LLM Usage Limits 2026: ChatGPT vs. Claude vs. Gemini vs. Grok vs. Perplexity (Full Comparison)

🔄 Refreshed 24 July 2026. Every price, model, and limit below was re-checked against the official pricing pages and help docs this week. AI plans move fast — this one’s current.

If you bought an AI subscription in June and haven’t looked since, some of what you’re paying for has already changed. In the last three weeks alone: OpenAI shipped a whole new model family, xAI dropped a new flagship, and the model that got yanked off Claude by an export-control order in June is now just sitting there in the menu like nothing happened. And this morning, Anthropic released Claude Opus 5 — a new state-of-the-art model that’s already the default on its top plan.

Here’s the part nobody tells you when you pick a plan. The number on the pricing page is the easy part. What actually decides whether $20 is enough is the limit system underneath it — and that system has been quietly rewritten across almost every platform this year. Message counts are on their way out. Compute pools are in.

So let’s go through all five platforms, current as of today, and sort out what you’re really buying.

What’s Changed Since Late June 2026

Claude Opus 5 launched today (July 24). Anthropic’s new flagship comes close to the frontier intelligence of Fable 5 at roughly half the token price, and it lands as the new default model on Claude Max and the strongest model available on Claude Pro. It brings a 1-million-token context window in the app, has thinking on by default, and posts new state-of-the-art scores on coding and knowledge-work benchmarks — for the same cost as the Opus 4.8 model it replaces. If you’re on Max or Pro, this is the model you’ll want to reach for. (Source: Anthropic — Introducing Claude Opus 5.)

GPT-5.6 is live now. OpenAI took it from “limited preview for a handful of vetted organizations” to fully shipped on July 9. In ChatGPT today, GPT-5.5 Instant still handles fast everyday replies, but GPT-5.6 Sol now powers the Medium, High, and Extra-High reasoning modes on paid plans, and Sol Pro sits at the top of the Pro tier. If you checked in June and saw “preview only,” ignore that — it rolled out. (Source: OpenAI — GPT-5.6 in ChatGPT, help center.)

Claude’s Fable 5 came back for good. The June saga is over: launched June 9, suspended June 12 under a US export-control directive, returned July 1 on a temporary leash. The leash is off. Fable 5 is a normal, generally available model now — free users get it at a reduced weekly allowance, Pro and Max get full access. Sonnet 5 is still the default, Opus 4.8 is still the flagship. (Source: claude.com/pricing.)

Grok 4.5 landed everywhere. xAI pushed its newest flagship to web, iOS, Android, and X around July 22, replacing the Grok 4.2-series models. (Source: x.ai/news — Introducing Grok 4.5.)

Gemini got cheaper at the bottom. Google’s entry tier, AI Plus, is now $4.99/month, and the free tier’s default model moved up to Gemini 3.6 Flash. The $250 → $200 cut on AI Ultra that Google announced at I/O has fully landed. (Source: gemini.google/subscriptions; one.google.com AI plans.)

Perplexity renamed its agent and leaned into credits. “Comet Agent” is now just Computer, and it reached Pro subscribers in March. Standard searches are still free and don’t touch your credit balance — it’s the agent doing multi-step work that spends them. (Source: perplexity.ai — pricing / changelog.)

The pattern under all of it: Claude, Gemini, and Grok now all run compute-weighted weekly pools with a rolling five-hour refresh. More on why that changes your buying decision below.

Quick Comparison: All Five Platforms at a Glance

ChatGPT (OpenAI)

Plans: Free · Go $8/month · Plus $20/month · Pro $100 and $200/month.

The July 9 launch of the GPT-5.6 family is the headline. Three models arrived together: Sol (the flagship), Terra (a balanced everyday model), and Luna (the cheapest and fastest). In the ChatGPT app, this is what you actually get:

• GPT-5.5 Instant — the default for fast, everyday responses.
• GPT-5.6 Sol — powers the Medium, High, and Extra-High reasoning modes on Plus and above.
• GPT-5.6 Sol Pro — the highest-quality option, reserved for the Pro tier (and Enterprise).

