Each of these is real, recent, and reproducible. Sources are linked where the vendor publishes a number; the rest come from the operator's 14 months on Claude Pro plus the discord channels of every team that hit the wall before you did.
Every frontier subscription throttles in 5-hour rolling windows. The throttle is not a soft warning, it is a hard pause in the middle of a refactor.
Card on file, phone number, IP. The billing trail is a discovery surface. If your work touches a regulator, a competitor, or an NDA-covered customer, that surface is now part of your threat model.
You hit Sonnet's reasoning wall on a thorny diff and you want to ask Opus or GPT-5.5 the same question. With a Claude or OpenAI subscription, you can't. You'd need a second account, a second card, a second login.
You already pay Anthropic direct, OpenRouter, maybe a Together credit. None of the consumer subscriptions let you point them at your existing keys, so you pay twice: once for the subscription, again for the spillover.
Cursor's "you used your fast quota" notification arrives somewhere between commit and pull request. ChatGPT's "switch to GPT-4o" downgrade message arrives during the demo.
Anthropic and OpenAI both route through US infrastructure. The DPAs they offer are governed by US law and US discovery. If your customer's procurement form asks for EEA-only processing, the consumer subscriptions cannot honour it.
Numbers verified 2026-05-22 against each vendor's published pricing page. Where a vendor publishes a token allowance, we used it; where they publish a request count instead, we noted that. This is the table for the casual-to-prosumer crowd. If you are paying $100+ a month, scroll past this one to the heavy-use matrix below.
| Product | Price | Token budget | Models | KYC? | Crypto? | BYO keys? | Cancel anytime? | EU residency? | Real pain point |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Pro | $20 / mo | ~5x free; 5-hour caps | Anthropic only | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | Locked to Anthropic; weekly Opus throttle; US-only processing |
| Claude Max | From $100 / mo | 5x or 20x Pro, your choice at signup; still session-capped | Anthropic only | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | Even the 20x tier still hits 5-hour caps; Agent SDK credit helps but you cannot route around Anthropic |
| Cursor Pro | $20 / mo | Usage-based fast-request credits; exact monthly count not published, then throttled to slow mode | Cursor's curated set | Yes | No | Partial | Yes | No | Fast-request allowance is not published in raw numbers, making it hard to budget; overage can run well past the base $20; BYO key only for OpenAI/Anthropic |
| GitHub Copilot Indiv | $10 / mo (also Free at $0, Pro+ $39, Max $100) | Unlimited completions; chat/premium requests capped and scale with tier | GitHub's set | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | IDE-locked; chat model swaps without notice; four tiers now exist and the jump from $10 to $39 or $100 is steep |
| ChatGPT Plus | $20 / mo | GPT-5.5 capped, falls back to GPT-4o | OpenAI only | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | Silent downgrade to weaker model when caps hit; OpenAI lock-in; no API parity |
| Windsurf (Codeium) Pro | $20 / mo (raised from $15 on Mar-19-2026) | Daily + weekly quotas (numeric figures not public) | Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.4, SWE-1.5 | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | Quota system replaced credits Mar 2026; numeric caps undisclosed; meters can blank a workday with no warning |
| llmdeal Pro | $119 / mo | 50M tokens included, overage $4 / 1M | Smart-routed across 6 open-weight models + Frontier add-on | No | BTC / XMR / LTC | Yes, $19 add-on (free on $100+ plans) | Yes, by not renewing | Yes, EEA GPU routing on request | None of the above. OpenAI-compatible endpoint, your code does not change. |
Sources: anthropic.com, openai.com, cursor.sh, github.com/features/copilot, codeium.com, llmdeal.me/pricing.html. Last verified 2026-05-22.
