AI Coding Plans Ranked (August 2026): From Free to $200, a Winner at Every Tier
On August 16, a user on Reddit's r/codex reported that their weekly Codex quota had been cut roughly in half overnight. The third-party tracker NerfTrack estimated the API-equivalent value dropped from about $160 to $80 (XenoSpectrum, reporting on the 2026-08-16 incident). That's a community report plus a third-party estimate — as of August 21, OpenAI has neither confirmed nor denied it.
I'm paying for two of these companies myself right now, so news like that spikes my blood pressure. So this piece lays out every one of the 20-odd plans on the market as of August 2026, tier by tier, so you can decide for yourself. You don't need to write a line of code to follow along — every tier has something for regular people too.
This whole article has one thesis, so let's get it out of the way first: Benchmarks are the ceiling; quota is your daily life — and never marry one vendor.
How I score this, and why you should believe me
Full disclosure up front: I personally pay a monthly subscription to both Claude and ChatGPT, and this very site was built with Claude Code. So yes, I have a soft spot for both, and a grudge against both too.
Official pricing pages are my baseline for data. Beyond that I lean heavily on third-party trackers built specifically for coding plans, like codingplan.org (updated 2026-08-19), plus Reddit — vendors never volunteer the fact that they quietly cut your quota, only the community does. Anywhere I cite a community number, I mark it "reported/estimated" so you know it's not gospel.
When it comes to which model is actually stronger, I trust exactly one referee: Artificial Analysis benchmarks. Anywhere this article states "X is stronger" as fact, that's the source. Everything else — other review sites, vendor self-promotion, community chatter — I label honestly as "opinion."
One more heads-up: every vendor measures quota differently — credits, prompts, messages, flat dollars — and none of it converts cleanly from one vendor to the next. Don't try to do that math in your head; just compare within a vendor, not across them.
On prices: every vendor here bills in US dollars at whatever the rate is the day your card gets charged, so the figures in brackets are a rough conversion (rate of 2026-08-22, US$1 ≈ €0.86, via exchangerate-api). They are there to give you a feel, not official local pricing.
Free tier ($0): squeeze the free stuff dry first
| Company | Plan (monthly) | Quota | Strengths | Weaknesses |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | ChatGPT Free ($0) | Has Codex, but a tiny quota | Free taste of agentic coding | Just enough to sample |
| Anthropic | Claude Free ($0) | Quota on the thin side | Quality is good | Hits the ceiling after a few messages |
| 🏆Gemini Free ($0) | ~30 messages/day (2026-03 data) | Well-regarded answer quality; paste a YouTube link for an instant summary | Quota isn't generous | |
| DeepSeek | 🏆App/Web ($0) | Unlimited, running V4 Pro and V4 Flash (GA 2026-08-13) | Free access to a flagship-class model, 1M context, decent app | Chinese company: data stored offshore, your input may be used for training |
| GitHub Copilot | Free ($0) | 2,000 completions/month | Enough completions for daily use | Completions are the only thing worth bragging about |
| opencode | + local Ollama ($0) | Unlimited | Offline, your code never leaves the machine | Needs 16GB+ RAM, quality isn't flagship |
| Cursor | Hobby ($0) | Entry-level quota | Free taste of the IDE | Quota is tiny |
| Windsurf | Free ($0) | Entry-level quota | Free to try | Quota is tiny |
| Kiro | Free ($0) | 50 credits | Free to try | Quota is tiny |
| Trae | Free ($0) | Entry-level quota | Free to try | Locked to the Trae IDE |
| Augment | — | — | — | — |
| GLM (Zhipu) | — | — | — | — |
| MiniMax | — | — | — | — |
| Kimi | Adagio ($0) | K2.7/K2 | Good at long Chinese-language documents | Flagship K3 costs extra |
| Qwen (Alibaba) | — | — | — | — |
💬 My take: there are two monsters in the free tier right now. First: DeepSeek. The official app is free, unlimited, and runs V4 Pro and V4 Flash — models that only went GA on August 13. Nothing else at this price point comes close. My honest opinion: it holds its own against top-tier flagships, and on some tasks it even beats things in the GPT-5.5 class (that's my take plus community sentiment, not an Artificial Analysis number). But be clear-eyed about the cost: it's a Chinese company, your data sits on offshore servers, and whatever you type in may become training material. Fine for recipe questions and travel planning. Don't feed it your company's documents or anything personal. Second monster: Gemini. Answer quality is consistently solid, and it has a trick no other free tier offers — paste a YouTube link and it hands you a summary. A two-hour keynote turns into a bullet list.
