How to choose an AI subscription
The quiz weighs your answers; this is the same reasoning written out, for readers who would rather follow it themselves. Three decisions, in this order, every plan name links to its provider's pricing page.
Start at the bottom of the ladder
Almost everyone should buy the cheapest paid tier of the provider they lean towards and upgrade later. Every provider sells a ~$20 rung with a real coding agent on it (Claude Pro, ChatGPT Plus, Google AI Pro, Cursor Pro), and moving up the same ladder changes only the limit - your agent, your login, and your habits carry over. A bigger plan bought before you have hit a limit is money spent on headroom you have not measured.
Two exceptions. Fable ships only on Claude Max, so if step 2 says you need it, your entry rung is Max 5x at $100. And we do not recommend SuperGrok or any Kimi tier at any price - see our take.
Decide what the work is, then which model it needs
Only the hardest problems need the top two models. If you will hand the agent genuinely hard work - large refactors, debugging you cannot reason through yourself, tasks where a weaker model gives up - you want Claude Fable 5 (Claude Max 5x, $100) or GPT 5.6 Sol (ChatGPT Plus, $20). Fable is the stronger of the two in our runs; Sol is the faster and the cheaper way in.
Everything else - everyday coding, whole apps from a prompt, UI work, writing, automation - is fine on the $20 rung's models: Opus 5 on Claude Pro, Gemini 3.7 Flash on Google AI Pro, Sol on ChatGPT Plus, or Cursor Pro if you want the agent inside your editor and the freedom to switch models. The leaderboard shows how close that field sits on real-world work.
Decide how often you will use it, then which provider
With the model settled, the rhythm of your work picks the provider, because plans differ most in how they meter you. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Moonshot all run a session window under a weekly limit; xAI meters a weekly bucket and Cursor a monthly one (all from our published run data).
What separates the session-window plans is how many of those windows the weekly limit lets you empty. A calendar week holds 33.6 five-hour windows. Google AI Pro's weekly limit holds exactly 6 of them and Kimi Allegretto exactly 5; Claude Max 20x holds about 7 and ChatGPT Plus about 6. So a plan is not a bucket you can drain at any pace: it is a duty cycle of roughly one fully spent session a day, whichever of them you buy.
- A few sessions a week - any $20 plan works; the weekly limit is never the constraint.
- Daily, in focused blocks - Claude's rolling window suits this best: it refills every five hours whatever the week has done, while the weekly limits on the other plans hold only about six emptied sessions.
- Hours most days - you will outgrow every $20 rung; Claude Max 5x is the plan we would buy, with ChatGPT Pro 5x the alternative if Codex is already your home.
- Several agents running much of the day - Claude Max 20x or ChatGPT Pro 20x; this is the only case where a $200 plan is the right first purchase.
Still between two plans? Compare subscriptions puts our verdict on every rung side by side; the quiz runs these three decisions for you.
Plan names and prices come from the quiz config (v34); each price carries its source and retrieval date.