If your AI bill clears $100 a month, the comparison changes. You are now in territory where Claude Max, ChatGPT Pro, Cursor Business with multiple seats, API-direct spend, and stacked subscriptions all compete. The interesting question is no longer "which subscription is best" but "how many subscriptions am I paying for and what do they actually deliver." Same data discipline as the entry table: every figure traced to the vendor's pricing page or, where blocked by anti-bot, to two aggregator cross-checks. Verified 2026-05-22.
| Product | Price | Token budget | Models | Rate limits | KYC? | Crypto? | BYO keys? | Cancel? | EU residency? | Real pain point |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Max | From $100 / mo (5x); $200 / mo for 20x | ~88K tokens / 5-hour window on 5x; ~220K tokens / 5-hour window on 20x | Anthropic only (Sonnet, Opus, Haiku) | 5-hour rolling buckets on both tiers; weekly Opus cap; chat and Claude Code share the same bucket | Card on file | No | No | Yes | No | Peak-hour throttling Anthropic openly admits to. Even the 20x tier stays capacity-gated; chat eats the same bucket as Claude Code. |
| ChatGPT Pro | From $100 / mo | 5x or 20x Plus's 5-hour bucket, your choice; 20x adds 250 Deep Research runs / mo | OpenAI only; ~1M token context on 20x (~680 pages) | 5x or 20x Plus across all model classes, picked at signup; Deep Research a separate monthly cap on 20x | Card on file | No | No | Yes | No | The "5x/20x Plus" framing is relative, not absolute — you don't know the underlying token volume. Still capacity-gated at peak on either tier. No refund outside EU/UK/Turkey. No crypto. |
| Perplexity Max | $200 / mo ($167 / mo if paid annually) | Unlimited Labs + Perplexity Computer; 300+ Pro Searches/day baseline | Multi: GPT-5.5, Sonnet 4.6, Sonar Large, Grok | "Unlimited" Labs (soft-capped); daily Pro Search ceiling unchanged from Pro | Card on file | No | No | Yes | No | Search-first product. Useful for research, weak for sustained code generation. Same $200 ceiling as Claude/ChatGPT top tiers. |
| Google AI Ultra | From $99.99 / mo (5x); $199.99 / mo for 20x | Gemini 3.1 Pro + Veo + NotebookLM Pro; daily caps not public | Google only (Gemini 3.1 Pro) | Daily/monthly caps on Veo + Deep Research not enumerated in numeric terms; usage scales with the 5x/20x tier picked | Google account | No | No | Yes | Workspace data only | Locked to Google ecosystem, now split into two tiers like Claude Max and ChatGPT Pro. The Workspace bundle inflates perceived value if you don't need 2 TB Drive. |
| SuperGrok Heavy | $300 / mo | Grok 4 Heavy multi-agent + 256K context + parallel test-time compute | xAI only (Grok 4 Heavy) | Highest priority access; soft caps on image gen ("unlimited" with throttling after 50 to 100 rapid gens) | X / grok.com account | No | No | Yes | No | 10x price jump from SuperGrok ($30) to Heavy ($300) with no middle tier. Non-refundable per xAI ToS. |
| Cursor Teams (3 seats) | $40 / user, 3 seats = $120 / mo | Credit-based per seat (post Jun 2025 overhaul) | Cursor's curated set + BYO partial | 1 req/min, 30/hour API-layer; effective request count cut ~55% in Jun 2025 overhaul | Card per org | No | Partial | Yes | No | HN-documented "$350 in one week" overage cases. CEO publicly acknowledged "mishandling" the Jun 2025 rollout. Credit-to-request ratio is opaque. |
| Copilot Business (5 seats) | $19 / user, 5 seats = $95 / mo | $19 in AI Credits per seat / mo (post Jun 1 2026 overhaul) | Multi: GPT-5.5, Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3.1, others | Code completion unmetered; chat / agent / premium models burn AI Credits at per-model rate | GitHub org | No | No | Yes | No | Pro signups paused April 20 2026. Usage-based billing starts June 1 2026. Users are bracing for overage surprises. |
| Copilot Enterprise (5 seats) | $39 / user, 5 seats = $195 / mo | $39 in AI Credits per seat / mo | Multi-model + custom org models | Per-seat AI Credit budget; org-level overage | GitHub org | No | No | Yes | No | Doubles the per-seat cost vs Business for SSO, audit logs, and policy controls. Pricing model changes June 1 2026. |