If you don’t see GPT-5.6 Sol in your model picker yet, the rollout runs account by account — it may not have reached you.

The tiers, plainly:

• Free gives you GPT-5.5 Instant with limited use, and in some regions (US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada) you’ll see ads.
• Go ($8) roughly 10× the free message allowance — the cheapest way to escape constant “you’ve hit your limit” walls.
• Plus ($20) the mainstream pick: expanded reasoning access via Sol, larger context, and Deep Research runs.
• Pro comes in two flavors. The $100 tier gives you Pro-level access with lower allowances; the $200 tier is the same access at roughly 4× the headroom, plus Sol Pro and early feature previews.

Watch out for: OpenAI still doesn’t give you a live dashboard showing how much of your allowance is left. You find the ceiling by hitting it. On paid plans, different models draw from separate allowances, so burning through your Sol reasoning quota doesn’t necessarily lock you out of Instant.

Saving your work out of ChatGPT is its own small adventure — the ChatGPT export guide covers chats, files, and images.

Claude (Anthropic)

Plans: Free · Pro $17/month (annual) or $20 (monthly) · Max $100 and $200/month.

The big one landed today: Claude Opus 5, Anthropic’s new flagship, released July 24. It’s the new default model on Max and the strongest model on Pro, it carries a 1-million-token context window in the app, and it delivers state-of-the-art coding and knowledge-work performance at the same cost as the Opus 4.8 it replaces. Anthropic pitches it as reaching near-Fable-5 intelligence at roughly half the price — which makes it the everyday workhorse and leaves Fable 5 as the absolute top-end option.

That release caps a dramatic stretch. Back in June, Fable 5 launched on the 9th, got suspended on the 12th under a US export-control directive, and returned on July 1 with temporary restrictions. All of that is now history — Fable 5 is generally available again (free users get it at up to 50% of weekly limits; Pro and Max get full access). The current lineup:

• Haiku 4.5 — fast and cheap, good for high-volume simple tasks.
• Sonnet 5 — the everyday default on Free and Pro, near-flagship performance at lower cost, 1M context.
• Opus 5 — the new flagship: default on Max, strongest option on Pro, best for hard reasoning and long agentic work.
• Fable 5 — the top-end frontier model when you need maximum capability regardless of cost.

How the limits work: every plan runs on a rolling five-hour session window, and paid plans stack weekly limits on top. Max has two weekly ceilings — one across all models and a separate one for Sonnet — and your weekly clock resets at a fixed time assigned to your account. Pick your tier by session intensity:

• Pro ($17–$20) — steady daily use, one project at a time.
• Max 5× ($100) — long, uninterrupted sessions; you work with Claude for hours.
• Max 20× ($200) — all-day heavy use, multiple parallel threads, or Claude Code as a daily driver.

Recent good news for coders: on May 6, Anthropic doubled Claude Code’s five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans, and removed the peak-hours limit reduction for Pro and Max. If you’d bounced off Claude Code’s caps earlier in the year, they’re materially looser now.

If you lean on Claude Code, the Codex vs Claude Code comparison is worth a read before you commit a tier to it.

Gemini (Google)

Plans: Free · AI Plus $4.99/month · AI Pro $19.99/month · AI Ultra $99.99 and $199.99/month.

Google reshaped its subscription ladder at I/O 2026, and the changes have now fully rolled out. Two things matter most: a genuinely cheap entry tier, and a price cut at the top.

• Free — Gemini 3.6 Flash as the default, with limited access to 3.1 Pro. Compute-based limits.
• AI Plus ($4.99) — 2× the free usage. The new bargain-basement tier.
• AI Pro ($19.99) — 4× free usage, a 1-million-token context window, Deep Research, and full 3.1 Pro access. First month often free.
• AI Ultra — $99.99 for 5× the Pro allowance, or $199.99 for 20×. That top price dropped from $250 earlier this year. Ultra adds Deep Think reasoning and Gemini Spark.