🏆 Winner: raw model strength → DeepSeek. Features and integration → Gemini. Escape clause: mainly coding and you've got a decent machine → local opencode + Ollama + Qwen3-Coder. Don't want anything leaving your machine, period → same answer.
$3–18: Chinese vendors turned the budget tier into a bloodbath
| Company | Plan (monthly) | Quota | Strengths | Weaknesses |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | 🏆ChatGPT Go ($8 · ~€7) | Full agentic features | Big-lab quality at a floor-level price | Smaller quota than Plus |
| Anthropic | — | — | — | — |
| — | — | — | — | |
| DeepSeek | — (the free tier already covers it) | — | — | — |
| GitHub Copilot | Pro ($10 · ~€9) | $15 in credits; completions never touch the credit balance | Unlimited completions, native to GitHub | Agentic features do eat credits |
| opencode | 🏆Go ($10, $5 first month · ~€9) | $12/5h, $30/week, $60/month | One subscription covers 18 open-source models, quota priced transparently | Open-source models, not flagship-tier |
| Cursor | — | — | — | — |
| Windsurf | — | — | — | — |
| Kiro | — | — | — | — |
| Trae | Lite ($3 · ~€3) / Pro ($10) | Entry to mid-level quota | Cheapest option in an already-cheap tier | Locked to the Trae IDE |
| Augment | — | — | — | — |
| GLM (Zhipu) | Lite ($18, $12.6 if billed annually · ~€15) | 10,000 credits/week | Community verdict: "near-flagship at a tenth of the price" (opinion) | Peak-hour speed, data-residency concerns |
| MiniMax | Starter ($10 · ~€9) | 100 prompts/5h | M2.7 is fast | Quota runs small |
| Kimi | Andante (¥49 ≈ $7 · ~€6) | 300–1,200 messages/5h | Chinese-language strength, long context | Flagship K3 needs a higher tier |
| Qwen (Alibaba) | Lite (¥39 ≈ $5.5 · ~€5) | 700 credits/5h | Cheap early-bird pricing | Free CLI got killed without warning (2026-04-15); rules keep shifting |
💬 My take: this is the most interesting battlefield of 2026. Chinese vendors — GLM, MiniMax, Kimi, Qwen — are selling near-flagship capability at a tenth of the price, and it's forcing US vendors to invent price points that never existed before, like ChatGPT Go. For coders, opencode Go is the best-designed product at this tier: it prices its quota in actual dollars ($12 per 5 hours), which is a rare kind of honest. Compare that to the big labs quietly "adjusting based on demand" — I'll take the transparency every time.
🏆 Winner: coding → opencode Go. Everyone else → ChatGPT Go. Escape clause: want a cheap model plugged into Claude Code → GLM Lite has an OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Before you point a company project at any Chinese vendor, confirm whether your data is even allowed to leave the country.
