What an AI coding subscription is worth
A subscription is a bet that you will use more than you pay for. The honest way to settle it is not to guess how much a plan allows — three of the four vendors below do not publish that — but to ask the question from the other end: how much coding does a plan have to absorb before it costs less than paying API rates for the same model? That sum needs only two published numbers, the plan’s price and the model’s price per token, and both are below with their sources.
The unit is one agentic coding session: 60,000 tokens in across a tool-using loop and 4,000 out — the same session priced everywhere else on this site. Long coding sessions re-send the same context, so the cached column assumes three in four input tokens come from the prompt cache, and it is the more realistic of the two.
What we will not tell you
How much usage you get if you max a plan out. Anthropic publishes “5x or 20x more usage than Pro” without saying what Pro’s session holds; OpenAI publishes “Expanded Codex usage”. Those are real limits with unpublished sizes. Figures circulating elsewhere are estimates and anecdotes, and an invented denominator would be worse than an absent one — so the limit column quotes each vendor word for word and says plainly when the number is missing.
3 of the 20 tiers here publish an allowance as money. All of them are GitHub’s, because Copilot bills in credits spent at API rates — so for those rows the ratio is arithmetic, not inference.
Claude CodeAnthropic
Claude Code and the Claude apps draw on the same allowance, so coding competes with chat. Max is billed monthly only.
Priced against Claude Opus 5.5 at $0.320 a session and Claude Haiku 5.5 at $0.008.
| Plan | Per month | Included | Break-even | With cache | What the vendor says about limits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | free | – | – | – | Claude Code not included. Free covers everyday questions(No cap of this kind published) |
| Pro$17/mo annual | $20 | – | 63 | 134 | At least 5x more usage per 5-hour session than Free(Published only as a multiple of a plan whose size is unstated) |
| Max | $100 | – | 313 | 671 | Choose 5x or 20x more usage than Pro, per rolling 5-hour session(Published only as a multiple of a plan whose size is unstated) |
Prices read from claude.com on 27 Oct 2026.
CodexOpenAI
Codex usage is bundled into the ChatGPT subscription, described in words rather than amounts. Pro covers a choice of three usage tiers from $120.
Priced against GPT-6 Astra at $0.800 a session and GPT-6 Luna at $0.008.
| Plan | Per month | Included | Break-even | With cache | What the vendor says about limits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | free | – | – | – | Limited Codex access(A limit exists; the vendor does not publish its size) |
| Go | $6 | – | 8 | 15 | No Codex allowance stated for this tier(A limit exists; the vendor does not publish its size) |
| Plus | $20 | – | 25 | 51 | Expanded Codex usage(A limit exists; the vendor does not publish its size) |
| Pro | $120 | – | 150 | 304 | Longer Codex and ChatGPT Work sessions; your choice of 3 usage tiers(A limit exists; the vendor does not publish its size) |
Prices read from chatgpt.com on 27 Oct 2026.
GitHub CopilotGitHub
The only plan here that publishes its allowance as money: GitHub AI Credits are spent at API rates, so the ratio below involves no assumptions. Credits are a base amount plus a flex allotment GitHub says may change.
Priced against GPT-6.1 Sol at $0.160 a session and Claude Sonnet 5.5 at $0.160.
| Plan | Per month | Included | Break-even | With cache | What the vendor says about limits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | free | – | – | – | Limited chat and agent usage(A limit exists; the vendor does not publish its size) |
| Pro | $10 | $15 (1.50×) | 63 | 134 | $15 per month of GitHub AI Credits ($10 base + $5 flex)(Allowance published as money) |
| Pro+ | $39 | $70 (1.79×) | 244 | 523 | $70 per month of GitHub AI Credits ($39 base + $31 flex)(Allowance published as money) |
| Max | $100 | $200 (2.00×) | 625 | 1,342 | $200 per month of GitHub AI Credits ($100 base + $100 flex)(Allowance published as money) |
Prices read from github.com on 27 Oct 2026.
OpenCodeOpenCode
Three ways to pay, only one of them a subscription. The editor itself is free with your own provider key; Console bills per request from prepaid credits; Go and Go Plus are flat monthly plans over a fixed list of mostly open models. Go is described as being primarily for international users wanting stable global access.
Priced against GLM 5.3 at $0.102 a session and Claude Haiku 5.5 at $0.008.
| Plan | Per month | Included | Break-even | With cache | What the vendor says about limits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bring your own key | free | – | – | – | You supply a provider key and pay that provider directly; OpenCode adds nothing(No cap of this kind published) |
| Console | per use | – | – | – | Charged per request from prepaid credits, plus a 4.6% + $0.31 fee on each credit purchase(No cap of this kind published) |
| Go | $10 | – | 98 | 192 | Lower-cost access to the listed models(A limit exists; the vendor does not publish its size) |
| Go Plus | $40 | – | 394 | 769 | Higher usage limits across the listed models(A limit exists; the vendor does not publish its size) |
Prices read from opencode.ai on 27 Oct 2026.
CursorxAI
The subscription buys Grok usage; the page states third-party models are offered at API list price and billed separately, so for those models a plan is worth exactly what you pay and the break-even never arrives.
Priced against Grok 4.3 at $0.085 a session and Grok 4.20 at $0.085.
| Plan | Per month | Included | Break-even | With cache | What the vendor says about limits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | free | – | – | – | Limited agent requests, limited chat requests(No cap of this kind published) |
| Plus | $8 | – | 94 | 212 | Shared AI usage pool; only Grok models on this plan(A limit exists; the vendor does not publish its size) |
| Premium | $30 | – | 353 | 794 | 4x more usage compared to Plus(Published only as a multiple of a plan whose size is unstated) |
| Super | $100 | – | 1,176 | 2,646 | 15x more usage compared to Plus(Published only as a multiple of a plan whose size is unstated) |
| Ultra | $200 | – | 2,353 | 5,291 | 50x more usage compared to Plus(Published only as a multiple of a plan whose size is unstated) |
Prices read from cursor.com on 27 Oct 2026.
How to read this
Break-even is a volume, not a verdict. If you run fewer sessions than the number in that column, the API is cheaper and a subscription is paying for headroom you are not using; if you run more, the plan wins — until you meet the limit the vendor has not published, which is the part no arithmetic can settle. Read the two break-even columns as a range: list prices at one end, heavy cache reuse at the other.
One case needs no sum at all. Cursor states that third-party models run at API list price and are billed separately, so for those models the subscription buys no token value and the break-even never arrives — what you are buying is Grok usage and the editor.
Session costs come from the same price data as the rest of the site, so they move when a provider changes its prices. See the best models for coding agents for which of these models is actually worth running.
Cite as: BenchLeader, “What an AI coding subscription is worth”, data as of 27 Oct 2026, https://www.benchleader.com/coding-plans.