The models: Gemini 3.1 Pro is the flagship, Gemini 3.6 Flash handles fast free-tier work, and Gemini 3 Pro powers the AI results inside Google Search.

How the limits work: Gemini moved off fixed daily prompt caps and onto compute-based allowances. Your usage now factors in prompt complexity, which features you invoke, and how long your chat runs — a quick text question costs far less than a video generation or a long coding session. The allowance refreshes every five hours until you hit a weekly ceiling. It’s the same model Claude and Grok use now.

Two of Gemini’s strongest tools deserve their own walkthroughs: Gemini Deep Research and the Gemini 3 Flash vs Pro guide if you’re deciding which model to lean on.

Grok (xAI)

Plans: Free · SuperGrok $30/month · SuperGrok Heavy $300/month.

Grok 4.5 is the new flagship, rolled out to web, iOS, Android, and X around July 22. xAI describes it as its smartest model yet, built for coding, agentic tasks, and knowledge work, with a February 2026 knowledge cutoff.

The bigger structural change came in June, when xAI scrapped separate per-product daily limits. Before, Chat, Imagine (image), Voice, and Build each had their own caps. Now paid users draw from a single shared weekly usage pool and spend it however they like across every product.

• Free — Grok 4.5 to start, with tight limits.
• SuperGrok ($30) — raises your weekly pool and unlocks more across every product, plus multi-agent reasoning.
• SuperGrok Heavy ($300) — the maximum weekly allowance for the heaviest users.

X Premium and Premium+ subscribers get increased Grok limits bundled in, and Premium Business/Organization accounts include SuperGrok access.

Watch out for: the shared pool cuts both ways. Convenience on one side; on the other, expensive actions eat a surprising slice of your week. A single ten-second video generation can consume a couple of percent of your entire weekly allowance — and if the content filter blocks a generation, that cost still comes out of your pool even though you never receive the file. Budget your heavy media generations deliberately.

Perplexity

Plans: Free · Pro $20/month ($200/year) · Max $200/month ($2,000/year).

Perplexity works differently from the chat assistants, and its pricing reflects that. The core product is answer-with-citations search, and ordinary searches remain free and unmetered on every tier. What you’re paying for at the top is Computer — Perplexity’s agent that does multi-step work — plus higher research and generation limits.

• Free — unlimited standard searches with citations; a small number of Pro Searches per day and limited Research runs.
• Pro ($20) — the mainstream tier: generous Pro Search and Deep Research allowances, and access to Computer (which shipped to Pro subscribers on March 13, 2026).
• Max ($200) — built for sustained heavy work: higher limits on Deep Research, asset generation, and file uploads, more video creation per month, and several Model Council runs.

The credits wrinkle: Ask searches don’t consume credits — only Computer does, when it runs agentic, multi-step tasks. Consumer Max accounts start with 10,000 credits a month and a default $200 spending cap on total credit charges, which you can raise up to $5,000 in settings. Enterprise Max seats run $325/month.

Understanding the New Usage Paradigms

For years, “usage limit” meant a number of messages. You’d get “40 messages every three hours,” and you could count them. That model is basically gone.

Claude, Gemini, and Grok now run the same underlying thing: a compute-weighted pool. Instead of counting messages, they measure how much work each prompt actually costs — a quick question is cheap, a long coding session or a video job is expensive — and draw it from a weekly allowance that refreshes in rolling five-hour windows. Grok took it furthest with one single weekly pool spanning chat, image, voice, and Build. Google’s version weighs prompt complexity, feature use, and conversation length. Perplexity runs the same idea under a different label — credits — where only the agent spends from your balance.

Here’s why this matters for your wallet: you can no longer glance at “messages per day” and know whether a plan fits you. A heavy user of cheap prompts — quick questions all day — will sit comfortably inside a plan that a light user of expensive prompts — a couple of long video or coding jobs — blows through by Wednesday. Match the plan to the kind of work you do, not just the volume.

