AI Pricing

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. The cheap-AI story keeps escalating. In September I wrote about open source AI beating GPT-5.5 at a sixth of the cost — open models were closing the capability gap while undercutting US pricing. This month Alibaba went further: Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4-trillion-parameter model that Alibaba claims goes toe to toe with Claude Fable 5, released to everyone, with API pricing around $2 per million input tokens. On the Arena.AI leaderboard it trails only Fable 5 and three Claude Opus models. For frontend coding, only two Opus models and Moonshot’s Kimi K3 beat it. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Google just dropped the price of its top-tier AI plan from $250 to $100 a month, and I had to do a double-take. At Google I/O 2026, they announced a completely new pricing structure that puts their most powerful AI tools at a price point that actually competes with ChatGPT and Claude. But “compete” and “are worth it” are two very different things. Here’s what I found after digging through every detail. ...