Affiliate disclosure: AI Agent Square may earn a commission when readers sign up through links on this page. Our scoring is editorially independent. See our methodology.
TL;DR. Across 50 leading AI agents tracked between January and May 2026, the median business-tier per-seat price is $25/user/month; the median enterprise-tier per-seat price is $30/user/month. Mainstream copilots (ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft) have held headline pricing steady for two years while quietly tightening credit allowances 15-25%. Vertical agents — legal, finance, and revenue-tooling — have raised list prices 25-56% versus 2023. The most important shift in 2026 is the structural move from pure per-seat pricing to hybrid seat-plus-credit pricing, which transfers usage risk from vendor to buyer.
Why we built this index
Buyers, procurement leads, and finance teams asked us the same three questions throughout 2025: what is the going rate per seat for an AI agent, how fast is it moving, and which vendors are quietly transferring inference cost back to customers through credit caps? Public list pricing is the ceiling of the negotiation, not the median paid price, but it remains the most defensible anchor for benchmarking. So we built one.
The AI Agent Pricing Index tracks the published price of every plan tier of 50 leading AI agents across consumer, prosumer (creator/SMB), business, and enterprise tiers. Where vendors decline to publish enterprise pricing, we use verified buyer quotes shared with us under NDA and report a tight range. The index updates quarterly. This is the first public version.
Methodology in one paragraph
We chose 50 agents covering the categories buyers ask us about most: general-purpose LLMs, coding agents, design and creative AI, customer support, sales enablement, knowledge management, finance, legal, healthcare, marketing, and workflow orchestration. For each agent we pulled the vendor's published price as of 1 May 2026, normalised to USD, monthly billing where available (with an annual-discount note), and per-user where the plan allows. For credit/usage-based plans we report the included credit pool and the marginal cost of overage. Where the vendor publishes only an enterprise "call us" plan, we surveyed three independent procurement contacts from buyers in our network for a verified range. Where a verified range is not available, we report the published range from CloudZero, IntuitionLabs, and similar pricing-research outlets, with full sourcing in each agent's individual review on AI Agent Square.
Headline finding 1: $20-$30 is the new $99
The single most striking pattern in the 2026 dataset is the convergence of mainstream business-tier pricing at $20-$30 per user per month. ChatGPT Plus sits at $20. Claude Pro sits at $20. Microsoft Copilot Pro sits at $20. Microsoft 365 Copilot Enterprise sits at $30. GitHub Copilot Business sits at $19. Notion AI sits at $10 add-on. Cursor Pro sits at $20. Gemini Advanced sits at $19.99. v0 Pro sits at $20. Replit Core sits at $20.
This is not coincidence — it is the equilibrium price of a foundation-model-backed agent at current inference economics. Below $20, the vendor cannot serve a "power user" without losing money on inference. Above $30, the buyer asks why the agent costs more than a typical SaaS seat. Vendors that have tried to land above this band on horizontal agents (Microsoft Copilot Enterprise at $30) have done so by tying the seat to a base productivity license that customers already buy.
| Agent | Tier | Per-seat price (May 2026) | Annual discount |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT Plus | Prosumer | $20/mo | — |
| ChatGPT Team | Business | $25/seat ($30 monthly) | 17% |
| ChatGPT Enterprise | Enterprise | $60-$100/seat (verified band) | varies |
| Claude Pro | Prosumer | $20/mo | — |
| Claude Team | Business | $25/seat (Standard) — $125/seat (Premium) | volume |
| Claude Enterprise | Enterprise | Custom (400K context) | varies |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot | Enterprise | $30/seat + base license | annual prepay |
| GitHub Copilot Business | Business | $19/seat | — |
| GitHub Copilot Enterprise | Enterprise | $39/seat | — |
| Cursor Pro | Business | $20/seat | — |
| Notion AI add-on | Add-on | $10/seat | annual prepay |
| Gemini Advanced | Prosumer | $19.99/mo | — |
The median per-seat business-tier price across the 50 agents is $25. The mode is $20. Vertical and revenue-tooling agents pull the mean above the median; the distribution is right-skewed, not normal.
Headline finding 2: credit allowances tightened 15-25% in 2026
While headline seat prices held flat, vendors quietly tightened credit allowances on the Business and Pro tiers. This is the hidden price hike of 2026. We compared January 2025 plan documentation against May 2026 plan documentation across 20 agents that publish credit pools and observed an average decline of 18% in included credits, with a corresponding rise of 9-22% in marginal overage pricing.
Concrete examples we can name publicly:
- Cursor. The Pro plan's "fast" requests have been re-shaped twice in 12 months, with the practical effective allowance for premium models reduced. The vendor still calls it "unlimited" with rate caps; the rate caps tightened.
- Windsurf. Reduced the included monthly credit pool on the $15 Pro plan by approximately 15% in Q1 2026 and adjusted the overage rate upward.
- v0. Adjusted credit weighting on its Pro tier in early 2026 such that the same workload costs roughly 10-15% more in credits.
