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I update this site constantly — new reviews, refreshed pricing, breaking news, and pages polished with the latest facts. Here's everything that's changed in the last 30 days. Currently 26 updates on this page.
Latest news
Model launches, pricing changes, shutdowns, benchmarks. Each piece cited and dated.
OpenAI gives GPT-4o and GPT-4.1 92 days — half the notice the same family got in April
On 14 October 2026 OpenAI deprecated the last GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1 mini snapshots with a 14 January 2027 shutdown — 92 days, against the 184 days the gpt-4o-2024-05-13 snapshot got in April and against OpenAI's own published floor of 'at least 6 months' for generally available models. The same day, GPT-5.5 left the ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work and Codex model pickers on every plan, five months after becoming the default. Fine-tuned models follow their base model out.
Cursor's $20 plan is gone — and the models most Cursor users run left the usage pool
On 12 October 2026 SpaceXAI merged Grok, Cursor and X Premium into one five-tier ladder: Free, Plus $8, Premium $30, Super $100, Ultra $200. Cursor Pro at $20 is closed to new signups. The headline is a price cut, but the shared usage pool now covers Grok models only — Claude and GPT in the Cursor editor moved to pass-through API billing on Premium and above. For a developer whose daily driver is Sonnet, a flat $20 bill becomes $30 plus metered tokens.
Google retired two Gemini Flash models by rerouting them, not by failing them
Google's Gemini API changelog for 8 October 2026 deprecated gemini-3.5-flash and gemini-3.7-flash, and said every request to both is automatically routed to a different model. Both IDs are gone from the models page and the pricing page, and the deprecations page rows that cover them carry no date for when any of it happened. The bill does not change; what changes is that pinning a Gemini model ID no longer pins a model.
OpenAI's fastest tier reached Europe on 8 October — on every model except the flagship
On 8 October 2026 OpenAI shipped Ultrafast for GPT-6.1 Sol at $12/$60 per million tokens, six times standard, and became the first OpenAI speed tier purchasable under EU data residency. GPT-6 Astra's Ultrafast remains global-and-US-only at $60/$300. For a European buyer that turns latency from a price decision into a model decision: you can buy speed, but only on the model one point below the flagship.
Claude Haiku 5.5 is a tenth of Haiku 4.5's price — until your prompt passes 100,000 tokens, where it costs five times more
On 7 October 2026 Anthropic launched Claude Haiku 5.5 at $0.10/$0.50 per million tokens and cut Sonnet 5.5's cache read from $0.20 to $0.10. Haiku 5.5 is the first Claude model priced by prompt length: above 100,000 tokens every rate multiplies by five — the steepest long-prompt surcharge any major vendor charges, at the lowest threshold. Because the cliff is measured in Anthropic's newer tokenizer, it arrives at about 77,000 Haiku-4.5-equivalent tokens.
Mistral's new flagship costs less than its own mid-tier — and the price on the model card is a sale with no published end date
Mistral Large 4 launched 6 October 2026 at a list price of $1.36 input and $4.18 output per million tokens. Mistral Medium 3.5, the mid-tier it sits above, is $1.50 and $7.50. The flagship is cheaper on both ends with four times the context, which retires Medium 3.5 as a purchase. The number the model card actually shows today is half the list — $0.68 and $2.09 — struck through against the higher rate, and Mistral has not published the date the discount ends.
Google is paywalling a Gemini model its own Flash overtook in May — and charging $4.99 subscribers nothing for the privilege of losing it
From 9 October 2026 the free Gemini app drops to Flash-Lite only, and Google AI Plus subscribers lose the Pro model on a date Google will email them individually rather than publish. The Pro model in question is Gemini 3.1 Pro, which Google's own Gemini 3.5 Flash passed on benchmarks at I/O in May. The headline downgrade costs paying subscribers almost nothing. The free-tier cut is the one that matters, because it removes the only way to evaluate Gemini without a card.
Microsoft bought the transcription accuracy crown at 3x the price floor — and the price expires in 89 days
On 1 October 2026 Microsoft AI shipped MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, its first streaming speech-to-text model, and claims the no. 1 accuracy rank on Artificial Analysis for both final and partial transcripts. It costs $0.54 per audio-hour — three times Meta's $0.18 streaming rate — and that $0.54 is explicitly an introductory price 'through the end of the year', with no successor rate published. The two voice models launched alongside it are the more interesting purchase — though not the cheapest, as first reported.
Recently refreshed
Reviews I updated with this week's facts — model launches, pricing changes, new features. The page exists; the content moved forward.
ChatGPT
Buy Plus at $20/month. Every rung above it costs the same $20 per 1x of Plus usage, so upgrading buys headroom rather than a better rate — and the one plan that was priced below that line loses half its allowance on 30 October 2026. Here is the plan arithmetic, what the free tier costs you in a currency other than money, and the regional terms a European buyer has to check first.