$20: the main battlefield, and the winner isn't who you'd guess
| Company | Plan (monthly) | Quota | Strengths | Weaknesses |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | 🏆ChatGPT Plus ($20 · ~€17) | Instant ~160 msgs/3h, Thinking 3,000 msgs/week (measured 2026-08-04; officially "subject to fluctuation") | Nothing at this price beats the chat volume; full multimodal | Codex quota under a shrinkage cloud since 8/16 (community-reported, unconfirmed) |
| Anthropic | Claude Pro ($20 · ~€17) | 5-hour session + weekly cap; +50% through 8/31 | Claude Code tops multiple review rankings | Chat quota is a full tier below Plus's |
| Gemini AI Pro ($19.99 · ~€17) | CLI 1,500 requests/day | 1M-token context is unmatched | CLI ecosystem mid-transition (2026-06-18) | |
| DeepSeek | — | — | — | — |
| GitHub Copilot | — | — | — | — |
| opencode | — | — | — | — |
| Cursor | Pro ($20 · ~€17) | Fixed usage, then metered overage | Good IDE experience | Rewrote its billing model three times in 2026 |
| Windsurf | Pro ($20 · ~€17) | Fixed usage | Smooth IDE integration | Frequent renaming (Devin Desktop) and repricing |
| Kiro | Pro ($20 · ~€17) | Fixed credits | Spec-driven development is an interesting idea | Pricing was criticized by The Register (2025-08) |
| Trae | — | — | — | — |
| Augment | Indie ($20 · ~€17) | 40,000 credits | Indexes large codebases well | Small community |
| GLM (Zhipu) | — | — | — | — |
| MiniMax | Plus ($20 · ~€17) | 300 prompts/5h | High volume, fast | Model isn't top-tier |
| Kimi | Moderato (¥99 ≈ $14 · ~€12) | Mid-level quota, unlocks flagship K3 | Cheap way into K3 | Ecosystem skews toward Chinese-language users |
| Qwen (Alibaba) | Standard (¥139 ≈ $19.5 · ~€17) | 3,000 credits/5h | Generous quota | Same as above: a history of shifting rules |
💬 My take: engineers will tell you Claude Pro has the best quality, and plenty of reviews rank it that way. But I'm giving this tier to ChatGPT Plus, for two reasons. First: 3,000 Thinking messages a week. Based on everything public I could find, no other $20 plan touches that volume — and for someone who asks AI about everything, that's the difference between all-you-can-eat and an à la carte menu. Second, how I actually use it: I connect a GitHub repo to ChatGPT and use my chat quota to read code and talk through changes. (Caveat: the GitHub connector is read-only — actually editing files still means burning Codex quota.) Cheap chat quota for thinking things through, expensive Codex quota spent only on the actual edit — that's the most efficient split I've found. The August 16 shrinkage scare is still hanging over this plan, so pay monthly and keep a close eye on it.
🏆 Winner: ChatGPT Plus (coding-specific award: Claude Pro). Escape clause: you live in a terminal 90% of the time → Claude Pro. You value volume over quality → MiniMax Plus's 300 prompts/5h looks best on paper.
$30–100: heavy-user territory
| Company | Plan (monthly) | Quota | Strengths | Weaknesses |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | Pro ($100 · ~€86) | 5x Plus's usage | Launched 2026-04-09, an unmistakable answer to Claude Max 5x; beefed-up Codex | Same August 16 quota cloud hangs over this too |
| Anthropic | 🏆Max 5x ($100 · ~€86) | 5x Pro | A community case measured ~$1,850 of API-equivalent usage in 30 days (single case); has a real mobile app | Expensive; unclear whether the boost survives past 8/31 |
| AI Ultra base tier ($99.99 · ~€86) | CLI 2,000 requests/day | Cut down from $249.99 at I/O 2026 | Reputation still hasn't recovered | |
| DeepSeek | — | — | — | — |
| GitHub Copilot | Pro+ ($39 · ~€33) / Max ($100) | $70 / $200 in credits | Deep GitHub integration | The credit pool is finite |
| opencode | — | — | — | — |
| Cursor | Pro+ ($60 · ~€51) | Bigger fixed quota | Good IDE experience | Billing rules change often |
| Windsurf | — | — | — | — |
| Kiro | Pro+ ($40 · ~€34) / Pro Max ($100) | Bigger credits | — | Not much of a loyal following |
| Trae | Pro+ ($30 · ~€26) / Ultra ($100) | High-end quota | Cheap way to buy volume | Locked to the Trae IDE |
| Augment | Developer ($50 · ~€43) | 600 messages/month | Enterprise-grade indexing | Billed per message |
| GLM (Zhipu) | Pro ($80, $56 if billed annually · ~€68) | 60,000 credits/week | The poster child for Chinese-vendor value | Data leaves the country, peak-hour speed |
| MiniMax | Max ($50 · ~€43) / Max HS ($80) | 1,000 prompts/5h | High volume (HS is even faster) | Model ceiling |
| Kimi | Allegro (¥699 ≈ $97 · ~€83) | K3 + 1M context | Flagship for long Chinese-language documents | Ecosystem skews toward Chinese-language users |
| Qwen (Alibaba) | Pro (¥499 ≈ $70 · ~€60) | 12,000 credits/5h | Generous quota | Same history of shifting rules |
💬 My take: this tier is now a two-horse race. OpenAI filled the $100 gap on April 9 with Pro (5x Plus's usage), aimed squarely at Claude Max 5x. But if it's my money, I'm still buying Max 5x. That $1,850 figure is a single community case, not a guarantee for everyone — but even cut in half, it blows past the $100 ticket price. The underrated win here is the phone app: I can sit on the couch and have AI edit code, and I genuinely can't go back. No Chinese vendor, however cheap, has matched that experience yet. If you want to save money, GLM Pro ($80, $56 if you go annual) is a solid runner-up.
