On the prices these four companies publish in the UK today, ChatGPT Plus is £20 a month, Claude Pro is £20, Google AI Pro is £18.99, and Microsoft no longer sells a consumer Copilot subscription at all. Copilot now comes inside Microsoft 365, from £8.49 a month. The cheapest real AI plan of the four is Google AI Plus at £4.49, and it comes with 400GB of storage. Before you pay for any of them, check what is already on your bill.
What brought you here?
- I just want to see the pricesAll four, from their own UK pages. What each one costs
- I already pay Microsoft or Google for somethingThen you may already have one. Check your bill first
- I am torn between ChatGPT and GeminiWhat actually differs, and what does not. Gemini vs ChatGPT
- People keep telling me to try ClaudeThe three way, priced. Claude vs ChatGPT vs Gemini
- Where does Copilot even fit nowMicrosoft quietly removed the standalone plan. Copilot after Copilot Pro
- £20 a month is too muchThere is a £7 tier, with one catch. ChatGPT Go vs Plus
- I paid and it still cut me offThis is the part the price list hides. The usage limit
- I would rather not pay anythingThe free tiers are better than you think. Free tiers and alternatives
- Just tell me which to buyBy what you actually do. Which one to pay for
We are a UK technology retailer. There is nothing for sale on this page and no prices from our shop on it. Every figure below was read off the company's own UK page or its UK App Store listing on 19 August 2026, and all of them are linked at the bottom.
- ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Copilot: the UK price of each
- You may already be paying for one, through Google One AI Pro or Microsoft 365
- Gemini vs ChatGPT: what actually separates them
- Claude vs ChatGPT vs Gemini: the three way
- Where Copilot fits now: the Microsoft 365 Copilot price after Copilot Pro
- ChatGPT Go vs Plus: is ChatGPT Go worth it?
- The usage limit is the real price: Claude Pro limits and ChatGPT resets
- Free tiers, and the best alternative to ChatGPT
- Which is the best AI assistant for you, and is ChatGPT Plus worth it?
- Quick answers
Four companies would like about £20 a month from you for what looks like the same thing. A chat box that answers questions. If you have tried to work out which one is worth it, you have probably run into the same problem we did: almost every comparison you can find prices them in dollars, and almost none of them mention that you might already be paying for one.
So we did the boring part. On 19 August 2026 we opened each company’s own UK pricing page and its UK App Store listing, and wrote down what a person in Britain is actually charged. Then we looked at what those subscriptions quietly include, because that is where the real difference sits.
ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Copilot: the UK price of each
Here is the whole market on one screen. Every price is per month, inclusive of VAT, and was read on 19 August 2026 from the company’s own UK page, or from its UK App Store listing where the company does not publish UK prices itself. Anthropic is the one that does not: claude.com serves dollars to a UK visitor, so the Claude figures below come from its UK App Store listing, where each tier is named monthly or annual.
| Assistant | Free tier | Cheapest paid plan | The plan most people buy | Heavy use |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT (OpenAI) | Yes, £0 | Go, £7 | Plus, £20 | Pro, from £89 |
| Gemini (Google) | Yes, £0 | Google AI Plus, £4.49 | Google AI Pro, £18.99 | Google AI Ultra, from £79.99 |
| Claude (Anthropic) | Yes | Pro, £20 | Pro, £20 (or £199.99 a year) | Max, £119.99 or £249.99 |
| Copilot (Microsoft) | Yes, free in Windows 11 | Microsoft 365 Personal, £8.49 | Microsoft 365 Personal, £8.49 | Microsoft 365 Premium, £18.99 |
Two things in that table are worth stopping on.
The first is that the cheapest proper AI plan in Britain is Google’s, at £4.49 a month. That is less than a quarter of what ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro charge, and it arrives with 400GB of cloud storage attached. Whether the model suits you is a separate question, but on price alone it is not close.
The second is that Microsoft is not in this table the way you would expect. There is no consumer Copilot plan to buy any more. We go into what happened further down.
One detail that matters if you were about to pay in dollars: OpenAI’s own billing documentation lists GBP as a supported currency for the United Kingdom. Buy from the website with a UK card and you are charged in pounds, so there is no foreign transaction fee to worry about. UK and EEA customers can also pay by bank debit rather than card.
You may already be paying for one, through Google One AI Pro or Microsoft 365
This is the section we would want someone to read to us before we spent £240 a year. Two of these four assistants are sold inside subscriptions that millions of people in Britain already hold.
If you pay for Microsoft 365, you already have Copilot. Microsoft 365 Personal is £8.49 a month or £84.99 a year and its feature list on Microsoft’s own UK page includes Copilot in the Office apps and higher usage for AI image creation in Copilot chat. If you are paying for Word and Excel, the assistant is already in there. You do not need to buy a second one.