- Replit. Restructured the credit / "checkpoint" model in early 2026 with a net effective tightening for heavy users.
None of these are predatory — inference costs have not fallen as fast as user volume has grown — but they are real cost increases that do not appear in any list-price comparison. For buyers, the lesson is to evaluate AI agents on a per-workload basis (credits per typical month-end close, credits per typical onboarding, credits per typical support deflection) rather than on per-seat headline alone.
Headline finding 3: vertical agents are the price outliers
The horizontal copilots converged on $20-$30. The vertical agents — tools that bundle proprietary data, citation guarantees, or domain-specific workflow — did the opposite. Two patterns dominate.
Pattern A: legal and finance agents at $100-$500/user
Legal AI is a price-stratified market. Paxton AI bundles research, drafting, and review at $199-$299/user/month. Lexis+ AI sits at $175-$300/seat plus the base Lexis subscription. Westlaw Precision AI sits at $200-$500/seat plus base Westlaw. CoCounsel (now part of Thomson Reuters) sits at $225-$500/month. Harvey is enterprise-only with a published expectation of significantly higher per-seat pricing for AmLaw-100 firms.
The same dynamic exists in finance close software. Numeric, FloQast, and BlackLine all price as team-baseline plus per-module, with practical floor pricing of $2,000/month for the smallest production deployments. Single-seat math is misleading in this category — the unit of pricing is the close, not the user.
Pattern B: revenue tooling raised list prices 25-56% versus 2023
Sales enablement and conversation intelligence is the category where buyers have felt the most price pain. Gong per-seat pricing escalated meaningfully against 2023 baselines. Apollo, Outreach, and Salesloft all repriced upward through 2024-2025. The driver is a combination of inference cost (more AI features per seat), expanded data coverage, and consolidation pricing power as smaller competitors got acquired.
Buyers in this category should evaluate every renewal with a comparable-quote benchmark and a documented escalation history. The single best leverage point in a revenue-tooling renewal is "what is comparable competitor X charging for the same seat count?"
Headline finding 4: enterprise pricing is opaque by design — and 15-40% off list is the realistic range
14 of the 50 agents we track decline to publish enterprise pricing. They list "Contact us" or "Custom." From buyer quotes in our network, the realistic discount range off published Business-tier list price (when applied to an Enterprise seat count above 250) is 15% to 40%, weighted by:
- Term length. Three-year contracts unlock the highest discounts. Twelve-month is the floor.
- Volume. The biggest jump is at the 1,000-seat threshold. Above 5,000 seats, vendors flex on commercial terms (BAA, SLA, prepay credit) rather than per-seat list.
- Prepay. Annual prepay (versus quarterly invoicing) typically lands a 5-10% additional discount.
- Competitive table. A documented competing quote from a credible vendor (Anthropic if you're at OpenAI; OpenAI if you're at Anthropic; Google if you're at either) is the single biggest lever.
- Strategic significance. Logo value matters. Vendors will discount more aggressively for a customer they want to feature.
This is consistent with broader procurement research from Gartner on enterprise SaaS negotiation, and it lines up with the 30-40% off-list discount band we have observed in enterprise contracts for traditional productivity SaaS for the past decade. AI agents are not yet exempt.
Headline finding 5: the free tier is winning
36 of the 50 agents we track offer a usable free tier — defined as a tier that can complete a non-trivial workflow without immediately hitting a paywall. This is a structural change from 2023, when only 22 of the equivalent agent list had real free tiers. The driver is competition for the prosumer funnel: vendors expect 1-3% of free users to convert to paid within 90 days, and a vendor without a free tier is invisible on top-of-funnel listicles, AI tool directories, and AI search Overviews.
For buyers, this is unambiguously good news — almost every agent in this list can be evaluated for two weeks without a procurement-ticket. The vendors that do not offer a free tier (mostly enterprise-only verticals like Harvey and Rogo) compensate with white-glove pilots.
The full index by category
Below is the per-category summary across the 50 agents we track. Click through to each agent's individual review for the full plan-by-plan price table, the credit math, and our methodology score.
General-purpose LLMs (8 agents)
| Agent | Free | Prosumer | Business | Enterprise (verified band) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Yes | $20 | $25-$30 | $60-$100 |
| Claude | Yes | $20 | $25-$125 | Custom |
| Gemini | Yes | $19.99 | $22+ | Custom |
| Microsoft Copilot | Yes | $20 | $30 + base license | $30 + base license |
| Perplexity | Yes | $20 | $40 | Custom |
| DeepSeek | Yes | Free + API | API tiers | API tiers |
| Grok | Limited | $30 (X Premium+) | Custom | Custom |
| Cohere | API | API tiers | API tiers | Custom |
Coding agents (8 agents)
Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Replit, Windsurf, v0, Bolt, Devin, and Claude Code anchor this category. Median Pro tier: $20. Median Business: $25. Devin sits as the outlier at $500/month for the autonomous agent plan, reflecting compute and persistent-state pricing. See our Cursor review, GitHub Copilot review, and Windsurf pricing deep-dive for the per-credit math.
