Costs of using proprietary models

Subscriptions

Most big AI companies offer a free version with limitations. When you hit the free limit you either have to wait for it to reset or switch to a smaller model automatically.

For example, with ChatGPT-5.5, free users can send up to ~10 messages every 5 hours on the Thinking model, then they are switched to the smaller version of the model until the limit resets.

Both Claude and ChatGPT cost roughly $A30/month for the personal paid plan or around $300/month for serious or business users.

For developers

For developers building apps, their programs send requests to the LLM and get a response back (called API calls).

The cost is per 1 million (M) tokens input (what you write) and output (what the model writes back), not per month.

These prices can change when companies release new models or make their systems cheaper to run.

The table below shows the cost of using the most popular four Claude models (from Anthropic), as of June 2026. The cost is per 1 million tokens and the price is in US Dollars (USD).