If you pay Google for storage, the upgrade is smaller than you think. Google folded its AI plans into Google One, so the storage tiers and the AI tiers are now the same ladder:
| Google One plan | Per month | Storage | Gemini included? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | £0 | 15GB | Basic access |
| Basic | £1.59 | 100GB | No AI plan |
| Standard | £2.49 | 200GB | No AI plan |
| Google AI Plus | £4.49 | 400GB | Yes |
| Google AI Pro | £18.99 | 5TB | Yes |
| Google AI Ultra 20x | £189.99 | 30TB | Yes |
Read the middle of that ladder again. If you are on Google One Standard at £2.49 for 200GB, moving to AI Plus costs you £2 more a month, doubles your storage to 400GB and adds Gemini on top. That is the cheapest step into a paid AI assistant available to anyone in the UK right now, and most people on it never notice the option.
And you may not need to pay at all. Copilot is built into Windows 11 and works without a subscription. Gemini ships on Pixel and Samsung phones. Both will answer everyday questions all day for nothing.
Gemini vs ChatGPT: what actually separates them
We are not going to tell you which one writes better. That changes every few weeks, both companies ship new models constantly, and you can test the pair of them free in an afternoon with your own work. Any article that ranks them on quality is out of date by the time you read it.
What does not change month to month is what you get for the money, and there the two are genuinely different products.
| ChatGPT | Gemini | |
|---|---|---|
| Way in | £7 a month (Go) | £4.49 a month (Google AI Plus) |
| Main plan | £20 (Plus) | £18.99 (Google AI Pro) |
| Storage included | None | 400GB to 30TB depending on tier |
| Built into | Its own apps | Gmail, Docs, Android, Chrome |
| Ads | OpenAI says the Go plan may include ads | No ad line on the plans page |
So the honest split is this. Gemini is the better deal if you already live in Google’s apps, because you are buying storage you probably need anyway, and Google lists Gemini in Gmail and Docs as part of what the paid AI Pro plan includes. ChatGPT is the better deal if you want the assistant itself to be the product, with the widest set of tools bolted on and the largest third party ecosystem around it.
If you use Gmail for everything and pay Google for storage already, start with Gemini. If you do not, the gap is small enough that price should decide it.
Claude vs ChatGPT vs Gemini: the three way
Claude is the one people recommend to each other rather than the one people see advertised, and UK interest in it is climbing fast. In our own keyword data, monthly UK searches for “claude pro” have gone from around 4,400 to roughly 8,100 in the last year. That is close to double while the others held steady.
On price it sits exactly level with ChatGPT:
| ChatGPT Plus | Claude Pro | Google AI Pro | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly | £20 | £20 | £18.99 |
| Annual | Not listed on the UK pricing page | £199.99, about £16.67 a month | Not listed on the UK plans page |
| Next tier up | Pro, from £89 | Max, £119.99 or £249.99 | Ultra, from £79.99 |
| Storage | None | None | 5TB |
| Buy extra usage? | Being tested | Yes, credits at £29, £59 and £299 | No consumer credits |
Claude is the only one of the three that will plainly sell you more usage as a top up rather than making you jump to a much larger plan. If your work comes in bursts, that flexibility is worth more than a couple of pounds a month.
Claude also has the cleanest annual discount of the three. £199.99 for the year works out at about £16.67 a month, which is £40 a year less than paying monthly.
What you give up is breadth. There is no storage in the box, no phone that ships with it, and no office suite behind it. You are buying the assistant and nothing else.
Where Copilot fits now: the Microsoft 365 Copilot price after Copilot Pro
If you went looking for a Copilot subscription recently and could not find one, you were not being dim. It is not there any more.
Microsoft used to sell Copilot Pro as a standalone consumer plan. On 19 August 2026 we opened Microsoft’s own UK store page for it, microsoft.com/en-gb/store/b/copilotpro, and it no longer serves that product. It redirects you to the Microsoft 365 Premium page instead. The phrase “Copilot Pro” appears nowhere on Microsoft’s UK plan comparison page either.
So the answer to “how much is Copilot” is now “how much is Microsoft 365”:
| Plan | Per month | Per year | What Microsoft says you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft 365 Personal | £8.49 | £84.99 | Copilot in the Office apps, higher usage for AI image creation |
| Microsoft 365 Family | £10.49 | £104.99 | The above for up to 6 people, plus Copilot in Teams |
| Microsoft 365 Premium | £18.99 | £189.99 | Exclusive access to advanced Copilot features |
That reframes the whole comparison. At £8.49 a month, Microsoft 365 Personal is the cheapest route to a paid assistant from any of the four big names, and you get Word, Excel, Outlook and 1TB of OneDrive with it. If you were going to pay for Office anyway, the assistant is effectively free.
