A beginner's guide to AI tools
What these things are, what the words mean, and what they cost. No jargon that isn't explained on the spot.
Prices rebuilt from our own data · 2026-09-05 16:45 UTC
There are only two kinds of thing
| Kind | What it is | What you pay |
|---|---|---|
| A chat appChatGPT, Claude, Gemini | A box you type into. Free versions exist and are usable. | A flat monthly fee, or nothing |
| An APIthe same models, for programs | How software talks to a model. Almost every other AI product is built on one. | Per word, with no monthly fee |
That's most of the confusion gone. The company selling you a writing assistant is usually renting the same model you could type at yourself, through the second row.
The six words you need
- Model
- The thing that does the work. GPT-6 and Claude Opus 5 are models. New ones come out constantly.
- Token
- How the labs count text for billing. A token is about three quarters of a word.
- Context window
- How much text it can hold at once. A big one lets you paste in a whole book and ask about it.
- API
- Letting a program talk to the model instead of you typing at it. Billed per word, not monthly.
- Deprecation
- A lab announcing a model will stop working on a set date. If you built on it, that's your deadline.
- Changelog
- A running list of what changed, written by the people who changed it.
What the apps cost
| App | Free tier | Cheapest paid | Top tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Yes | $8Go | $100Pro |
| Claude | Yes | $20Pro | From $100Max |
| Gemini | Yes | $4.99AI Plus | $199.99AI Ultra 20x |
Read off each lab's own pricing page on September 5, 2026.
And what the API costs
Different product, different pricing. You pay per word, and the range is wider than people expect: we hold published prices for 48 models from 8 labs, and the same month's work runs from $0.19 to $89.
The price table has all of them, with a box you can put your own numbers into.
How to choose, without a top-ten list
| Check | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| What you already pay for | A subscription you have beats a better model you don't. Start there. |
| The price | The same month's work runs $0.19 on Ministral 3 14B and $89 on GPT-5.5 Pro. Same job. |
| The context window | Only matters if you paste long things in. The biggest we list holds about 1M tokens. |
| Free first | All three big apps have a free tier that is genuinely usable. Try before you pay. |
What we can't tell you
Which model is smartest. Nobody has measured that in a way that survives contact with your actual work, so we don't publish a ranking and there's no directory of tools here. The site carries ads, and where a page links to a product on Amazon that link pays us a commission. Neither buys anyone a mention.
Where to go next
- What everything costsEvery model with a published price, and a box that turns your usage into a monthly bill.
- Which model fitsFilter by what you can spend and how much text it has to hold.
- ChatGPT or ClaudeBoth line-ups side by side, and what the subscriptions do and don't cover.
- What happened todayWhat the labs published, in their own words, every fifteen minutes.