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State of AI prices: October 2026

What an AI tool's cheapest paid plan costs, category by category, read off the vendors' own pricing pages by the INITE Atlas. One snapshot a month.
· Snapshot of October 2026 · Converted to US dollars at the ECB rate of October 30, 2026

State of AI prices

median cheapest paid plan
$20/mo
tools with a monthly price
12,491
name a free plan
49%
priced by usage
9%

The Atlas has a monthly paid price for 12,491 of the 19,452 AI tools whose pricing page it read. Their cheapest paid plan costs $20/mo at the median, and the middle half pays between $9.99/mo and $49/mo. 49% name a free plan; 9% charge by usage. The dearest category by median is Sales ($41/mo), the cheapest Knowledge ($9.99/mo). Categories shown: 18, each with at least 15 priced tools.

Cheapest paid plan per month, in US dollars, by category
CategoryMedianMiddle halfPriced toolsFree planBy usage
All tools$20/mo$9.99/mo – $49/mo12,49149%9%
Marketing$25/mo$13/mo – $49/mo1,97652%8%
Developer tools$19/mo$9.99/mo – $32/mo1,84261%11%
Automation$20/mo$9.99/mo – $45/mo1,19553%7%
Sales$41/mo$20/mo – $99/mo48242%6%
Finance$20/mo$9.94/mo – $42/mo46253%7%
Analytics$29/mo$15/mo – $79/mo44355%5%
Security$19/mo$9/mo – $49/mo28656%6%
Support$29/mo$19/mo – $55/mo28142%9%
HR$26/mo$10/mo – $90/mo25051%10%
Agents$25/mo$10/mo – $49/mo22553%5%
Meetings$12/mo$8.31/mo – $24/mo15260%6%
Legal$29/mo$18/mo – $91/mo9138%15%
Data$25/mo$12/mo – $50/mo8661%17%
Health$18/mo$8.25/mo – $49/mo8441%7%
Retrieval (RAG)$29/mo$15/mo – $74/mo7153%11%
Knowledge$9.99/mo$6.66/mo – $13/mo6268%5%
Documents$35/mo$25/mo – $65/mo1742%4%
Creative & media$20/mo$10/mo – $25/mo1568%5%
Download as CSV · CSV · 19 rows

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Cheapest and dearest, named

Only prices read twice from the tool's own pricing page are named here; a category without one shows none.

Method

The INITE Atlas reads each tool's own pricing page about once a month and records the lowest paid price, its currency and period, whether a free plan is named and whether the tool charges by usage. This page is a snapshot of those readings on the first days of the month.

A price is turned into one month of the plan: a monthly or per-seat monthly price as it is, a yearly one divided by twelve, converted to US dollars at the European Central Bank's reference rate of the day. One-time prices, prices per unit of use and currencies the ECB does not publish are left out of the medians.

A category is shown only when at least 15 of its tools have such a price; a median of a handful is one vendor's pricing, not a market's. A tool is named as the cheapest or dearest of its category only when its price was read twice and agreed. The change against the month before is of the whole shelf, so it moves with the tools the Atlas adds as well as with prices. The dearest example is taken from within the category's top tenth of prices, not its very top, which is usually an enterprise contract.

Nothing here is written by a model: the sentences are filled in from the numbers in the table.

Free to cite with a link to this page (CC BY 4.0).

Find a tool by its price in the Atlas