Insight · 04 Nov 2026
All insights · 3 min read · 1 linked thread
The price is not the news
Nineteen of the 285 changes we logged since late July moved a price. The allowance and the model list are what actually move.
Subscribers watch the price, because it is the number on the page and the number on the invoice. On our own record it is also the number that rarely moves.
A price change is the rarest entry we log
Our ledger holds 285 entries since the end of July. Nineteen of them moved a price. The rest were model lists, usage caps, policy wording, launches and plans taken off sale.
That ratio is not a claim about generosity. It says what a provider can change without touching the invoice, which turns out to be most of the product.
It also says something about how plans are sold. A price is a single number that has to match a checkout page, an invoice and a tax line. A cap is a sentence, and sentences are easier to revise. Providers write caps as message counts, dollar pools, multipliers of a base tier, or an opaque included usage. Only the last kind can absorb a cut without the page looking different.
A roster can grow by four names in a week. A plan can lose its included third-party allowance while the headline price sits in the same place. None of that appears as a price change, and all of it changes what your money buys.
The cuts that matter arrive without a receipt
Thirty-five of the 43 entries that made a plan worse never touched the price. They removed a model, lowered a cap, withdrew a plan or added a clause to a policy. You find out from a depleted allowance or a tool that stops working, not from an announcement. A price rise gets an email. A cap cut gets a changelog line, if you are lucky.
“I immediately cancelled and went to Claude after learning Dots was their big announcement and they were halving my 20x plan.”
The pattern repeats at the top of the ladder. Cursor's top tier kept its price this autumn and lost the monthly API pool for third-party models, replaced by a shared weekly pool for Grok models. Claude renamed its top tiers without a price move and restated what they include. The invoice was the last thing to change in both cases.
Neither change was announced as a reduction. One was published as a new subscription line-up, with the old tiers frozen for existing subscribers. The other was published as a rename. A subscriber reading either announcement learned what the new plan is, not what the old one stopped being.
Price cuts are just as quiet
Eleven price moves went down and eight went up. Neither direction tells you what the plan now includes, which is why a cheaper month is not evidence of a better deal.
A provider can lower a headline price and remove the allowance that made it useful, or raise one and add a model that pays for the difference. We log both as price entries. The subscriber still has to read the rest of the record to know which happened.
Most of the price entries we hold are restatements, where a page was re-read and nothing moved. Change is the exception inside the price column too, so a quiet month there says nothing about the rest of the plan.
There is a reason to keep logging the restatements anyway. A price that survives repeated re-reads is evidence of something, and it is the only part of a plan we can check the same way every month. It just cannot carry the argument on its own.
What this record cannot tell you
We log what a provider publishes, so the mix reflects our rules as much as the market. A model added to a page counts as an improvement here whether or not anyone uses it, and a provider that changes things quietly may never reach the ledger.
Only 26 of the 104 plans in the catalog carry a plan-level entry, which is not enough to say which plan changes fastest. We can describe the shape of change. We cannot rank plans by stability, and we will not pretend otherwise.
What it would take is a record of what each subscriber used before and after a change. Nobody publishes that, and we are not going to infer it from complaints.
Watch the allowance, not the price
One check at the same point in two billing cycles tells you more than a year of price watching:
- Compare how much usage is left on the same day of the cycle. A cap cut shows up there and nowhere else.
- When a model you rely on leaves the roster, price its replacement before you renew. That is a price rise even when the number did not move.
- Save the page or invoice that states your current cap. If your plan stops being sold, that copy is your only baseline.
Check the providers named here
We do not rank plans here. Open the records and read the verified figures yourself.