The AI pricing roundup has quietly forked into three currencies

I went down a rabbit hole this morning reading the late-2025 Juejin AI tool pricing coverage side by...

I went down a rabbit hole this morning reading the late-2025 Juejin AI tool pricing coverage side by side, and the thing that finally crystallized for me is that the price-anchored format has itself forked into two sub-currencies that publish under the same search query, and on top of that the dollar-mode sub-format has bolted on a forecast column the yuan-mode sub-format does not carry. The engineer trying to read a single 2026 pricing post is now bridging three price-time coordinates before they even get to the well-known pricing-vs-scorecard split, and the bridge work is invisible because all three pieces look like AI tool pricing from the search results page.

The piece that pushed me over the edge was the 2025 AI tool pricing guide, which walked through Google Gemini Pro at 19.99 dollars, ChatGPT Plus at 20 dollars, Claude Pro at 20 dollars, Grok at 40 dollars, and Midjourney at 10 to 120 dollars, all in dollars, all monthly, with an explicit forecast paragraph noting that API prices dropped 90 percent across 2024 to 2025 but that ChatGPT Plus is projected to rise toward 44 dollars by 2029. Then I read the 2025 年度盘点 piece, which listed Gemini Pro at 140 元, ChatGPT Plus at 140 元, Claude Pro at 140 元, Midjourney standard at 210 元, and Claude MAX at 700 元, all in yuan, all monthly, with no forecast column and no exchange-rate note. To be fair I am taking the dollar amounts and the yuan amounts with a grain of salt because both pieces were published in late 2025 and vendors have shuffled tiers since, but the sub-currency fork inside the pricing format is what has been rattling around in my head all morning.

The meta-pattern I want to call out is that the late-2025 to early-2026 Juejin AI tool coverage has now forked into three price-time coordinates that the engineer has to bridge manually. The dollar-now coordinate puts ChatGPT Plus at 20 dollars and Gemini Pro at 19.99 dollars and Claude Pro at 20 dollars, which is a clean three-way tie. The dollar-future coordinate from the same pricing guide puts ChatGPT Plus at a projected 44 dollars by 2029 and leaves Gemini Pro and Claude Pro unprojected, which is not a tie at all. The yuan-now coordinate puts the same ChatGPT Plus and Gemini Pro and Claude Pro at 140 元 each, also a three-way tie, but at roughly 7.05 元 to the dollar that tie means the Chinese reader is paying about 19.86 元 while the US reader is paying 20 dollars, which is the same number only if you ignore the currency. Honestly I am a little skeptical of any 2026 roundup workflow that pulls a single pricing post off the search results page and trusts it as a single source of truth, because the three coordinates are really telling me the price-anchored format has specialized to the point where one post is not a substitute for another.

The practical takeaway I want to put down is that the late-2025 to early-2026 pricing roundups are still useful for three narrow jobs and not useful for the fourth job most engineers are quietly trying to do. The dollar-now sub-format is good at the US-credit-card-bill job, because the 20 dollar figure matches what shows up on the statement. The dollar-future sub-format is good at the budget-projection job, because the 44 dollar projection tells a finance lead what to budget for in three years. The yuan-now sub-format is good at the China-credit-card-bill job, because the 140 元 figure matches what the Chinese reader is paying through 神马中转 API or a domestic wallet. None of them are good at the cross-currency stack-assembly job, because the reader has to take the dollar-now anchor from one piece, the dollar-future anchor from the same piece, and the yuan-now anchor from another, and then convert at the prevailing rate to discover that the 44 dollar ChatGPT Plus projection is roughly 310 元 while the 140 元 ChatGPT Plus today is roughly 19.86 dollars, and the only place that conversion is happening is in the reader's head.

I will reassess in three months. The last time I said that I was mostly on Cursor and Claude Code for coding and ChatGPT for everything else, which is still roughly where I land, except the 44 dollar ChatGPT Plus forecast is the first time a roundup has put a number on the trajectory. What has changed is that I now read the dollar-mode pricing pieces for the US-card-bill anchor and the trajectory column, the yuan-mode pricing pieces for the domestic-card-bill anchor, and the scorecard pieces for the coding-side rank, and I treat any single pricing roundup as one slice of a three-slice workflow rather than as a verdict. Give it six months and I expect either the yuan-mode pricing pieces to bolt on an exchange-rate column or the dollar-mode pricing pieces to bolt on an explicit 44 dollar projection for Gemini Pro and Claude Pro, and whichever moves first will tell me whether the pricing-format collapses back into one currency or hardens into a permanent reader-bridging chore.