| Codeium Teams (4 seats) | $80 team fee + $40 / seat, 4 seats = $240 / mo | Daily + weekly quotas per seat (numeric figures undisclosed) | Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.4, SWE-1.5 | Quota meters refresh automatically; no numeric figures published since March 19 2026 overhaul | Card per org | No | No | Yes | No | Quota meters can blank a workday with no warning. Numeric caps are not disclosed. |
| Tabnine Enterprise (5 seats) | $39 / user, 5 seats = $195 / mo | Not strictly metered; bandwidth-limited | Multi (Claude, GPT, Mistral) on Enterprise; in-house on Pro | Soft bandwidth limits | Business verification on enterprise contracts | No | Air-gapped option on Enterprise | Annual on Enterprise | Private deployment option | Multi-model only at Enterprise tier. In-house Tabnine models perceived as weaker than frontier in Reddit threads. |
| OpenAI API direct (100M tokens / mo) | ~$3,000 / mo (50M in @ $10 + 50M out @ $50, flagship rate) | Pay-per-token, no monthly bundle | GPT-6 Astra ($10/M in, $50/M out, flagship); GPT-5.6 Sol promo tier ($4/M in, $20/M out) | Tier 1-5 system; new accounts hit aggressive RPM/TPM caps; spend history unlocks higher tiers | Account verify for Tier 4/5 | No | Direct API | N/A | No | GPT-6 Astra runs $10/$50 per 1M at the flagship tier. Pre-paid credits non-refundable. No crypto. |
| Anthropic API direct (100M tokens / mo) | ~$600 / mo (50M in @ $2 + 50M out @ $10) on Sonnet 5 standard rate | Pay-per-token; batch 50% off; prompt cache up to 90% off | Sonnet 5 ($2/$10), Opus 5 ($5/$25), Claude Fable 5.1 / Mythos 5.1 ($10/$50, top tier), Haiku 4.5 ($1/$5) | Tier system gates higher limits behind cumulative spend | Account verify for higher tiers | No | Direct API | N/A | No | Fable/Mythos 5.1 is 5x the Sonnet 5 price. No crypto. No native consolidation with your OpenAI / Together / OpenRouter spend. |
| OpenRouter (100M tokens / mo) | ~$950 to $1,320 / mo (Sonnet 4.6 + 5.5% credit fee) | Pay-as-you-go credits | 300+ models across providers | Provider-specific; pooled rate limits across OR routes | None | BTC/ETH via Stripe Crypto (5% fee) | Yes (5% surcharge over 1M reqs/mo) | N/A | No | 5.5% credit-purchase fee compounds. Crypto path is Stripe Crypto, not native (technically KYC at the gateway). |
| Entry stack (Claude Pro + Cursor + Copilot) | $50 / mo | Three separate buckets, no consolidation | Anthropic + Cursor's curated set + GitHub's set | Three independent throttles to track | Three cards on file | No | No | Yes (three cancels) | No | Three logins, three bills, three rate limits. Workload doesn't move across them. |
| Light pro stack (Max 5x + Cursor + Copilot Business) | ~$159 / mo (Max 5x $100 + Cursor 1 seat $40 + Copilot Business 1 seat $19) | Three buckets again, none consolidated | Anthropic + Cursor's set + GitHub's set | Three independent throttles, the Max 5x one is the binding constraint for chat work | Three cards on file | No | No | Yes (three cancels) | No | You are paying for Claude twice over (Max 5x for chat, the Anthropic Claude calls inside Cursor and Copilot). No single point of cost control. |
| Team stack (Max 20x + Cursor Teams 3 + Codeium Teams 3) | ~$410 / mo (Max 20x $200 + Cursor Teams 3 seats $120 + Codeium Teams 3 seats $90) | Three buckets, three vendor portals | Anthropic + Cursor's set + Codeium's set | All three throttle independently | Three cards on file | No | No | Yes (three cancels) | No | Three procurement reviews, three SSO setups, three bills. Workload doesn't move across the boundaries. |
| llmdeal Pro | $119 / mo | 50M smart-routed tokens; overage $4 / 1M | 6 open-weight via Groq/Cerebras/NIM + Frontier Credits add-on for Claude/GPT-5.5 | Fixed-window slot, no peak-hour silent squeeze | None | BTC / XMR / LTC | Free on this tier | By not renewing | EEA GPU on request | None of the above. OpenAI-compatible endpoint, your code does not change. |
