Grammarly's Plus plan costs 392 rupees a month, and also 1,000 rupees a month. Both numbers are on the same page, and which one applies to you depends on a toggle most people never touch.
That is a 155 percent difference for the same product. It is the largest gap I found, but it is not the odd one out. I read eleven AI pricing pages on 27 October 2026 and wrote down two figures for every plan: the number the page shows you, and the number you pay if you want to leave next month.
Then I did something I have not seen anyone else bother with. I checked each vendor's advertised savings claim against its own arithmetic. Two of the six checkable ones were wrong.
The eleven, and what monthly really costs
Every figure below came off the vendor's own pricing page, read on 27 October 2026 from India on desktop.
| Tool and tier | Price shown | Monthly price | Monthly costs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grammarly Plus | ₹392 | ₹1,000 | +155% |
| Pictory Professional | $35 | $59 | +69% |
| Pictory Teams | $119 | $199 | +67% |
| Descript Hobbyist | $16 | $24 | +50% |
| Descript Creator | $24 | $35 | +46% |
| Descript Business | $50 | $65 | +30% |
| Runway Standard | $12 | $15 | +25% |
| Runway Pro | $28 | $35 | +25% |
| Runway Max | $76 | $95 | +25% |
| Claude Pro | $17 | $20 | +18% |
| Pictory Starter | $25 | $29 | +16% |
The left-hand column is what you see without clicking anything. The middle column is what the same plan costs if you are not willing to pay for a year in advance.
The split runs along product lines, not along honesty
Five of the eleven pages lead with the monthly figure, so what you see is what you pay: ElevenLabs, Jasper, Synthesia, Suno and Copy.ai.
The pages that lead with the annual rate are Pictory, Runway and Descript. All three sell video or media editing, all three carry the largest gaps in the table, and all three express the annual rate as a monthly-looking number. Runway goes furthest and strikes through the monthly price, so 15 dollars appears on screen with a line through it next to a 12 that you can only get by committing to a year.
Anthropic sits in the middle. Claude's page shows 17 dollars for Pro and then says, in the same sentence, 20 dollars if billed monthly. It also tells you the annual plan is 200 dollars billed up front, which is the detail the monthly-equivalent framing normally hides. Two hundred dollars divided by twelve is 16.67, so the 17 is a rounding rather than a price.
None of the eleven pages marked which toggle was selected in a way I could read from the page source. That is the part worth knowing. A reader comparing two tools in two browser tabs can compare one vendor's annual rate against another's monthly rate and never see the mismatch.
Pictory charges its cheapest customers the worst rate
This is the finding I did not expect, and it changes the advice.
A yearly commitment is usually described as buying you a discount of roughly twenty percent. On Pictory it buys you something different depending on which plan you are on:
| Pictory plan | Annual rate | Monthly rate | What a year saves you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $25/mo, $300/yr | $29/mo, $348/yr | $48, or 13.8% |
| Professional | $35/mo, $420/yr | $59/mo, $708/yr | $288, or 40.7% |
| Teams | $119/mo, $1,428/yr | $199/mo, $2,388/yr | $960, or 40.2% |
Forty-eight dollars is thin compensation for locking yourself into a video tool for twelve months, and Starter is the plan a cautious first-time buyer picks. Professional, the plan someone already committed would choose, saves nearly three hundred.
Runway does the opposite and applies a flat twenty percent to every tier. Standard, Pro and Max all save exactly twenty percent, and the page's dollar claims (36, 84 and 228 dollars a year) match the arithmetic to the cent.
So the honest version of pay yearly to save 20 percent is that it's correct for Runway, roughly double on Pictory's middle tier, and barely worth the lock-in on Pictory's entry tier. One rule does not cover it.
Six savings claims, checked against the vendors' own numbers
Every page that advertises a percentage gives you enough information to test it. Here is what the testing found.
| Vendor | Claim on the page | Best actual saving | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Runway | "Save $36/year", "$84", "$228" | exact on all three tiers | correct |
| Synthesia | "Save up to 4 months with yearly" | 33.7% on Pro, 33.3% is 4 months | correct |
| Descript | "Saving up to 35% over monthly plan" | 33.3% on Hobbyist | not reachable |
| Jasper | "Save ~20%" | 14.5% | overstated |
| Copy.ai | "20% Saving" | 17.2% | overstated |
| Suno | "save 20%" badge | 25% by its own dollar figures | understated |
Jasper is the clearest miss. Pro is 69 dollars billed monthly and 59 dollars billed yearly. That is 120 dollars saved on 828, which is 14.5 percent, advertised as roughly twenty. The gap between the claim and the arithmetic is a third of the claim.
