Six companies landing on the same $20 price point isn't collusion — it's a market finding its floor.

$20 has become the psychological ceiling for "impulse subscription" pricing on a consumer AI product, the same way $9.99 became the streaming-service anchor a decade earlier. What's interesting is what each company chose to pack into that ceiling once the number itself stopped being a competitive lever. Google reached for something it already owned at scale — storage — and bundled it in rather than competing purely on model quality. Anthropic went the opposite direction, refusing to publish a token count at all and instead selling a usage philosophy ("at least 5x free") that asks you to trust the relative multiplier rather than compare an absolute number.

That's a meaningfully different sales pitch, and it's worth sitting with for a second.

A published number invites a direct comparison; an undisclosed multiplier doesn't. Neither approach is dishonest, but they optimize for different buyers — the spec-sheet shopper who wants a message count to screenshot, versus the buyer who just wants to stop hitting limits without doing math. Devin and Replit Core sidestep the question entirely by not being general-purpose products at all, which is its own kind of honesty: a $20 coding agent doesn't need to justify itself against a $20 chatbot, because nobody is actually choosing between them.

The real comparison question isn't "which $20 plan is objectively best." It's whether the specific thing bundled into your $20 — storage, a coding agent, sourced search, or raw breadth — is the thing you were already going to pay for somewhere else.