Best AI Subscription 2026 Is Claude, Not ChatGPT or Gemini - WellWells
Home
About
Archive<br>Coffee SVG Icon<br>Sponsor
繁體中文English
Dark Mode
Table of Contents
Table of Contents<br>Introduction<br>Over the past year the AI tools have been in a brutal fight, with someone shipping a stronger, cheaper option every few months and knocking the last one down. Look back through this blog and you’ll see I backed whichever gave the best value at the time, and I backed each pick with conviction:<br>2025/03 : I championed “Perplexity In-Depth Review: Differences from ChatGPT, Feature Comparison, and Daily Use”, using it to replace my daily Google search, and paid for a full year on the spot.<br>2025/04 : I made GitHub Copilot’s agent mode my main coding driver in “Using GitHub Copilot’s Agent Mode to Boost Coding Efficiency”.<br>2025/11 : I cancelled ChatGPT and moved wholesale to Gemini in “2025 AI Subscription Reshuffle: Maximizing Value with GitHub Copilot and Gemini 3”, with family sharing at roughly TWD 110 per person.<br>2025/12 : I finished a from-scratch project in a single week with Google Antigravity in “Antigravity vs. GitHub Copilot: Features, Performance, and Cost”.<br>2026/04 : After Copilot moved to token billing and got pricier, I published “GitHub Copilot Moves to AI Credits Billing: 2026 Plans and Alternatives”.<br>Over the past year, almost every tool I recommended did the same thing: raised prices, cut quotas, got flaky , and the value kept sliding. My subscription list only got shorter, until one thing was left: Claude. This post traces my own usage trail, spelling out how each tool’s value collapsed, and where my money goes now to get the most out of it.<br>When this was verified : every price, quota, and policy here was re-checked in early July 2026 . The AI industry moves fast, so the numbers may already be different by the time you read this. Always defer to each vendor’s latest announcement.
Perplexity Quietly Shrank Its Paid Quotas<br>Perplexity once all but replaced my Google search: answers came with cited sources, travel lookups were fast, and back in March 2025 I paid for a full year.<br>The problem is that in early 2026 it quietly trimmed the paid quotas, without emailing anyone or grandfathering existing subscribers. Per tech-press reports, from around February, Deep Research dropped from hundreds of runs a day to only about twenty a month, advanced-model queries went from a clear daily allowance to a vague weekly cap that support couldn’t put a number on, and file uploads went from unlimited to a weekly cap. A second round in May tightened it again, with many users hitting the weekly wall after only a few queries. Every feature that got cut is advertised as unlimited on Max, so it degrades Pro and then nudges you toward the USD 200/month, USD 2,000/year Max plan.<br>Perplexity doesn’t tell you how much you have left, but there’s actually a rate-limit API you can check once logged in. The paid Pro plan comes with 300 Pro searches; I checked my own account and only 11 were left. And when the quota runs out it doesn’t block you or warn you, it just quietly downgrades the model to the weaker Sonar in the background, and the drop in answer quality is obvious the moment you use it.<br>On Reddit and Trustpilot, plenty of annual subscribers call it a bait-and-switch, and some complain Deep Research cites sources that flat-out don’t exist. For me, a research tool that won’t even tell me how many runs I have left this week is hard to keep as a main driver. For web search I now lean more on Gemini’s Deep Research or Claude. My Perplexity subscription hasn’t lapsed yet, so I’m still using it for now, but I doubt I’ll renew next time.<br>ChatGPT Is Stable but Now Just My Backup<br>ChatGPT was the first thing I subscribed to, though not the one I kept longest. It was always billed monthly with no lock-in, so the moment Gemini rolled out its annual discount, I switched over right away. Back then the biggest complaint was how bad its Chinese image generation was, and Gemini’s Chinese output was noticeably more accurate once it arrived. Translation, photo recognition, and web summarization all just work, and day to day it has no real problems. Just one thing stops me from keeping it as my main tool.<br>It occasionally trips the content moderation. Perfectly ordinary requests sometimes get a “can’t do that”, not every day, but when it happens it blocks you. Since the switch from 4o to GPT-5 it’s also picked up some new quirks: emoji show up constantly, the tone of its replies feels different, and it reaches for an “I can’t do that” line far more often, which makes it feel a lot more restricted. ChatGPT later launched a cheaper Go tier, but the trade-off is ads, which drew even more criticism.<br>For coding, I was mainly on Copilot back then, comparing GPT-4o against Claude Sonnet: Claude was noticeably stronger, so...