If you were not going to pay for Office, it is a worse deal than it looks, because you are buying a suite you do not want in order to get a chat box.
There is one more place Copilot turns up whether you asked for it or not. Since 2024, Windows laptops have shipped with a dedicated Copilot key where the right hand menu key used to sit. If you have bought a laptop in the last two years, look just right of the space bar.
ChatGPT Go vs Plus: is ChatGPT Go worth it?
This is the question we saw asked most often while researching this piece, and it is a fair one. The gap between the two tiers is £13 a month, which is £156 a year.
| Free | Go, £7 | Plus, £20 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Everyday text chats | Unlimited, within abuse guardrails | Unlimited, within abuse guardrails | Unlimited, within abuse guardrails |
| Uploads, images, voice | Limited | More of each | Expanded again |
| Memory | Short | Longer | Longer |
| Advanced reasoning models | No | No | Yes |
| Ads | No ad line on the pricing page | May include ads | No ad line on the pricing page |
That last row is the one nobody mentions, and it comes straight from OpenAI’s own UK pricing page. Under the Go plan it says, in OpenAI’s own words, that the plan may include ads. The Plus tier carries no such line. If you would find advertising inside your assistant irritating, that is a real difference and it is worth £13 a month to some people on its own.
Our read: if you use an assistant for everyday questions, drafting messages and looking things up, Go at £7 is plenty. The unlimited everyday chatting is the same on both. If you lean on it for work, where the quality of a hard answer actually costs you time or money, the advanced reasoning models on Plus are the reason to pay.
Start on Go. Move up only when you can point at a specific job it failed.
The usage limit is the real price: Claude Pro limits and ChatGPT resets
Every comparison you will read puts the monthly price in a big table and stops there. That table is not what you pay. What you pay is the monthly price plus whatever it costs you when the assistant stops halfway through a job.
Look at how the top tiers are now named, across three companies that do not otherwise agree on anything:
| Company | Top tiers, as they name them |
|---|---|
| OpenAI | ChatGPT Pro 5x and Pro 20x |
| Google AI Ultra 5x and Ultra 20x | |
| Anthropic | Claude Max 5x and Max 20x |
All three are selling the same product tiered by how much of it you are allowed to use. The multiplier is the product. That tells you what the industry thinks it is actually selling, and it is not intelligence, it is throughput.
The next step is already happening: paying to get past your own limit. Anthropic sells usage credits at £29, £59 and £299. xAI sells extra credits on Grok. And in the middle of August 2026, OpenAI began testing a paid reset, which is a button that clears your weekly cap early.
The complaint that followed is instructive, and it is not the one you would guess. On the OpenAI community forum on Reddit the objection was not the price of the reset but the mechanic: buying one moves your weekly reset date rather than adding allowance on top. Buy a reset six days into your week and you have pushed your next free reset back by six days. Users in the thread worked through the arithmetic and put the average value at roughly a quarter of what the reset costs.
What this means for you is simple. When you compare these four, the number to compare is not the monthly price. It is how much work you get done before it stops. And that number is the one none of them publish clearly. The only reliable way to find your own limit is to use the free tier hard for a week and see where you hit the wall.
Free tiers, and the best alternative to ChatGPT
If the point of your search was to avoid paying, you are in a better position than you probably realise. All four have a free tier, and the free tiers have grown a lot.
OpenAI’s own pricing page describes the free ChatGPT plan as unlimited text chats, subject to abuse guardrails. Not limited, unlimited. What free does not get you is the heavier stuff: lots of file uploads, lots of image generation, the advanced reasoning models. Gemini and Claude both have free tiers on the same pattern. Copilot is free inside Windows 11 with no account upgrade at all.
So the best alternative to paying for ChatGPT, for most people, is to use two free tiers side by side. When one says you have hit a limit, ask the other. It costs nothing and it removes the single biggest reason people upgrade.
If you want a genuine alternative rather than a cheaper one, these are the names worth knowing, none of which we sell or have any relationship with:
- Perplexity. Built around search and citations rather than conversation. Good if you want to see where an answer came from.
- Grok, from xAI. Sold in tiers up to a heavy plan, and bundled with X for some subscribers.
- DeepSeek. The Chinese model that keeps turning up in these conversations, largely because the free tier is unusually capable.
We have not priced Perplexity and Grok in the tables above for one reason: their UK App Store listings do not state whether each figure is monthly or yearly, and we are not prepared to print a price we cannot label correctly.
Which is the best AI assistant for you, and is ChatGPT Plus worth it?
By what you actually do, rather than by which model won a benchmark last week.
- You already pay for Microsoft 365. Stop. You have Copilot. Use it for a month before you spend anything else.
- You already pay Google One for storage. Move to Google AI Plus. It is around £2 more than the Standard tier, it doubles your storage, and Gemini comes with it.
