AI subscriptions

The cost of AI subscriptions for a team

Five figures a year at fifty people, and no shared record of what any of it produced.

What it costs

Claude Pro lists at $20 a month, Claude Team at $25 per seat monthly or $20 annual, ChatGPT Business at $25 monthly or $20 annual, GitHub Copilot Pro at $10 a month, and Cursor Pro at $20 with Teams at $40 per user, checked 21 August 2026. A mixed ten-person team commonly pays about $4,440 a year. Polaris charges per hour delivered instead.

Claude Team: $25 monthly / $20 annual
ChatGPT Business: $25 monthly / $20 annual
Copilot Pro: $10 / month
Checked: 21 August 2026

AI subscription list prices

Read from each vendor's own pricing page on 21 August 2026. Cursor's page was only partially readable, so this table quotes only the two rates that were unambiguous on it.

Claude Free$0
Claude Pro$20 / month
Claude MaxFrom $100 / month
Claude Team, standard seat$25 / seat / month
Claude Team, premium seat$125 / seat / month
ChatGPT Plus$20 / month
ChatGPT Business, standard seat$25 / user / month
ChatGPT Business, premium seat$125 / user / month
GitHub Copilot Free$0
GitHub Copilot Pro$10 / month
GitHub Copilot Pro+$39 / month
GitHub Copilot Max$100 / month
Cursor Pro$20 / month
Cursor Teams$40 / user / month

Product and plan by monthly billing.

Product and plan	Monthly billing	Annual billing	Notes
Claude Free	$0	$0	Includes Claude Code
Claude Pro	$20 / month	$17 / month, $200 upfront	Individual
Claude Max	From $100 / month	Not published as a separate rate	5x or 20x Pro usage
Claude Team, standard seat	$25 / seat / month	$20 / seat / month	Teams of 2 to 150
Claude Team, premium seat	$125 / seat / month	$100 / seat / month	More usage than a standard seat
ChatGPT Plus	$20 / month	Not offered	Individual
ChatGPT Business, standard seat	$25 / user / month	$20 / user / month	From 2 users
ChatGPT Business, premium seat	$125 / user / month	$100 / user / month	5x standard usage
GitHub Copilot Free	$0	n/a	2,000 completions a month
GitHub Copilot Pro	$10 / month	Not published on the plans page	Unlimited completions
GitHub Copilot Pro+	$39 / month	Not published on the plans page	Premium models
GitHub Copilot Max	$100 / month	Not published on the plans page	High-volume agent workflows
Cursor Pro	$20 / month	Toggle present, rate not readable	Individual
Cursor Teams	$40 / user / month	Toggle present, rate not readable	Team plan

A ten-person team's AI bill

A realistic mixed configuration rather than a worst case: not everyone gets everything, and the annual rate is used wherever a vendor publishes one.

ChatGPT Business, annual$120.00
Claude Team standard, annual$80.00
GitHub Copilot Pro$50.00
Cursor Teams$120.00
Total$370.00
Per person per year$37.00

Line by per month.

Line	Rate	Seats	Per month	Per year
ChatGPT Business, annual	$20 / user / month	6	$120.00	$1,440.00
Claude Team standard, annual	$20 / seat / month	4	$80.00	$960.00
GitHub Copilot Pro	$10 / user / month	5	$50.00	$600.00
Cursor Teams	$40 / user / month	3	$120.00	$1,440.00
Total		10 people, 18 seats	$370.00	$4,440.00
Per person per year		10	$37.00	$444.00

Eighteen seats for ten people

That is the shape of AI spending in 2026 and it is nobody's fault. Different tools are better at different work, so engineers end up with two subscriptions and everyone else has one, and the seat count exceeds the headcount. Each individual purchase was sensible.

What the $4,440 does not buy is a record. There is no shared log of what came out of those eighteen seats, no artefact a colleague can pick up, and no way to answer at renewal what the money produced. The output lives in chat histories on individual accounts, and when someone leaves it goes with them.

Four properties of per-seat AI that are worth naming

Cost and usage are unrelated
A seat costs the same whether it ran two prompts this month or two hundred. That is the defining property of the model, and it means no AI budget conversation can ever be about output.
Allocation becomes a management task
Because seats are scarce by price rather than by capacity, someone has to decide who gets one. Companies of fifty are running that argument quarterly, and it exists purely because of how the tools are priced.
The work stays single-player
Claude Code, Copilot and Cursor are excellent and they are local. They stop when the laptop closes, teammates cannot see or assign work to them, and there is no shared roster and no audit trail.
Premium seats double the unit twice
Both Claude Team and ChatGPT Business now sell a premium seat at $100 per seat per month on annual billing, five times the standard seat. The same access question comes back one tier up.

Eighteen AI seats against AI workers

Per-seat AI subscriptions

$4,440 a year for a ten-person team, checked 21 August 2026
Priced by access, so a quiet month costs the same as a busy one
Output lives in individual chat histories
Nothing to assign, review, or hand to a colleague

AI workers in Polaris

$0 for the workspace, no AI seats to allocate
Roughly $2 per human-equivalent hour actually delivered
A worker is a member of the org that anyone can assign a task to
Deliverables arrive as comments with files, on a task a person closes

Where to go next

What an AI worker costs, and how the hours are counted

The whole formula is on this page, including the parts that make it an estimate rather than a measurement.

Per-seat pricing and usage pricing charge for different things

One model prices access. The other prices output. Almost every argument about software cost is really about which of those you are buying.

Turning a single-player agent into a team member

The change is not a better prompt. It is putting the worker in the same table as the people.

Cloud agents versus local agents

Most teams end up running both. The useful question is which work belongs where.

Tool stack cost for a 50-person team

Three work tools and two AI subscriptions, which is where most companies of this size actually are.

AI worker

The difference between an agent you prompt and an agent you assign work to.

Questions people ask

+How much do AI subscriptions cost per person?

The common team rates checked on 21 August 2026 are $20 per seat per month on annual billing for both Claude Team and ChatGPT Business, $25 on monthly billing for each, $10 a month for GitHub Copilot Pro and $40 per user per month for Cursor Teams. Premium seats on Claude Team and ChatGPT Business are $100 per seat per month on annual billing.

+Why does a ten-person team end up with eighteen AI seats?

Because the tools are good at different things. Engineers typically carry a coding assistant plus a general assistant, and everyone else carries one. Seat count exceeding headcount is the normal outcome of per-seat AI pricing, not a procurement failure.

+Does Polaris replace these subscriptions?

It covers a different job. Claude Code, Copilot and Cursor are single-player tools that run on your machine; Polaris runs AI workers on cloud machines that keep working after you close your laptop, on tasks your teammates can see and assign. Many teams will keep a personal assistant subscription and still move delegated work into Polaris.

+Is there a per-seat charge for AI workers in Polaris?

No. There are no AI seats and no access tiers, so there is nothing to allocate and no argument about who gets one. The only charge is roughly two dollars per human-equivalent hour that a worker delivers, itemised on that worker's log.

+What if the delivered work is not good?

You do not close the task. In Polaris the machine never marks anything done: it posts its work as a comment, ticks its acceptance-criteria checklist and stops. A person closes and rates the task, and until they do, the delivery is open to dispute with the work log alongside it.