Free AI plan changes, October 2026

Anthropic's help centre says Cowork is available to paid Claude plans (Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise) only. Its release notes show it launched as a research preview for Max on macOS on 12 January 2026, reached general availability on macOS and Windows on 9 April, came to web and mobile on 7 July, and was merged into everyday Claude on 16 September ("Claude Cowork is now just Claude"). On 23 October Anthropic said the unified experience was generally available for Claude Enterprise. Agentic tasks use your usage allowance faster than regular chat.

Claude Duet is a different product: a proactive agent app that briefs you and takes tasks, asking before it sends, pays, signs or deletes anything. It opened as a research preview on 21 October 2026, by waitlist, for Pro and Max subscribers in the US only. During the preview it is included at no extra cost, shares your plan's usage limits, uses Opus 5.5 with no model choice, and is not available on Free, Team or Enterprise. Anthropic gives no date for other plans or countries, and invitations go out in waves.

Prices from Anthropic's Cowork page: Pro is $17 a month with the annual discount ($200 billed up front) or $20 billed monthly; Max is $100 a month (5x) or $200 a month (20x). Anthropic says plans and prices are subject to change.

Google's Gemini release notes for 13 October 2026 say Gemini 4 Argon is rolling out globally for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the Gemini app. Free users are not mentioned. Google's plans page lists the Free plan with the Flash-Lite model.

Google's plans page also lists Gemini 4 Argon under Google AI Plus, which does not match the release note, so check your own account if you are on Plus.

On 12 October 2026 xAI announced The X Subscription, which brings Grok, Grok Bot, Cursor and X Premium together in one plan. Cursor's docs say it is now sold as part of that subscription, and the same announcement says nothing changes for existing Cursor subscribers.

Cursor's pricing page (read 29 October) lists Free at $0 with limited Agent and Chat requests, Plus at $8 a month, Premium at $30 (4x Plus usage), Super at $100 (15x) and Ultra at $200 (50x), Teams from $30 per user a month and a custom Enterprise plan. Yearly prices appear only in the docs: $80 (Plus), $300 (Premium), $1,000 (Super) and $2,000 (Ultra).

The older names Hobby (free), Pro ($20), Pro+ ($60) and Teams ($40 per user) are what Cursor's docs call legacy plans: they "keep working as they are" for people who already have them, while new customers start on the current plans. Ultra costs $200 in both lists but means different things. Free and Plus do not include third-party models such as Claude, GPT or Gemini; on paid plans those are billed separately at API list price.

Google's plans page lists the Free plan at $0 a month with a Google Account, including the Flash-Lite model, image generation and editing, Deep Research, Gemini Live, Canvas and Gems, with limited Google Flow access, Gemini Notebook and 15 GB of storage.

What changed: Google's help page says the changes start for users without an AI subscription on 9 October. Auto becomes the default setting, and "most prompts will go to Flash-Lite, our fastest model", while prompts that need deeper reasoning "may go to Flash or Pro". If smart model selection is turned off, free chats use Flash-Lite for all responses. Google AI Plus subscribers get an email with their own start date instead.

Limits: Google does not publish a number of free prompts. Limits are compute-based (prompt complexity, models and features used, chat length), refresh every 5 hours until you reach a weekly limit, and may change without notice. Plus is listed at 2x the usage of Free and Pro at 4x. The context window is listed as 32k tokens without a plan, 128k on Plus and 1 million on Pro and Ultra. Google says some features may be unavailable to free users at busy times.

US prices from Google's plans page: Plus $4.99 a month, Pro $19.99 and Ultra from $99.99 ($199.99 for the 20x tier). Prices differ by country; the Bangladesh page lists Plus at ৳600 and Pro at ৳2,500 a month. Google's own pages disagree on a few details, such as the minimum age for paid plans (18 on the plans page, 13 in most countries on the limits page), so check your account.

Google's blog post of 16 July 2026 says "We're renaming NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook" and that it remains a standalone product. The old notebooklm.google address now redirects to notebook.google.

Google's plans help page lists a free Standard tier with up to 100 notebooks per user and 50 sources per notebook (Plus 200 and 100, Pro 500 and 300, Ultra 500 with 500 or 600 sources). Google's FAQ gives a per-source limit of 500,000 words or 200 MB for local uploads.

A blog post of 28 August 2026 says that from 2 September consumer accounts moved to flexible, compute-based limits that refresh every five hours instead of daily. Google does not publish exact numbers of chats or Audio Overviews for free users, and its plans help page still mentions daily and monthly quotas, so articles quoting a fixed number per day may be out of date. There is no separate price: Gemini Notebook comes with Google AI plans (Plus $4.99, Pro $19.99, Ultra from $99.99 a month in the US) and some Workspace plans.

Wispr's pricing page lists the Free plan at $0 with dictation on Mac, Windows, iOS and Android, and "2,000/week on desktop" with limited weekly use on mobile. Its plans help article says that on Mac and Windows 2,000 words is the allowance, at which Flow slows down, and 5,000 is the maximum, at which dictation is blocked. On iOS it gives a 550-word allowance (750 maximum); on Android 3,000 words a week, adding that in-app text may still show 1,000.

Wispr says your weekly limit can change without an app update, and its pages state the weekly reset time in different ways (Sunday midnight Pacific, Sunday 23:45 UTC, or based on local time), so check the app rather than a fixed number.

Pro is $15 per user a month billed monthly, or $12 a month on the annual plan ($144 a year), with no weekly limit. The help article says default trials last 14 days (30 with a referral, 90 for students). Students and educators with an education email get 50% off, per the pricing page. Audio is transcribed in the cloud.