- You want the cheapest useful assistant, full stop. Google AI Plus at £4.49. Nothing else is close on price.
- You want Office and an assistant. Microsoft 365 Personal at £8.49. The suite alone is worth that.
- You use it for everyday questions and drafting. ChatGPT Go at £7, and accept that ads may appear. Or stay free.
- It is a work tool and a bad answer costs you real time. ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro at £20. Try both free first, then pay for the one that handles your kind of work better.
- Your usage comes in bursts. Claude Pro, because it will sell you top up credits instead of forcing you onto a £119.99 plan.
- You are not sure you need one. Then you do not. The free tiers now cover unlimited everyday chat. Come back when something specific stops you.
One last piece of advice that applies to all four. Pay monthly for the first few months, even though annual is cheaper. These prices and tiers have changed repeatedly this year, and being locked into a plan that gets restructured under you is a worse outcome than the discount you gave up. We have watched the same thing happen to Starlink pricing in the UK, which moved four times in five months.
Quick answers
On price for a UK buyer, yes, and clearly so: Google AI Plus is £4.49 a month against £7 for ChatGPT Go, and the Google plan carries 400GB of storage. On answer quality the two trade places every few weeks, so it is not a question worth deciding from an article. Both have free tiers. Give each the same real task from your own week and use the one that handled it better.
Only if you need the advanced reasoning models. Everyday text chatting is unlimited on both tiers, so if that is what you do, the extra £13 a month buys you very little. The two reasons to move up are harder reasoning work and the fact that OpenAI says the Go plan may include ads, while Plus carries no such note.
£20 a month, or £199.99 for a year, which works out at about £16.67 a month and saves you roughly £40 over paying monthly. Above that sit Claude Max at £119.99 and £249.99 a month. Anthropic also sells usage credits at £29, £59 and £299 if you need more without changing plan.
There is no single winner, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing. Gemini is better value in the UK and better integrated if you use Gmail and Docs. Claude is the one people recommend for careful written work. Copilot is the one you may already own. Perplexity is better if you want citations. The useful question is not which is best but which is best for the work you actually do.
Not for everyone. The free tier now covers unlimited everyday text chats, so if that is how you use it, paying changes very little. It becomes worthwhile when you regularly hit limits on uploads, images or voice, or when you need the advanced reasoning models for work. Wait until something specific stops you, then pay.
There is not one to buy. Microsoft's old Copilot Pro store page now redirects to Microsoft 365 Premium, and Copilot Pro is not listed on the UK plan comparison page. Copilot comes inside Microsoft 365 instead, from £8.49 a month for Personal, and a basic version is free in Windows 11.
How we know
We are a UK technology retailer. There is nothing for sale on this page and no prices from our shop on it.
Every price in this article was read on 19 August 2026 from the company that charges it. The ChatGPT figures come from OpenAI's own pricing page loaded from a UK connection, and the plan wording from OpenAI's help centre. The Google figures come from Google One's United Kingdom plans page. The Microsoft figures come from Microsoft's own UK plan comparison page. The Claude figures come from Anthropic's UK App Store listing, which is the only place we could find the company's UK prices with the billing period attached to each tier.
The finding that Copilot Pro has gone is a live check, not an assumption: we requested Microsoft's Copilot Pro store URL and recorded where it sent us, which was the Microsoft 365 Premium page.
Where a figure was only available without a billing period, we left it out rather than guess. That is why Perplexity and Grok are named in the text but absent from the tables.
The search volume figures for Claude are our own keyword research for the United Kingdom, not a published statistic.
These prices move. All four companies restructured their consumer plans during 2026. We will re-check this page monthly, but if you are reading it long after the date above, open the linked pages before you spend anything.
Sources
- OpenAI, ChatGPT pricing: the UK figures for Free, Go, Plus and Pro, and the note that the Go plan may include ads.
- OpenAI Help Centre, What is ChatGPT Plus?: the plan description and monthly billing.
- OpenAI Help Centre, Multi-currency billing: GBP listed as a supported currency for the United Kingdom, and bank debit for UK and EEA customers.
- Google, Google One United Kingdom plans: the full ladder from Basic at £1.59 to Google AI Ultra 20x at £189.99, with the storage attached to each.
- Microsoft, Compare all Microsoft 365 plans (UK): Personal, Family and Premium pricing and the Copilot entitlements in each.
- Apple, Claude by Anthropic on the UK App Store: Claude Pro monthly and annual, Claude Max, and the usage credit prices.
- Apple, ChatGPT on the UK App Store: the in-app subscription prices used to cross check OpenAI’s own page.
- Reddit, r/OpenAI, discussion of OpenAI’s paid usage reset, 16 August 2026: the objection to the reset moving the weekly reset date.