🏆 Winner: Claude Max 5x. Escape clause: capped at $50 → MiniMax Max has the biggest quota. Rolling this out company-wide → look at Team plans, which this article doesn't cover.
$200: the priciest tier — let's do the math first
| Company | Plan (monthly) | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | ChatGPT Pro ($200) | Cloud Codex + every model + full multimodal |
| Anthropic | Max 20x ($200) | 20x Pro's quota |
| AI Ultra 20x ($200) | Top-spec Ultra | |
| DeepSeek | — | — |
| GitHub Copilot | — | — |
| opencode | — | — |
| Cursor | Ultra ($200) | Top of its ecosystem |
| Windsurf | Max ($200) | Top of its ecosystem |
| Kiro | Power ($200) | Top of its ecosystem |
| Trae | — | — |
| Augment | — | — |
| GLM (Zhipu) | Max ($168, $117.6 if billed annually) | 140,000 credits/week |
| MiniMax | — | — |
| Kimi | — | — |
| Qwen (Alibaba) | — | — |
Aside: Devin, the fully autonomous agent, starts at $500/month — the spend-till-it-hurts ceiling. Not in the table above.
💬 My take: let me do the arithmetic before I steer you wrong. Two $100 plans do not add up to one $200 plan's worth of quota: two separate Claude Max 5x subscriptions are two independent 5x allowances, not a stackable 10x, and quota never carries across vendors anyway. And Claude's 20x plan has a catch the community dug up a while back: paying double mostly buys you burst capacity inside the 5-hour window (roughly 4x) — your weekly budget doesn't scale up by that same 4x. Going by the reference ranges Anthropic itself published in 2025, Max 20x's weekly hours run only about 1.6–1.7x those of 5x (240–480 hours vs. 140–280 hours for Sonnet; Anthropic no longer publishes fixed hour counts, but the underlying structure — a 5-hour session plus a weekly total — hasn't changed). So 20x is really built for someone who needs to sprint hard in a short window. If you're heavy but steady across the whole week, this $200 plan is worse value than it looks.
I run two $100 plans myself — Claude Max 5x plus ChatGPT's $100 Pro, a matching pair — because I'm not buying maximum volume, I'm buying redundancy. When something like the August 16 episode happens (quota changes, a model gets dumber, an outage), I just switch to the other one and keep working. One $200 plan buys you capacity. Two $100 plans buy you insurance. Which one makes sense for you depends on how much it scares you that one vendor's bad day could stop all your work. It scares me.
🏆 Winner: depends what you're optimizing for. Need to burst hard inside a 5-hour window → that vendor's 20x plan. Everyone else → two $100 plans.
The benchmark check: Artificial Analysis (BenchLM snapshot, checked 2026-08-22)
This is the only judge I trust for facts about which model is actually stronger:
- Intelligence Index: Claude Opus 5 leads at 63.0%, with Fable 5 (62.1%) and Grok 4.6 (60.9%) close behind.
