How to read an AI pricing page: six patterns, fourteen vendors
Over one week we priced fourteen AI vendors across six categories, reading every figure from the vendor's own page. The same six patterns turned up almost every time, and not one of them is the number printed in the largest font.
- Find out what is being counted before you compare anything. We recorded ten different meters across fourteen vendors, and prices of different units are not comparable.
- The binding limit is rarely the headline number. Sellerboard's entry plan allows 3,000 orders and 150 emails. Submagic caps video length, not video count.
- "Unlimited" nearly always carries a qualifier in the same sentence or a footnote: slow, selected models, or fair usage with no published figure.
- The free tier's real limit is often not a quantity at all but a withheld right: privacy, a commercial licence, or the ability to keep your own export.
- Rollover, where it is published, has always been capped at 3x the monthly allowance. Three vendors, three categories, three different units, same number.
The six checks, in order
Ordered by how much money each one tends to be worth, not by how obvious it is. Every example below was read from a vendor's own pricing page in August 2026 and is linked to the full working.
Before any comparison, identify the unit. In one week we recorded ten: credits, AI credits, priority credits, Fast Tokens, characters, minutes of audio, minutes of video, videos per month, orders per month, recruiter seats, company headcount and annual revenue band. Two figures are only comparable if they price the same noun.
Most plans carry more than one limit, presented with equal visual weight, and only one of them will bind you. Work out which, then price only that. This is the check that most often changes which plan you should buy.
An allowance without a conversion rate cannot be turned into work before you pay. Most vendors publish the first and withhold the second, so a credit total on its own tells you nothing.
Frequently not a quantity. The paid feature is often the removal of a restriction the vendor chose to add, which never appears in a comparison of allowances and decides whether the free tier is usable at all.
Read the rest of the sentence and then the footnote. In this market the word almost always means unlimited-slow, unlimited-on-a-subset, or unlimited-until-we-say-otherwise.
Two multiplications settle it. Some advertised savings are exact, some attach to something other than the billing period, and occasionally the entry plan is the worst purchase on the page.
Ten meters, six categories
The full list of what these vendors count, which is the single most useful thing to know before opening a comparison table.
| Category | Vendor | Meters | Publishes a rate? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Presentations | Gamma | AI credits | No |
| Plus AI | credits | Yes, 40 to 170 per task | |
| Beautiful.ai | no unit | Not applicable | |
| Image generation | Ideogram | priority credits | No |
| Leonardo | Fast Tokens | No | |
| Voice and audio | ElevenLabs | credits, one shared pool | Yes, seven rates |
| Short-form video | OpusClip | credits | No |
| Submagic | videos, minutes and AI credits | No | |
| VEED | credits | Yes, 4 per AI video | |
| Podcasting | Podsqueeze | minutes of podcast time | Unit is self-explanatory |
| Recruiting | Manatal | recruiter seats, jobs per account | Unit is self-explanatory |
| Workable | company headcount | Unit is self-explanatory | |
| Amazon seller tools | Helium 10 | annual revenue band | Unit is self-explanatory |
| Sellerboard | orders per month, emails per month | Unit is self-explanatory |
The one number that keeps repeating
Of everything measured this week, the strangest finding is a convergence nobody advertises.
Maximum accumulated allowance, as a multiple of the monthly quota. Three vendors, three categories, three different units.
Leonardo's is the one that proves it deliberate: its Token Bank is 25,500 on a plan granting 8,500 a month, 75,000 on 25,000, and 180,000 on 60,000. Three tiers, three different numbers, every one exactly three months of that tier's own allowance. All three vendors condition it on staying subscribed, and none extends it to a free plan.
Why the price is the half that does not move
One structural observation that explains most of the patterns above.
A published price is sticky. Raising it is visible to every existing customer, it generates coverage, and it prompts cancellations. An allowance has neither property. If an operation that used to cost 40 credits starts costing 90, your effective cost has more than doubled and the number on the pricing page has not moved by a cent. Nobody issues a changelog for that, and no comparison site tracks it.
This is not an accusation. Metering compute genuinely is hard, costs really do vary by orders of magnitude between a short prompt and a long video render, and a credit is a reasonable abstraction over that. But it has a side effect that falls entirely on the buyer, and it is why every check on this page is aimed at the allowance rather than the price.
How this was compiled
Every figure cited here was read from the vendor's own published pricing page between 25 and 26 August 2026 and excludes tax. Nothing is estimated, modelled, or taken from a third-party comparison. Where a vendor's page could not be read, whether through bot protection or JavaScript-only rendering, no figure is published and the vendor is named as unread rather than counted as absent.
Each pattern above links to the full working, including the plan tables, the arithmetic and the vendors that could not be priced.
This page ages faster than most. Allowances, caps and rates move more quietly than prices do, which is the entire argument and therefore also the expiry condition. If a figure here no longer matches the vendor's own page, the vendor's page is right and this one is stale.