Copy.ai's Chat plan goes from 29 dollars to 24 dollars, and the page shows 288 dollars as the annual total, which confirms it. Twenty-nine times twelve is 348. The saving is 60 dollars on 348, or 17.2 percent, badged as 20 percent Saving.
Suno is wrong in the customer's favour, which is rare enough to mention. The toggle badge says save 20 percent. The plan cards say Saves $24 by billing yearly on an 8 dollar plan and Saves $72 on a 24 dollar plan. Both of those are 25 percent. Whoever wrote the badge and whoever wrote the cards were working from different numbers, and the cards are the better deal.
Descript's claim is defensible on a technicality. Up to 35 percent is not a promise that 35 percent exists, and its best tier reaches 33.3. Worth noticing rather than worth complaining about.
Notion is the one I could not test at all. Its page says Save up to 20% with yearly and then never shows an annual price for any plan. Plus is 10 dollars per member and Business is 20, both labelled per member per month with no billing period attached. There is no number on the page to check the claim against.
The first month is not the price either
Two of the eleven pages carry a third number I was not looking for, and it's the one most likely to end up on a card.
Synthesia lists Starter at 19 dollars a month with a first-month promotion of 9 dollars, and Pro at 89 with a first month of 49. ElevenLabs does the same thing on its plan cards: Starter at 6 dollars shows a promotional first month of 1 dollar, and Creator at 22 shows 11.
So Synthesia Pro has four prices on one page. Forty-nine dollars for the first month, 89 a month after that if you stay monthly, 59 a month if you commit to a year, and 708 dollars if you read the annual total. All four are accurate. Only one of them is what you will be paying in March.
The two tricks interact badly. A 49 dollar first month on a plan you then abandon is cheap. A 49 dollar first month that converts you into an 89 dollar monthly habit costs 1,028 dollars over a year, which is more than the 708 dollar annual rate you turned down at signup.
The risk nobody prices in
An annual subscription is a bet that the company outlives your commitment. For most of these tools that's a safe bet. For this category it is not automatically one, and there's a worked example from this month.
Mozilla Solo closes on 30 November 2026 and deletes every site it hosts. Its shutdown FAQ says subscription refunds are calculated as of 1 October 2026, a date that had already passed when the notice was being read. Anyone who had paid Solo for a year was therefore holding two months of unusable service and a refund calculation anchored before the product stopped working.
That's the cost an annual commitment carries and no pricing page mentions. Twelve months of Pictory Professional saves you 288 dollars against paying monthly, and it also means that if Pictory announces a closure in month three, you have nine months of credit with a company whose refund policy you have never read.
The tools where the annual discount is steepest are not a random sample. They're the ones with the heaviest costs and the thinnest margins, which overlaps uncomfortably with the ones most likely to be acquired, restructured or closed. Six of the products tracked in what happened to these AI tools sold annual plans before they stopped existing.
None of which makes annual billing a bad choice. It makes it a choice with two variables rather than one: how much you save, and how confident you are the vendor is still there in month eleven. The method for checking the second one is here, and it takes about sixty seconds.
What I could not read
Four tools I wanted in the table are not in it.
Perplexity returned 404 on both pricing URLs I tried. Canva and Gamma both returned 403 to an automated request, which means a bot wall rather than a problem, and Gamma's 403 is already documented on this site.
Cursor is excluded on purpose, and the reason is worth saying out loud. An automated read of its pricing page returned a set of tiers that did not match anything Cursor sells. Checking against write-ups found Hobby free, Pro at 20 dollars, Pro+ at 60 and Ultra at 200, but those sources disagreed with each other about usage allowances, and none of them is Cursor. So I have no primary source for Cursor's annual terms and it stays out. A gap in a table is better than a number I cannot stand behind, which is the same conclusion I reached about Manus and Gumloop three weeks ago.