- Agentic Index: Opus 5 leads here too, scoring 86.7% on Terminal-Bench — the top result in this snapshot.
- Value for money: Grok 4.6 ($2/$6 per million tokens) is the best bargain; GLM-5.3 ($1.40/$4.40) undercuts everyone on price.
Same thesis as always: benchmarks are the ceiling; quota is your daily life. Every pick above weighs spec, quota, and actual daily use together — I'm not just handing the crown to whoever tops a leaderboard.
The 4 mistakes people keep making when picking a plan
- Paying annually. Quotas can change overnight — see August 16 — and an annual plan means you've pre-sold your right to jump ship. Exception: when the annual discount is as steep as GLM's (30% off), it's cheap enough you won't mind staying put.
- Buying on benchmarks alone. A high score attached to a stingy quota still feels bad every single day.
- Overestimating your own usage. Run the free tier or the cheapest plan for a week or two before upgrading. From what I've seen, most light users can't even burn through a $20 plan's quota.
- Betting everything on one vendor. Heavy users: go re-read the math in the $200 section.
FAQ
Q: I don't code at all. Give me the 30-second version. Free → DeepSeek (strongest model) or Gemini (try the YouTube summary trick); $8 → ChatGPT Go; $20 → ChatGPT Plus. You never have to touch a coding tool.
Q: The 30-second version for people who code? $0 → opencode + Ollama; $10 → opencode Go; $20 → Claude Pro; $100 → Claude Max 5x; $200 → either go all-in on 20x or split across two $100 plans — see the trade-off above.
Q: Can I trust the Chinese vendors (DeepSeek/GLM/MiniMax/Kimi/Qwen)? The value for money is genuinely good, and DeepSeek's free tier is almost absurd. But think through two things first: your data sits on offshore servers and your input may get used for training (check with your employer before pointing it at company work), and the cheap tiers can change the rules fast — Qwen killed its free CLI without warning (confirmed 2026-04-15). Fine for personal side projects. Stop before you feed it anything confidential.
Q: Is this sponsored content? Ha, no — the ad slot's still empty. OpenAI took the $20 crown, Anthropic took the $100 one, DeepSeek and Gemini got the praise in the free tier, opencode and GLM got it in the budget tier. Every fanbase has something to be mad about — that's about as fair as I know how to be.
Quotas and prices move fast. Everything here was checked on 2026-08-22; I'll come back and update if anything major changes.
Sources (checked 2026-08-22)
All prices and quotas in the tables above come from official pricing pages plus the sources below:
- codingplan.org: tracker for 20+ coding plans (updated 2026-08-19)
- XenoSpectrum: Codex weekly-quota reports (Reddit r/codex) and the NerfTrack estimate (2026-08-16)
- codersera: DeepSeek V4 Pro/Flash GA and pricing (GA 2026-08-13)
- TechCrunch: ChatGPT launches the $100 Pro plan (2026-04-09)
- Zenken AI: ChatGPT plan limits (2026-08-04)
- explainx: Claude usage-limit timeline (doubled 2026-05-06; +50% through Aug 31)
- DataStudios: Gemini free-tier features and limits (2026-03)
- morphllm: weekly-hour ranges for Claude plans (2025 published reference figures; no longer officially published as fixed numbers)
- morphllm: real monthly AI coding spend ($1,850 API-equivalent single case)
- BenchLM: Artificial Analysis index snapshot (August 2026)
- usagebox: GitHub Copilot's move to AI Credits (effective 2026-06-01)
- Tembo: Gemini CLI's free route ends, Antigravity quotas (change of 2026-06-18)
- inventivehq: record of Qwen's free CLI shutdown (ended 2026-04-15)
- CloudZero: Windsurf (Devin Desktop) pricing
- The Register: the AWS Kiro pricing controversy (2025-08-18)
- dev.to: community review of GLM's cheap plan
- KDnuggets: opencode + Ollama + Qwen3-Coder hands-on
- Devin: pricing for the fully autonomous agent