Three more patterns worth knowing:

• Subscription-plus-credits is the new normal. The flat monthly fee covers your interactive use; a metered credit pool covers agentic and programmatic work. Both Claude and Perplexity now split it this way.
• Governments are now a release variable. Claude’s Fable 5 suspension in June wasn’t a bug or an outage — it was an export-control directive. Model availability can now shift for regulatory reasons, not just technical ones.
• Flagships turn over fast. OpenAI went from GPT-5.5 to the GPT-5.6 family, Grok from the 4.2-series to 4.5, and Claude from Opus 4.8 to Opus 5 — all inside a single quarter, the last of them the same day this update went out. Whatever’s newest today has a successor in the pipeline.

The Bottom Line: Which Plan Should You Buy?

Start with the free tiers. All five are genuinely usable now, and the free versions are the best they’ve ever been. If you’re not hitting walls, you don’t need to pay yet.

The $20 tier is still the sweet spot. ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, Gemini AI Pro, and Perplexity Pro each give you the flagship-adjacent models, real research tools, and enough headroom for daily professional use. For most people reading this, one $20 subscription is the right answer — the only question is which ecosystem you live in.

The new $5 tier is a real option. Gemini AI Plus at $4.99 and ChatGPT Go at $8 didn’t exist a year ago. If you use AI a few times a day and mostly hit free-tier walls on volume rather than capability, these clear the walls for pocket change.

The $100 shelf is where the serious competition lives. ChatGPT Pro ($100), Claude Max 5× ($100), and Gemini AI Ultra ($99.99) are all fighting for the same power user. Pick based on what you do all day: long agentic sessions and coding lean Claude; deep research and Google-ecosystem work lean Gemini; broad general capability with the newest reasoning leans ChatGPT.

Budget for credits, not just the subscription. If you’re going to use agents — Claude Code, Perplexity’s Computer, ChatGPT’s Codex — the flat fee is only half the bill. The metered pool on top is where heavy agentic work actually gets paid for.

Use more than one. The cheapest resilience strategy is a paid subscription to your primary platform plus free tiers on the rest. When your main one hits a weekly ceiling, or a model gets suspended for three weeks, you have somewhere to go.

The Evolution Continues

The one safe prediction: this table will be wrong again soon. A flagship now lasts about a quarter before a successor arrives, prices move in both directions, and a model can vanish for regulatory reasons with no notice. That’s the environment now.

You don’t need to track all of it. You need to know three things about your own plan: which model you’re actually getting, how its limit system works (compute pool, credits, or per-model allowance), and where your fallback is when you hit the ceiling. Get those three right and the churn stops mattering.

That’s also why this page carries a refresh date at the top. Check it before you trust the numbers — if it’s more than a month old, assume at least one price or model has moved.

Key Takeaways

• GPT-5.6 is live — Sol powers ChatGPT’s reasoning modes; GPT-5.5 Instant is the default.
• Claude Opus 5 launched July 24 — new default on Max, strongest on Pro, 1M context, at Opus 4.8’s price. Fable 5 stays the top-end option.
• Gemini is cheaper — AI Plus at $4.99, and the $250 → $200 cut on AI Ultra has landed.
• Grok 4.5 shipped everywhere, running on one shared weekly usage pool.
• Perplexity’s agent is now “Computer,” and only agentic work spends credits.
• The industry converged on compute-weighted weekly pools. Match your plan to the kind of work you do, not the message count.

Keep going:

• Gemini 3 Flash vs Pro: which model to use
• Codex vs Claude Code: which should you use?
• AI in 2026: a quick peek for people who don’t want to become developers
• Export guides: ChatGPT · Claude · Gemini

Last updated: July 24, 2026. Sources: OpenAI Help Center (ChatGPT Pro tiers, ChatGPT Go, GPT-5.6 in ChatGPT); Anthropic (Introducing Claude Opus 5), claude.com/pricing and Claude Help Center (Max plan, usage limits, context windows); gemini.google/subscriptions, one.google.com AI plans, and the Google blog (I/O 2026 AI subscriptions); x.ai (Grok 4.5, pricing) and docs.x.ai; perplexity.ai pricing, Max help center, and changelog.