Change at ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini

The flagship tiers have not raised their prices: ChatGPT Plus has read $20 since February 2023 1, Google's paid tier has listed $19.99 since February 2024, first as Google One AI Premium and since May 2025 as Google AI Pro 23, and Claude Pro lists at $20 4. What moved in 2026 was everything underneath the sticker. AI subscriptions are being repriced in quotas.

The tracker computes two measures. The Tier Fragmentation Count is the number of paid plans a buyer can choose per vendor. The Allowance Erosion Rate counts quota and access shifts at plans whose price did not move. The raw material is the vendors' own dated artifacts: a usage-limits notice on Google's help page, a date-stamped Anthropic guidance page, a maintainer post carrying a cutoff date, a subscriber email pinning a removal date.

The paid ladders grew, and the top tier split

• ChatGPT Go: launched in India on August 18, 2025 at 399 rupees, about $4.60, with 10x the free tier's message limits; OpenAI's Go page now describes the plan as available worldwide 56
• ChatGPT Plus: $20 1
• Claude Pro: $20 monthly, $17 on annual billing 4
• Claude Max: from $100, sold in 5x and 20x strengths 4
• Google AI Plus: $4.99 7
• Google AI Pro: $19.99 7
• Google AI Ultra: $99.99 at 5x usage, $199.99 at 20x 7

The Ultra line shows how fast the ladder now moves: on May 5, 2026, Google AI Ultra was a single plan at $250 a month 8. On May 19, Google split it, adding a $100 entry tier aimed at, in Google's words, "developers, technical leads, knowledge workers, and advanced creators," while the previous $250 plan dropped to $200 with what Google calls the "exact same capabilities" 9. The cheapest rung moved too: on June 8, Google cut AI Plus from $7.99 to $4.99 and doubled its storage from 200 GB to 400 GB 10. A reported "AI Ultra Lite" tier, which Google's plan page still did not list at this tracker's September 27 re-check, would wedge a fifth Google price point between Pro and Ultra 8.

What moved underneath the sticker in 2026

• May 17 to 19: Gemini switches from daily prompt limits to compute-based usage, with limits refreshing every five hours until a weekly cap, and "pay-as-you-go top-up AI credits" on the way; Google's help page carries the notice that usage limits changed starting May 17 911
• June 2: Anthropic's help center, date-stamped that day when this tracker launched, documents the same dual-clock design for Claude, five-hour session limits with weekly limits on top; the page's stamp had rolled to "Updated this week" by the September 27 re-check, with the same two clocks in the body 12
• June 18: Gemini CLI will no longer serve Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, or free users, per the maintainers' May 19 announcement 13
• September: GPT-6 Astra launches first to some enterprise customers, those with access to OpenAI's Daybreak cybersecurity platform, while Plus and Pro subscribers wait, and OpenAI's make-good is "one banked reset for every day you don't have access to Astra on your paid ChatGPT plan," in the words of Codex engineering lead Thibault Sottiaux 14
• November 13 (subscribers notified October 14 and 15): the ability to select Pro models in the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search moves behind Google AI Pro and above; AI Plus keeps Flash-Lite and Flash at its unchanged $4.99 1516

Three of those events sit at Google, one each at Anthropic and OpenAI, none accompanied by a price increase. The November 13 row takes Google's logged total from 2 to 3. The backdrop is a squeeze across the market: by May 2026, Claude users were complaining on social media about per-session limits that felt notably smaller, and GitHub Copilot had adjusted pricing on many of the models it offers 8.

Both ladders now run the same meter

Anthropic and Google converged on one architecture within weeks of each other: a five-hour window, a weekly ceiling above it, and credits to pay past the cap. Anthropic's pricing page tells paid subscribers they can "turn on usage credits to keep working at standard API rates" 4, and its help center sells pre-purchased usage bundles, up to 30 percent off credit rates, in one pool that works across the Claude apps, Claude Code, Cowork and third-party products 17. Google matched it in May with top-up credits on the way and a softer touch, shifting capped users to what Google calls its "lightning-fast smaller models" rather than stopping them 9; its plan page prints quota next to price for the creative studio, 200 Google Flow credits on AI Plus, 1,000 on Pro, and 10,000 or 25,000 on Ultra 7. At the margin, an AI subscription stops being all-inclusive and becomes a base fee plus a meter, the mobile-carrier model. Anthropic reserves the right in its own words: "Price and plans are subject to change at Anthropic's discretion" 4. In practice the price holds while the plans keep moving, and when a paid perk fails at launch the refund arrives in resets, a currency the vendor mints and values itself 14.

How the tracker counts

Entries come from vendor pricing pages, help-center notices, maintainer posts, and dated launch coverage, and every figure above carries its source. The method has limits: Go is priced per market, so its row is the India launch price; Claude Pro's earliest dated entry is its current listing, so no claim is made about years we could not source; reported-but-unshipped tiers like Ultra Lite stay out of the counts until they land. The tracker re-checks the vendor pages monthly; this pass re-read them on September 27, 2026. Event rows file on the dated notice itself: the November 13 row landed on its October notice, before any vendor-page re-check. At that September 27 re-check the Tier Fragmentation Count reads 4 for Google, the four monthly price points, $4.99, $19.99, $99.99 and $199.99, printed on one subscriptions page 7.