| llmdeal Elite | $159 / mo | 100M tokens + 128K context standard | All 6 open-weight + Frontier Credits add-on | Fixed slot, no degradation under load; reserved capacity headroom | None | BTC / XMR / LTC | Free on this tier | By not renewing | EEA GPU on request | Apples-to-apples vs Claude Max 20x / ChatGPT Pro Max at the same $200 ceiling. Twice the budget and you can swap models mid-request. |
| llmdeal EU-Sovereign | $199 / mo | 60M EU-only tokens + signed GDPR Article 28 DPA | All 6 open-weight, EEA-resident routing only | Fixed slot | None | BTC / XMR / LTC | Free on this tier | By not renewing | EEA-only with DPA | For the procurement form that asks "EEA-only processing, signed DPA, no US discovery surface." None of the consumer subscriptions can sign this. |
| llmdeal Business | $499 / mo | 300M tokens + reserved capacity pool | All 6 open-weight + Frontier Credits add-on | Reserved slice, no shared-tenancy throttle | None | BTC / XMR / LTC | Free on this tier | By not renewing | EEA or US, your call | For the 5-to-10 person team currently stacking Cursor Teams, Copilot Business, and Claude Max 5x for a heavy user. |
| llmdeal Scale | $1,999 / mo | 1.5B tokens + 99.5% SLA | All 6 open-weight + Frontier Credits add-on | Reserved capacity, formal SLA | None | BTC / XMR / LTC | Free on this tier | By not renewing | EEA or US, your call | For the customer currently spending $900 to $1,750 a month on OpenAI / Anthropic API direct with no slot, no consolidation, no SLA. |
| llmdeal Consortium Pro | $99 / mo | Community-routed inference · 25-50% off open-weight rates | consortium-llama-70b / consortium-qwen-coder / consortium-qwen-235b — community-hosted boxes, automatic fall-back to LiteLLM if unhealthy | rpm=1200 · tpm=5M · max_parallel=200 (highest we ship; consortium pool absorbs the load) | None | BTC / XMR / LTC | Free on this tier | By not renewing | EEA or US, your call | For developers who want the cheapest possible open-weight inference and don't mind that someone else's GPU under their desk is doing the work. Capacity-limited — gated tier on purpose. |
| llmdeal Fleet | $519 / mo | All consortium open-weights at priority-queue throughput | Smart-route + Llama 70B / Qwen3-235B / Qwen3-Coder-480B / Nemotron / Maverick | max_parallel=20 · rpm=120 · tpm=200k · priority queue | None | BTC / XMR / LTC | Free on this tier | By not renewing | EEA or US, your call | For the small team running a real product on open weights who want consolidated billing, priority queue, and 5 separate project keys for staging / prod / mobile / web. |
| llmdeal Fleet Plus | $959 / mo | Fleet + 60M frontier credits/mo (Sonnet / GPT-5.5 / Gemini Pro) | Everything in Fleet + the frontier reference set | max_parallel=40 · rpm=240 · tpm=400k · cache-priority · 24h priority support | None | BTC / XMR / LTC | Free on this tier | By not renewing | EEA or US, your call | Production SaaS doing agentic coding or RAG where 5–10% of calls genuinely need the frontier and 90% can ride open-weight — Fleet Plus prices both correctly. |
| llmdeal Burst Day | $129 one-time | 8M tokens, any model — frontier included — within 24h window | Full catalog including Claude Sonnet 4.6 / GPT-5.5 / Gemini Pro | 24h at Fleet-tier limits · stacks with any subscription | None | BTC / XMR / LTC | Free on this tier | No-op — one-off | EEA or US, your call | A Sunday-afternoon batch sweep · a benchmark across all your prompts · a one-day codebase migration. Cheaper than a $99 Claude Pro month for someone who just needs the capacity once. |
Sources: claude.com/pricing, chatgpt.com/pricing, perplexity.ai/pro, gemini.google/subscriptions, grok.com/plans, cursor.com/pricing, github.com/features/copilot/plans, windsurf.com/pricing, tabnine.com/pricing, openai.com/api/pricing, platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing, openrouter.ai/pricing, llmdeal.me/pricing.html. Last verified 2026-05-22. Wholesale-token totals computed at the vendor's published per-million rate with a 50/50 input/output split unless otherwise noted; your real workload will skew.
