Verified against official pricing pages and help centers on July 5, 2026. Numbers change; corrections get a changelog.
Here's a question that should be easy: you give an AI company ~$20 a month. What do you get?
We put it to the official pricing pages and help centers of six major AI subscriptions. Exactly one gave a number.
The one real answer
ChatGPT Plus: 160 messages with GPT-5.5 every 3 hours, after which you're switched to the mini model until reset (help.openai.com). The same number applies to the cheaper Go tier ($8/mo), which is its own interesting fact — the core chat allowance on Plus and Go is identical; you're paying up for other features. Free tier? OpenAI states its limits are "dynamic and may vary" — an explicit, on-the-record refusal to commit to a number. Honest, in its way.
The multiplier shell game
Claude's entire consumer lineup is a chain of multipliers hanging from a number that doesn't exist. Free is "Limited." Pro is "at least 5x" Free. Max is "5x" or "20x" Pro (support.claude.com). At no point — any tier, any official page — does an absolute number appear. Five times what is a question the pricing page is structurally designed not to answer. There's also a 5-hour session reset AND a weekly cap; sizes of both: unpublished.
Google runs the same play ("4x higher than standard," Ultra "up to 20x more than Pro") but deserves partial credit twice: the reset mechanism is published plainly — refreshes every 5 hours until a weekly ceiling — and the secondary credit system has real numbers (1,000 credits/mo on Pro, 25,000 on Ultra — support.google.com). Hard numbers for the side dish; a multiplier for the entrée.
And notice the convergence: OpenAI's top tier is sold as "5x or 20x more usage," Claude Max as 5x/20x Pro, Google Ultra as up-to-20x Pro. Three competitors independently arriving at the same evasive sentence structure isn't a coincidence — it's what works when nobody's keeping receipts.
The only free-tier number in the industry
Perplexity publishes a real one: free users get 5 Pro Searches every 4 hours (perplexity.ai). It's the only free-tier hard number we found across all six services — and then Pro, the thing you'd actually pay for, is "nearly unlimited." Nearly.
The quiet discontinuation
Try to buy standalone Copilot Pro from Microsoft today and you'll find the pricing pages simply don't offer it. Multiple independent trackers report it was closed to new customers in late 2025 with existing renewals ending August 2026 — but we could not find Microsoft saying so in its own words anywhere, which is why we're phrasing it this carefully. The consumer AI path is now Microsoft 365 bundles with "AI credits" whose monthly quantity is — we checked support docs, pricing pages, FAQs — published nowhere. In 2024, Copilot Pro shipped with a hard number (100 image boosts/day). In 2026, the bundles ship with adjectives. That's the direction of travel.
The vaguest system in AI
xAI's Grok rebuilt its paid limits in June 2026 into "one shared weekly usage pool that you can spend however you like across any Grok product" (docs.x.ai). Size of the pool: unpublished. Cost per message: unpublished. Free tier: "generous limits." Two of its named tiers (SuperGrok Lite, Heavy) have no publicly listed price at all. This is the most opaque consumer pricing system we found in this entire audit — a subscription where neither the quantity nor, for some tiers, the price is written down.
What to do with this
Treat unpublished limits as changeable limits. If it's not written down, it can shrink without notice — and you have no receipt to point at.
Measure your own ceiling. For one week, note each time you hit a limit and the local time. That's your real number — the one the pricing page wouldn't give you — and it tells you whether the $100 tier is solving a real problem or a manufactured one.
Reward disclosure. All else near-equal, give your $20 to the companies that publish numbers. It's the only feedback loop that makes fine print legible.
No referral links in this post. Sources linked inline; quotes pulled July 5, 2026.
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