This page is a cross-app index of verified storefront rows, not another “cheapest AI in the world” listicle. Six products had dated country prices in our file as of 29 Aug 2026: ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, Gemini AI Pro, Perplexity Pro, SuperGrok, and GitHub Copilot Pro. Where a cell is blank, we say blank instead of inventing a dollar figure.
Category hub: /ai-subscriptions/. Full ChatGPT Plus board: /service/chatgpt/.
The ranked table, by entry price
USD converts at the public euro reference rate of 29 Aug 2026. Local currency is what you actually pay. Each row is the plan people mean by “the paid AI sub” - the flagship tier, not the cheapest SKU hiding under a different name.
| App | Plan ranked | Cheapest USD | Local | vs US | US list |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub Copilot | Pro | $10.00 flat | $10 (US verified) | list | $10.00 |
| ChatGPT Plus | Plus | Philippines $16.16 | ₱999 | −19% | $19.99 |
| Perplexity Pro | Pro | Philippines $16.16 | ₱999 | −19% | $20.00 |
| Gemini AI Pro | AI Pro | Indonesia $17.33 | Rp309,000 | −13% | $19.99 |
| Claude Pro | Pro | Pakistan $17.69 | ₨4,900 | −12% | $20.00 |
| SuperGrok | SuperGrok | Turkey $27.12 | ₺1,299.99 | −10% | $30.00 |
Same-week snapshot, six catalogues. The Philippines winning two tables at ₱999 is a price-point coincidence, not a shared checkout - each app bills its own way, which matters more than the headline number (see payment rails below).
Runners-up straight from the file: ChatGPT Plus Pakistan $17.69 and Japan $18.86; Perplexity Pro Pakistan $17.69 and Canada $18.02; Gemini AI Pro Philippines $17.79 and Turkey $18.15; Claude Pro Japan $18.86 and Indonesia $19.57. Pairwise, ChatGPT versus Claude gets its own page: ChatGPT vs Claude.
The quiet winner nobody ranks: Copilot at ten dollars
Every roundup chases the chatbots and misses the boring one. GitHub Copilot Pro is $10/mo, billed directly by GitHub on your ordinary card - no regional app-store pricing, no second Apple ID, no arbitrage math. Our US row is verified 29 Aug 2026; the other country cells are seeded but not yet priced, so treat “flat worldwide” as GitHub’s own documented model rather than our forty-two-row verification.
That $10 undercuts every flagship row above - including the Philippines bargain - before you factor risk. And if you are a student or teacher, GitHub Education verifies enrollment and drops Copilot Pro to free. For anyone in school, the cheapest paid-AI decision is not a country choice at all; it is an application form.
Trade-off, stated honestly: Copilot is a coding assistant, not a general chatbot. If you live in a browser tab asking questions about recipes and tax law, the comparison that matters is still the chat tier below. Price and product both count.
Wait - isn’t Turkey supposed to be the cheap one?
That story died in June 2026. ChatGPT Plus Turkey doubled from ₺449.99 to ₺999.99 overnight, which converts to about $20.86 - above the US $19.99 list. India tells the same cautionary tale: ₹1,999 lands at $20.88 in dollars despite looking cheap in rupees. SuperGrok’s Turkish row (₺1,299.99 = $27.12) survives, but only because its US list is higher to begin with.
Any article still calling Turkey the budget capital of AI subscriptions is pre-June thinking. Check the conversion, always: a low native number is not automatically a bargain once you divide.
Why competitor roundups show different winners
We checked the field while writing this. One tracker’s latest snapshot was late July; another still ran Q2 numbers showing Claude Pro at $10.96 in Nigeria - a tier Anthropic has since restructured, so their “winner” no longer exists at that price. A third showed Perplexity’s Canadian row ahead of its Pakistani one, which flips depending purely on the day’s exchange rate.
Three things separate this page from those:
- One verification week. All six tables were checked 29 Aug 2026. No splicing a 2025 blog figure into an August ranking.
- Flagship plans only. Gemini Plus ($4.99 US) is not AI Pro ($19.99 US). ChatGPT Go (₹399 = $4.17 in India, same date) is not Plus. Rank like against like or the whole exercise is fiction.
- Blank beats guessed. Microsoft retired Copilot Pro as a consumer SKU; Midjourney Standard is a US-only list. Those stay out of the ranking until dated rows exist.
India deserves its own warning. YouTube and Netflix genuinely are cheaper there in USD. ChatGPT Plus is not. If a roundup says everything is cheaper in India, it never opened the Plus row.
Payment rails are not portable
Cheapest country is not a property of “AI.” It is a property of one merchant’s catalogue plus one billing rail.
- ChatGPT Plus: web checkout takes cards in your account country; the App Store row bills to the Apple ID country. Turkey and India require locally issued cards, gift cards fail everywhere we checked, and OpenAI closes known arbitrage accounts. High ban risk on those two rows.
- Claude Pro: cards-only on the web today, so most regional pricing flows through App Store billing - where the Apple ID country is the price and store credit works within that storefront.
- Perplexity Pro and Gemini AI Pro (our rows): App Store IAP. Same Apple-ID-country logic. Note the Gemini SKU is a Google One / 5 TB bundle, so the web Google One checkout is a different product we have not dated.
- SuperGrok: dated App Store rows; it is not X Premium - that comparison lives at Grok vs X Premium.
- GitHub Copilot Pro: direct card billing from GitHub, which is exactly why it can hold one global price. PayPal and invoicing appear on higher team tiers.
A Pakistan Apple ID that buys Claude Pro at ₨4,900 does nothing for ChatGPT Plus pricing, and a Philippines ID that wins two tables overpays Claude (₱1,290 = $20.87 there). If your plan is “one cheap account, four apps,” the file already shows that plan losing money on at least one row. And no - a VPN changes your IP, not your billing country. Ban risk is the cost that never shows up in the USD column.
I re-check catalogues weekly. How a figure earns its source and date, and why blank beats guessed: methodology.