Three real combinations we see in inbound DMs. Numbers are computed against the same published vendor rates as the matrix above; we round honestly. We are not trying to make every stack look like a save. The third example is a case where llmdeal costs more in dollars and the trade is volume plus consolidation, not raw price.
$100 + $40 + $19 = $159 / mo today
Switch to Pro $119 + Frontier Credits add-on $89 = $239 / mo. BYO Keys included free at this tier, so your existing Anthropic key handles the closed-weight prompts directly without a markup hop. Three subscriptions collapse into one OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
$200 (Cursor Teams 5) + $95 (Copilot Business 5) + $100 (Claude Max 5x) = $395 / mo today
Switch to Business $499 / mo. 300M tokens shared across the team, BYO Anthropic key keeps the existing Claude relationship in your name, reserved capacity pool means no peak-hour squeeze. Unified billing, one procurement review.
50M input @ $3/M + 50M output @ $15/M = ~$900 / mo wholesale, plus tier-system rate limits
Switch to Scale $1,999 / mo. 1.5B tokens (15x the volume), reserved capacity slot, 99.5% SLA, BYO Anthropic key still available for the Sonnet-specific prompts via Frontier Credits add-on, crypto checkout if you prefer. EEA or US-resident routing, your call.
No comparison page deserves trust until it admits the cases where it isn't the right answer. Here are four.
27 SKUs from $0 to $5,999/mo. Same OpenAI-compatible endpoint across all of them. Pick the bundle that matches your workload, switch tiers by emailing us, cancel by not renewing.
What you get on every tier: no KYC, no card on file, crypto checkout in BTC, XMR, or LTC, OpenAI-compatible endpoint that drops into any OpenAI SDK without code changes, smart routing across Groq, Cerebras, and NVIDIA NIM, your choice of EU-resident or US-resident processing, and the ability to bring your own provider keys to consolidate spend. Open-weight stack means Llama 3.3 70B, Qwen3-235B, GPT-OSS-120B, Nemotron-Super-120B, Llama-4-Maverick, Qwen3-Coder-480B, and more, all swappable in one request. The Frontier Credits add-on (live 2026-06-15) routes specific prompts to Claude and GPT-5.5 when you need the closed-weight frontier on top.
Worked-out switches for the four combinations we see most often in inbound DMs. Numbers are conservative.
switch to →
Mix Pack $49 with 25M tokens + smart-route across Qwen3-Coder, Llama 3.3 70B, and DeepSeek V3.2, plus the BYO Keys add-on $19 so your existing Anthropic key handles the hard prompts.
switch to →
Pro $119 + Frontier Credits $89 add-on. 50M smart-routed tokens, 5M Frontier credits for Claude/GPT-5.5, BYO Keys included free.
switch to →
Business $499 / mo. 300M tokens shared across the team, reserved capacity pool, BYO Anthropic key included free so the team's existing Claude relationship stays in your org's name.
switch to →
Scale $1,999 with smart-route across the open-weight stack + dedicated rate-limit pool + 99.5% SLA. Below that, Fleet Plus $959 covers production SaaS that needs ~60M frontier tokens/month with cache-priority and 24h-priority support. For one-off heavy days, Burst Day $129 stacks with anything.
The trust angle, because every "no KYC crypto" pitch deserves a hard look at the business model.
We do not sell your data. We do not log prompts. We do not run a training pipeline on what you send. We make money the boring way: on the spread between what an open-weight model costs us to host (or to route through a wholesale provider like Groq, Cerebras, or NVIDIA NIM) and what we charge you per token. The Pro tier's 50M-token bundle has roughly a 45 to 55 percent gross margin at current prices, which is below what Anthropic or OpenAI run at, because we are not paying for a brand and we are not paying for ChatGPT.com's consumer surface.
200,000 tokens, no card, no KYC, no follow-up email asking for ID. Point any OpenAI SDK at https://llmdeal.me/v1 and you are in.