I Compared 12 AI Pricing Pages to Their August Versions. Eight Had Not Moved a Cent.

If you pay Cursor $20 a month, you are on a plan that no longer exists. It still works, and Cursor says it will keep working. But the plan the company now calls comparable costs $30, and moving to it is a one way door.

I found that by accident. I had gone looking for something else: whether AI companies quietly change their terms. The answer turned out to be more interesting than the question.

What I did

I took 19 AI pricing pages, pulled each one out of the Wayback Machine as it stood on 1 August 2026, and compared it with the same page on 2 or 3 November. Both halves come from the archive rather than the live web, so anyone can repeat this with a URL and about a minute per tool.

Twelve of the 19 gave me prices I could read on both dates. ChatGPT and Gemini render their prices in JavaScript, which does not survive archiving, so I could compare their plan names but not their numbers. Canva, Notion, Gamma, Perplexity and Midjourney did not archive usefully at all.

Eight of twelve had not changed anything

This is the part I did not expect, and it is the finding that makes the rest mean anything.

Not approximately the same. The same, to the dollar, three months apart. Copilot's credit allowances of $15, $70 and $200 were unchanged too, and so were Figma's three seat types across all three tiers.

ElevenLabs sits just outside this group, and it is worth a sentence because it shows how a page can change without a price changing. Its list prices are identical on both dates, $0, $6, $22, $99, $299 and $990, and the credit allowances behind them are identical too, from 10,000 on Free to six million on Business. What moved is the offer bolted on top. In August the Creator tier advertised fifty percent off your first month. In November it advertised two months free on annual billing, with the per month equivalents spelled out for the first time.

That is a real change to what a new customer pays in year one, and a price comparison that only reads the headline number misses it entirely.

So the industry is not constantly repricing. Most of these pages are boring, and that is good news. It also means the three that did change are worth looking at properly.

Cursor rebuilt its entire ladder

On 1 August the Cursor pricing page offered Hobby for free, an Individual plan at $20 a month with Pro, Pro+ and Ultra beneath it, and Teams at $40 per user. The footer read "2026 Anysphere, Inc."

On 2 November it offered Free, Plus at $8, Premium at $30, Super at $100, Ultra at $200, and Teams from $30 per user. The names Hobby, Individual, Pro and Pro+ are gone from the page entirely.

Cursor's help page explains why. The product is now sold as part of what it calls The X Subscription, one subscription covering Grok, Cursor and X, and the models it lists are Grok 4.7, 4.6, 4.5 and Composer 2.5. Annual billing runs $80 for Plus, $300 for Premium, $1,000 for Super and $2,000 for Ultra, which is the kind of gap that makes paying annually worth the arithmetic.

To its credit, Cursor publishes a mapping table. That table is where the real story is.

A legacy Pro subscriber who moves pays fifty percent more. A Pro+ subscriber pays sixty seven percent more. Team customers on Standard actually do better, dropping from $40 to $30 a seat. If the new ladder has priced you out, I keep a list of Cursor alternatives.

Cursor is straightforward about the consequences: legacy plans keep working at the same price and features unless you change or cancel, and if you do switch, your subscription is cancelled with a prorated refund and the page states the change is permanent. There is no route back.

What Cursor does not do is put any of this in its changelog. I read the changelog on 3 November, with entries running back through 20, 16, 13 and 6 October and 23 September. It contains no mention of Plus, Premium, Super, Hobby or Individual, and none of the new prices.

The two I could not put a price on

ChatGPT and Gemini both archive perfectly well. Neither archives its prices, because both render them in JavaScript after the page loads, so the snapshot preserves the layout and loses the numbers.

What did survive is the plan names, and on both dates they are the same. ChatGPT showed Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise in August and the same six in November. Google showed AI Plus, AI Pro and AI Ultra on both dates.

That is a weaker finding than a price comparison and I am not going to dress it up as more. No renames happened at the two largest consumer AI products in this window, which is worth knowing given that renaming is exactly what Cursor and Anthropic did.

Claude added a tier and renamed another

On 1 August, Anthropic's page listed Max at "From $100" a month, with no Ultra. On 2 November it listed Max at "$100" and Ultra at "$200".

That "From" is the tell. It was doing the work of covering Max 5x and Max 20x, two plans sharing one card. Anthropic's help centre now states that the Max 20x plan is called Ultra, and that existing Max 20x subscribers moved across automatically with no price change.

