Quick answer
The standard developer AI stack (ChatGPT Pro + Claude Pro + Cursor + GitHub Copilot) costs roughly $840/year or $2,520 over three years, for software you'll never own. Bodega One Code is free for personal use ($39 one-time for commercial). It costs nothing or pays for itself within weeks.
I want to show you a math problem.
It's not complicated. But once you've seen it, the "it's only $20/month" framing that every AI company uses starts to look different.
The standard developer AI stack in 2026
Let's start with what a typical developer actually pays. Not an edge case, just someone building software in 2026 who uses the tools their industry has normalized.
- ChatGPT Plus: $20/month for GPT-4o, reasoning models, image generation
- Claude Pro: $20/month for Claude Sonnet and Opus, extended thinking, higher rate limits
- Cursor Individual: $20/month for the IDE, usage-credit based (extra credits billed per request)
- GitHub Copilot Pro: $10/month for in-editor completions, chat, and CLI
That's $70/month before you've deployed a single line of code. Before the hosting bill. Before API credits you burn in production.
Annual: $840. Over three years? $2,520. For tools you'll never own.
The "just $20" psychology
Every subscription is priced to feel small. Spotify is $11. Netflix is $15. The mental accounting that makes these feel fine ("less than a lunch") was engineered by pricing teams who've read the same behavioral economics papers.
AI companies know this. $20/month clears the "is this worth it?" threshold without much friction. The problem is stacking. Four subscriptions at $10-20/month each isn't four small purchases. It's $840/year for access to tools you don't own, and that number grows every time a tier you actually need gets more expensive.
What you're actually paying for
Here's the part nobody talks about: you're not buying anything. You're renting access.
At the end of year three, you've paid $2,520. You own nothing. Stop paying and your access stops immediately. The workflows, the context, the integrations? Gone. Or available at whatever price they set next.
Compare that to tools with perpetual licenses. Most desktop software was priced as a one-time purchase for decades. The SaaS model has been so thoroughly normalized for AI that the alternative (just owning the tool) barely comes up.
The 3-year cost breakdown
| Tool | Monthly | Year 1 | 3-Year Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT Plus | $20 | $240 | $720 |
| Claude Pro | $20 | $240 | $720 |
| Cursor Individual | $20 | $240 | $720 |
| GitHub Copilot Pro | $10 | $120 | $360 |
| Full stack | $70 | $840 | $2,520 |
And that's assuming prices hold. The base tier at $20 has been stable, but the versions you actually need for serious work have quietly moved up. Claude Max (the tier with rate limits that actually support heavy dev work) runs $100/month. That's $1,200/year for one tool.
The API cost underneath
There's one more cost layer most subscription comparisons miss: model usage fees on top of the subscription.
Cursor moved to credit-based billing in June 2025. Pro ships with $20 of included usage; after that you pay per request. Developers doing real agent work (long context sessions, multi-step Composer chains) burn through the included credits in days. The economics shifted from "flat $20/month" to "flat $20/month plus whatever you spend on requests."
GitHub Copilot Pro caps at 300 premium requests/month. Claude Code is fully consumption-based: roughly $50-150/month at moderate use, $200-500/month if you're running it in CI on every PR.
The subscription is often the floor, not the ceiling.
The subscription vs one-time purchase calculation
Before you renew, run this math:
- List every AI tool you're currently paying for
- Multiply each monthly price by 36
- Add them up
- Ask whether what you got was worth what you paid
Not "is it useful?" Of course it's useful. The question is whether the subscription model specifically makes sense for your situation. For developers on a team with a real budget, maybe. For freelancers and indie developers paying $70+/month for a stack they'll never own, it's worth thinking harder about.
Honest pricing for AI coding tools did not disappear. It just stopped being the default. Bodega One Code is free for Personal use (1 machine) or $39 one-time for Pro (2 machines, commercial license). Free or pay once, own it. No usage meter, no monthly ceiling, no acquiring company that can raise your price next quarter. See the full pricing breakdown or our offline AI IDE guide if you want to weigh every option.
Sources: Cursor pricing · Claude Pro pricing · GitHub Copilot pricing · ChatGPT Plus pricing
Common questions
- How much do AI coding subscriptions cost over 3 years?
- A typical stack of ChatGPT Plus ($20/mo), Claude Pro ($20/mo), Cursor Individual ($20/mo, formerly Cursor Pro), and GitHub Copilot Pro ($10/mo) totals $70/month, or $2,520 over three years. You own none of it. The access ends the moment you stop paying, and every tool can reprice or change terms mid-contract.
- Is Cursor Individual worth $20 a month?
- Cursor Individual (renamed from Cursor Pro in May 2026) runs $720 over three years. Heavy users hit usage limits and pay extra on top, including Bugbot which is now metered inside this tier. If your usage is steady and heavy, the real cost is well above the sticker price.
- Does Bodega One Code cost less than Cursor over time?
- Yes. Bodega One Code Personal is free (1 machine) or Pro is $39 one-time for commercial use (2 machines). Cursor Individual is $720 over three years. Bodega One Code is free, or for commercial users pays for itself in two months and never renews. You own the license, updates are included, and there is no usage metering.
- Why one-time pricing instead of a subscription?
- Subscriptions make sense for services with ongoing server costs. An IDE that runs on your machine does not have those costs. One-time pricing means you own the software, prices cannot rise on you, and the tool keeps working if the company changes direction. It also aligns our incentive with shipping, not churn.
Written by the Bodega One team. We build Bodega One Code, the local-first AI IDE, and we write here about local models, AI costs, and what we learn shipping it. More about the team and why we build local-first on the about page.
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