AI Rate CardSubscription or API: when ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro is cheaper than paying per token
Updated Nov 8, 2026
A chat subscription costs a fixed price a month; the API charges for every token. Which is cheaper depends on how much you write. The subscription or API calculator shows it for your own use, at the cheapest seller of the model and at the maker's own API.
How to use the calculator
- Subscription: pick Claude Pro or Le Chat Pro (their price comes from the plan pages we check daily) or choose "Other" and type the price.
- Model id: the model the subscription's app uses, e.g.
anthropic/claude-sonnet-5-5oropenai/gpt-5.5. - Messages a day and tokens per message. A chat app resends the conversation with every message, so a message in a mid-length chat is about 3,000 input tokens and 600 output tokens; short questions are less, long documents far more.
The table shows one message, a month (30 days) and the break-even: how many messages a day make the subscription the cheaper choice.
Two examples from today's prices
- Claude Pro ($20) vs Claude Sonnet 5.5 through the API, 3,000 / 600 tokens per message: a message costs $0.012 at Anthropic's API, so 40 messages a day is $14.40 a month - the API is cheaper below about 56 messages a day, the subscription above.
- A $20 subscription vs GPT-5.5 through the API: a message costs about $0.033 at OpenAI, so the subscription pays off from about 20 messages a day; the cheapest reseller halves that cost.
What the comparison leaves out
- Extras: a subscription includes the app, image generation, voice and file tools; the API is the model alone.
- Limits: a subscription caps heavy use; the API does not, but every message is paid.
- Caching: through the API the repeated part of a chat can be read from the cache at a lower price - see the cache and batch calculator.