Two things moved with the name. Max 20x was sold on twenty times Pro's usage, and the Ultra page documents ten times Pro's usage per week. Same price, same subscribers, half the stated multiple, and no published arithmetic behind either figure. Enterprise also stopped being custom priced and now shows $20 per seat per month on annual billing with a twenty seat minimum.

Anthropic's news index returns nothing for Ultra, Max 20x, rename or pricing. Its own Claude for OSS page still describes what it gives away as "Max 20x subscriptions", a plan name the company retired.

I should declare an interest here. I had all of this wrong in my own Claude review until yesterday, when I rewrote it. I am not reporting a failure I spotted from the outside.

Synthesia is the one that did it properly

Synthesia renamed Creator to Pro, and it is the only company of the three that told people in advance.

A help article dated 29 September 2026, written under a named author, announced changes effective 1 October. It says Creator is renamed Pro with the same price, same features and more included, that your price, features and billing date stay the same, and it gives a reason: the company now does surveys, interactive avatars and dubbing, so Pro fits better than Creator. Monthly credits on that tier went from 3,600 to 6,500, and four new Pro multiples appeared above it.

The archive backs the announcement exactly. Creator was $89 on 29 September. Pro was $89 on 9 October. The company did what it said, on the day it said.

There is one gap. That article carries no dollar figures anywhere, and it states that Starter keeps its current price without saying what that price is. Starter was $29 on 24 October and $19 on 29 October. A five day window, three weeks after the announcement, not covered by it. The direction is in customers' favour, but it arrived with every plan getting a new baseline allowance, and a smaller number beside a different allowance is not automatically a better deal.

What this actually tells you

The pattern is not that companies change terms constantly. It is that when they do, the change lands in a help centre article, and nowhere a paying customer looks.

Cursor's restructure is documented thoroughly in support pages and absent from its changelog. Anthropic's rename exists in a support article and nowhere in its news feed. Synthesia wrote a proper announcement and still left its clearest price move out of it. Three companies, three different standards of disclosure, and not one of them sent the news to the place you would notice.

There is a second pattern underneath that one. In all three cases the company kept its existing customers whole. Cursor's legacy plans keep their price, Anthropic moved Max 20x subscribers across at no extra cost, and Synthesia held Creator pricing through the rename. Nobody had money taken from them in the night.

The cost lands on the next decision instead. It is paid by the Cursor user who cancels for a month and comes back to find the comparable plan is $30, by the Max subscriber who assumed twenty times meant twenty times, and by anyone comparing tools on a review written before the page changed.

If you pay for any AI subscription, the practical move takes a minute. Open web.archive.org, paste the pricing page URL, pick a snapshot from before the last renewal you remember, and read the two versions side by side. You are not looking for what the page says. You are looking for what it has stopped saying.

If the two versions differ, check the changelog and the help centre before you conclude anything. On this evidence the help centre is where the answer lives, and the changelog is where it does not.

The limits of this method

Text extraction from archived pages misses anything rendered in JavaScript, which is why ChatGPT and Gemini have no prices here despite both archiving fine. Five tools produced no usable snapshot pair at all. A pricing page is also not a contract, and none of this covers what any individual account is actually charged, which can differ by region, promotion and legacy status.

I checked three changelogs and one news index for announcements. Absence from those is not proof that no announcement was made anywhere, only that I could not find one in the obvious places.

Sourcing

All comparisons use Wayback Machine snapshots of each company's own pricing page, captured 31 July to 6 August 2026 and 25 October to 3 November 2026, read on 3 November 2026. Specific snapshot timestamps: Cursor 20260801112809 and 20261102201000, Claude 20260801031906 and 20261102111153, Synthesia 20260803024759, 20260929082114, 20261009155034, 20261024222349 and 20261029011117.

Plan details and mapping tables come from Cursor's pricing and plans help page, Anthropic's Ultra and Max help centre articles and its pricing page, and Synthesia's help article on the 1 October 2026 plan changes, all read on 3 November 2026. Changelog checks were made against cursor.com/changelog and anthropic.com/news on the same date.

Eight tools showed no change and are reported as unchanged rather than unexamined. Where I could not read a figure, the tool is listed as unusable rather than assumed stable.

The cheapest consumer protection in software is a URL and a date.