Pricing and Free Tiers

The good news: all four have genuinely useful free tiers. The bad news: the free tiers all have limits that push you toward a paid plan if you use them seriously.

Side-by-side pricing

What the free tiers actually give you

Gemini's free tier is the most generous. It includes voice mode (Gemini Live), image generation, and up to five deep research reports per month — features the other three lock behind paid plans. If you're mainly curious and want to explore without spending money, Gemini gives you the most to work with for free.

ChatGPT's free tier gives you GPT-4o with daily limits on messages and file uploads. It includes limited image creation, limited memory, and a limited number of deep research reports per month — enough to try the features, but with caps that push heavier users toward a paid plan. Advanced voice requires paying.

Claude's free tier includes web search, file uploads, Artifacts (a canvas for writing and code), and memory across conversations. The daily usage limit is more restrictive than the others, so heavy users will hit it faster.

Copilot's free tier is built into Windows 11 and the Edge browser, making it the most frictionless to access for anyone already in the Microsoft ecosystem. It offers GPT-4o conversations, limited image creation, voice mode, web search, and up to 5 deep research reports per month at no cost — comparable to ChatGPT's free tier in scope.

Ads on the free tiers

Both ChatGPT and Copilot show ads to free users. ChatGPT began testing ads in early 2026 — they appear at the bottom of answers when there's a relevant sponsored product. Copilot's free tier personalizes ads using your conversation history, similar to how Bing works. Claude and Gemini show no ads. Paying for any plan removes ads on ChatGPT and Copilot.

The $20/month tier

For most people, the ~$20/month paid option is the right choice if you decide to pay at all:

• ChatGPT Plus ($20/month) — More GPT-4o, image generation, access to reasoning models, basic voice mode, some deep research.
• Claude Pro ($20/month) — About 5x the free tier capacity, access to the full Opus model, priority access, and Claude Code.
• Gemini AI Pro ($19.99/month) — Full Gemini Pro with a 1 million token context window, 20 deep research sessions per day, 2 TB of Google One storage. The best value if you use Google products heavily.
• Microsoft 365 Premium (~$20/month) — Includes Copilot plus the full Microsoft 365 suite (Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, OneDrive). If you're already paying for Microsoft 365, Copilot may be included or available as an add-on.

Higher tiers

All four now offer $100–$200/month plans aimed at heavy professional users:

• ChatGPT Pro ($200/month) — Effectively unlimited access including the most advanced reasoning models.
• Claude Max ($100–$200/month) — Expanded capacity for power users who regularly hit Pro limits.
• Gemini AI Ultra ($99.99/month) — 5x the limits of AI Pro, including the most capable Gemini models.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot Enterprise (~$30/user/month) — Full Microsoft 365 with enterprise data protection and deep integration across all Microsoft apps.

For most personal users, these tiers are overkill. They're built for people running AI as a core part of their professional workflow.

What you're trading on the free tiers

Beyond ads, free-tier conversations on most platforms may be used to improve the underlying model, unless you opt out. All four allow you to turn off conversation history or opt out of training data use — but none of them make this the default. It's worth spending five minutes in the privacy settings of whichever tool you use. For a deeper look at what each company does with your data, see the next lesson.