Coding subscriptions compared

TRAE Lite, at $3 a month, is the cheapest plan here that also states what it allows you to do. Some vendors sell cheaper plans and publish no allowance for any of them; those are listed too, but there is nothing to compare them on, so the lower price does not make them better value.

45 of 65 plans state an allowance as a figure. The rest give a ratio to another plan, or nothing at all. These vendors publish no figure for any plan they sell: Anthropic and Moonshot. That is a choice rather than an oversight — an unpublished allowance is one they can tighten later without announcing a change or breaking a stated promise.

At published API rates, MiniMax Token Plan Ultra (International) returns the most for its price of anything in this table — about 53.99× its monthly fee in equivalent API usage, priced on MiniMax-M3. Read the model with the multiple: a plan can carry its whole figure on a generous allowance of its cheapest model, and that may not be the one you would use. The comparison also assumes you spend the allowance. Below it, the subscription costs the same and buys less.

Monthly prices across the 12 vendors tracked here, in US dollars. Plans sold in one market only are converted at the current rate, so the figure is comparable rather than what the vendor would charge you.

• TRAE — $3–$295.44 a month, across 10 plans
• Zhipu — $7.24–$160 a month, across 6 plans
• Moonshot — $7.24–$103.31 a month, across 4 plans
• MiniMax — $7.24–$120 a month, across 6 plans
• Qoder — $8.72–$200 a month, across 9 plans
• CodeBuddy — $9.95–$147.65 a month, across 7 plans
• OpenCode — $10 a month, across 1 plan
• GitHub Copilot — $10–$100 a month, across 4 plans
• OpenAI — $20–$200 a month, across 4 plans
• Anthropic — $20–$200 a month, across 3 plans
• Google — $20–$200 a month, across 4 plans
• Cursor — $20–$200 a month, across 7 plans

It converts a plan's published allowance into what that same usage would cost at the model's published API rates, using the assumptions on the methodology page. It is a comparison device, not a refund: nobody hands you the difference, and a plan whose allowance you never reach is worth what you used, not what it granted.

A watcher re-reads each vendor's pricing and documentation pages every three days and compares what it finds against what is held here. Nothing it finds is published until a person confirms it against the source. The most recent confirmation in this table is 2026-07-29.

7 of the 65 plans here explicitly authorize access from your own code and agents, rather than only from the vendor's editor or CLI. Most say nothing either way, and silence is not permission — each plan page quotes the vendor's own wording so the judgement stays yours.

This page compares price against published allowance, which is everything it can know. What decides the answer is how many people are on your team and how heavily they code, and the cost planner takes those two inputs and prices both routes — a subscription per seat, and the same work billed per token.