Why a year up front is worth this much to them
A sixty percent discount is not generosity and it is not a pricing error. Cash arrives now instead of over twelve months, which for a company burning money on inference is worth real interest, and the customer stops being able to leave. Monthly churn of five percent means half your customers are gone within a year, and an annual contract makes that arithmetic impossible for twelve months at a stretch.
Which explains where the biggest discounts cluster. Video and media tools carry the heaviest inference costs and the most casual users, the people who sign up for one project and cancel. Those are exactly the customers a 40 percent discount is built to convert.
The same logic sits underneath what the word free has stopped meaning. A free tier and a steep annual discount are two answers to one question, which is what to do about a user whose costs you cannot forecast.
The ten second check
You don't need to read a pricing page carefully. You need to do one division.
Find the annual total, divide by twelve, and compare that to the monthly price. If the page won't show you an annual total, which is what Notion does, treat the savings claim as unverified, because it is.
Three things to look for while you are there:
Struck-through numbers are monthly prices. Runway's 15, 35 and 95 all appear with a line through them, and all three are what you pay without a year's commitment.
The phrase billed annually turns a monthly-looking number into a yearly one. Grammarly's whole 155 percent gap lives in four words of small type under a big figure.
Billed up front tells you the real cash number. Claude's page is the only one of the eleven that gives it, and 200 dollars is a materially different proposition from 17 a month.
What I would actually do
If you've used the tool for three months and know you'll keep it, take the annual rate. The discount is real money and the lock-in costs you nothing you were going to use.
If you're deciding whether to try something, pay monthly for the first month even where it costs 25 percent more. One month of Runway Standard at 15 dollars is cheaper than eleven months of regret at 12.
Work out your own tier's discount before committing, because Pictory proves it varies from 14 percent to 41 percent inside one company. The badge on the toggle describes the best case and you may not be in it.
And if a page advertises a percentage, divide it out. Two of the six claims I checked today were overstated by a third, and both took about forty seconds to disprove with the vendor's own numbers.
Sourcing
Eleven pricing pages, read on 27 October 2026 from India on desktop. Every price, toggle label and savings claim quoted here came off the vendor's own page rather than from reporting about it.
Read today: Grammarly's ₹392 billed annually and ₹1,000 when billed monthly. Pictory's $25/$29 Starter, $35/$59 Professional and $119/$199 Teams, and its absence of a free plan. Runway's $12/$15, $28/$35 and $76/$95 tiers with the per-year dollar claims. Descript's $16/$24, $24/$35 and $50/$65 plans and the up to 35% line. Claude Pro at $17 annual, $200 billed up front, $20 monthly. Jasper Pro at $69 and $59 with Save ~20%. Synthesia's $19/$14 Starter and $89/$59 Pro, the $168 and $708 annual totals, the $9 and $49 first-month promotions, and the 4 months claim. Suno Pro at $8 and Premier at $24 with both the 20% badge and the dollar savings. Copy.ai Chat at $29 and $24 with the $288 annual total. ElevenLabs Starter at $6 and Creator at $22 with $1 and $11 first months, defaulting to monthly. Notion Plus at $10 and Business at $20 with no annual figure published.
Read 8 October 2026: Mozilla Solo's shutdown FAQ, including the 30 November 2026 closure date and the 1 October 2026 refund calculation date, both quoted from support.soloist.ai rather than from reporting about it.
One weaker row. ElevenLabs' annual prices are not displayed as numbers. Its FAQ states that annual billing works out to two months free, so the $60 and $220 yearly totals above are calculated from that rule rather than quoted. The monthly figures are quoted directly.
Not priced: Perplexity (404), Canva and Gamma (403), Cursor (no readable primary source).
The Grammarly figures are rupees because the page was read from India, and one vendor confirmed in writing to this site this month that plan sets, not just prices, vary by country and device. Our own Grammarly review carried roughly $12 annual against $30 monthly before that read, which is a different pair of numbers and the same 2.5x ratio. If you are somewhere else, expect your currency and possibly your plan names to differ, and expect the ratio to survive.
Pricing pages change more often than anything else covered here. If you are reading this months from now, the method in the ten second check will outlast the table, and the pricing changes log tracks what has moved since.
One last number. Pictory's Starter customers pay 13.8 percent less for giving up a year of flexibility, and Pictory's Professional customers pay 40.7 percent less for giving up exactly the same thing. The cheaper you are, the worse the deal, and no page tells you that.