Design and creative AI (7 agents)
Midjourney, DALL-E, Runway, Adobe Firefly, Synthesia, ElevenLabs, and Canva AI. Pricing diverges from the $20 norm because video and high-resolution image generation are expensive. Runway Standard sits at $15-$35; Synthesia Personal at $29; ElevenLabs Creator at $22. See our Runway ML review for the multi-model breakdown.
Customer support and sales (10 agents)
Intercom Fin, Zendesk AI, Apollo, Outreach, Salesloft, Gong, Drift, Freshdesk Freddy, HubSpot AI, and Salesforce Einstein. This is the category with the highest year-over-year escalation: +25-56% versus 2023 baselines across the leaders. List pricing typically lands $50-$200/seat/month, with consolidation pricing pressure on the buyer side. See our Gong AI review for the per-seat band detail.
Vertical agents — legal and finance (7 agents)
Paxton AI, Lexis+ AI, Westlaw Precision, Harvey, Rogo, Numeric, FloQast. Floor pricing is meaningfully higher because of data-licensing cost (Lexis/Westlaw), proprietary domain training (Harvey, Rogo), or team-baseline pricing (Numeric, FloQast). See our Paxton AI review and Rogo AI review.
Workflow orchestration (10 agents)
n8n, Zapier, Make.com, Workato, Microsoft Power Automate, Gumloop, Cassidy, Lindy, Relevance, and Vellum. Pricing models split between per-execution (n8n), per-operation/credit (Make, Zapier, Cassidy), and per-flow (Power Automate). See our n8n pricing breakdown and Gumloop review.
Three buyer takeaways for the rest of 2026
1. Negotiate the credit pool, not just the seat. If your vendor uses a credit model, the credit pool is where the next price hike will be hidden. Lock the credit allowance in the contract, not just the seat price. If you can't, build a quarterly true-up provision so a tightening doesn't surprise your finance team mid-fiscal.
2. Use the comparable-quote leverage. The mainstream LLM market is competitive enough that a credible competing quote moves the needle. Every renewal conversation we have seen in 2026 where the buyer brought a verified competing quote ended with a meaningful concession. Procurement teams that do not run a parallel evaluation are leaving 10-25% on the table.
3. Watch escalation, not just price. The single best predictor of next year's bill is this year's escalation rate. Demand that vendors publish year-over-year per-seat list price changes for the past three years. The vendors that have raised list 30%+ annually will do it again. The vendors that have held steady can be trusted on roadmap commitments. This is the single highest-leverage diligence item we recommend to enterprise buyers.
Use the index to anchor your next AI agent purchase.
Pricing guide Compare alternatives Read the TCO playbookFrequently asked questions
What is the AI Agent Pricing Index?
The AI Agent Pricing Index is an AI Agent Square research dataset tracking the published, list, and verified-quote prices of 50 leading AI agents across consumer, prosumer, business, and enterprise tiers. It updates quarterly so buyers, procurement teams, and analysts can benchmark per-seat costs, hidden credit costs, and year-over-year escalation.
What is the median per-seat price for a business-tier AI agent in 2026?
Across the 50 agents we track, the median business-tier per-seat price in 2026 is $25 per user per month, with enterprise tiers clustering at $30 to $60 per user per month. The notable outliers are vertical agents — legal AI ($199-$299/user) and finance AI ($2,000+/month team baselines) — which carry premium pricing for specialized data and citation guarantees.
How much have AI agent prices changed year over year?
Mainstream copilot pricing has been remarkably stable — ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, and Microsoft Copilot Pro all sit at $20-$30 per user per month for the second year running. Where prices have moved sharply is in usage-metered tiers and enterprise add-ons, where prompt-credit allowances tightened by 15-25% on average and overage pricing rose accordingly. Gong, Apollo, and other revenue-tooling vendors have raised list prices 25-56% versus 2023 baselines.
Why are credit-based AI pricing models so common?
Credit-based pricing lets vendors price for inference cost — the dominant variable cost of running an LLM-backed agent. Per-seat pricing alone forces vendors to socialize heavy-user inference across light users, which is unprofitable. Credit models also let vendors price by task complexity. The trade-off for buyers is unpredictability — a heavy month can cost 3x a light month under credits, where seats are flat.
How should buyers use this index?
Treat the index as a starting benchmark, not a final quote. Public list pricing is the ceiling — enterprise buyers routinely negotiate 15-40% off list for annual prepay, multi-year, or volume above 250 seats. Use the index to spot category-level outliers, anchor your negotiation, and quantify the credit-versus-seat trade for your specific workload. The index also surfaces escalation history, which is the single biggest leverage point in renewal conversations.
Sources & further reading
- Microsoft 365 Copilot Enterprise pricing — microsoft.com
- Claude pricing breakdown (CloudZero) — cloudzero.com
- Enterprise AI comparison (IntuitionLabs) — intuitionlabs.ai
- ChatGPT cost analysis (CloudZero) — cloudzero.com
- Tactiq pricing comparison — tactiq.io