OpenAI Codex
Codex is the coding agent most Claude Code users skip, and that is a mistake. It bets on asynchronous delegation rather than pair programming: describe a task, walk away, review a pull request. It runs GPT-6.1 Sol at $2/$10 per million tokens with cached input at $0.10, comes free with ChatGPT Plus at $20 a month, and is now strong enough that most professional developers run it alongside Claude Code rather than instead of it.
Grok
Grok is the AI that shouldn't work and does. Built by Elon Musk's xAI, integrated into X, and marketed as the 'rebellious' alternative to safety-focused models, Grok 4 quietly scores at the top of reasoning benchmarks while Aurora generates images faster than anything else on the market. Here's what actually matters in 2026, plus the trade-offs nobody mentions.
Cursor
Cursor is the AI editor most developers try first, and often keep — but on 12 October 2026 SpaceXAI closed the $20 Pro plan to new signups and folded Cursor into a Grok-wide subscription ladder. The usage pool now covers Grok models only; Claude and GPT are metered at API list on top. Here is the new rate card, what the SpaceX acquisition did to model choice, and when to pick Claude Code instead.
Gemini
Google AI Pro at $19.99/month is the tier that makes sense for most buyers: 3.8 Flash, 3.1 Pro, Deep Search and 5TB of Drive storage. The free app dropped to Flash-Lite only on 9 October 2026, Gemini 4 Argon is announced but not yet purchasable, and every Flash API rate doubles on 1 January 2027. Here is what each tier actually buys.
Claude
Claude is the AI assistant to buy when the work has your name on it. Pro at $20/month is the right plan for almost everyone, Max 20x is the only rung on the ladder that buys usage at a discount, and Sonnet 5.5 at $2/$10 is the model to call by default. Here is the plan arithmetic, the current lineup, and the four billing behaviours the rate card does not show.
Claude Code
Claude Code is still the category leader for complex coding work in October 2026. The plan question is the one worth getting right: Pro at $20 is the only paid Claude plan that returns no API credit, Max 5x at $100 returns $100 a month, and Team Standard at $25/seat now includes Claude Code — so the old advice to buy Premium for terminal access is obsolete.
Gemma 4
Gemma 4 is Google DeepMind's Apache 2.0 open model family — the 31B Dense flagship scores 89.2% on AIME 2026 math reasoning and ranks #3 among all open models on Arena AI's text leaderboard, beating multiple 400B+ proprietary rivals on intelligence-per-parameter. Native function-calling, structured JSON, multimodal (video + image), and edge variants that run offline on phones, Raspberry Pi, and NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. The most capable open model family in 2026 for developers who need permissive licensing, on-device inference, or model-portability across harnesses like Aider, OpenCode, and Pi.
NotebookLM
NotebookLM is the AI tool that made the broader market take research-focused AI seriously. Drop in 30 sources, ask it questions, and get answers grounded in the actual documents — with citations that link back to specific passages. In 2026, with Audio Overviews, Mind Maps, and Slide Deck generation, NotebookLM is the strongest AI research tool in the category. Here's the concise breakdown of what it does, the new Pro/Ultra tiers, and why the free version is still the best offering.
Qwen
Qwen is Alibaba's frontier AI lab — the most capable Chinese model family besides DeepSeek. The flagship is now Qwen3.8-Max-0902, a post-training refresh shipped 2 September 2026 at unchanged pricing: 2.4T parameters, 1M-token context, $2/M input and $6/M output. It took the top slot on Code Arena WebDev from Claude Opus 5 Max by three Elo points, having roughly doubled two agentic coding scores without touching the base model. It is API-only on Alibaba infrastructure, which is the constraint that decides most Western evaluations before the benchmarks do.
Mistral
Mistral is the French AI lab that became Europe's credible frontier player. Le Chat Pro at €14.99/month undercuts every Western competitor at the entry tier. Mistral Large 4 (6 October 2026) is the cheapest frontier-class model in Europe at $1.36/$4.18 per million tokens list; Small 4 is a strong cheap workhorse. The data-sovereignty story matters for European buyers. Not the absolute quality leader — but the right pick for anyone who needs European hosting or wants the cheapest serious AI subscription.
Kling
Kling is the AI video tool that has become impossible to ignore. From Kuaishou (the Chinese short-video giant), Kling undercuts Runway on pricing, generates longer clips than Veo, and added native audio generation in version 2.6. At $6.99/month starting, it's the price-performance leader of AI video in 2026. Here's where it wins, where it doesn't, and the Chinese-origin considerations that matter for some use cases.
Category pages refreshed
Best-for category pages updated with the latest picks and 2026 news cross-links.
What a Long Prompt Actually Costs on Each Vendor
Every major API now charges a surcharge above a prompt-length threshold, and the four rate cards disagree about where that threshold sits: 100,000 tokens on Claude Haiku 5.5, 200,000 on Gemini Pro and Grok, 272,000 on the GPT-6 family. Those numbers are not comparable, because each is denominated in its own vendor's tokens. Measured against the same English document, Anthropic's cliff arrives at about 47,000 words and OpenAI's at about 191,000 — four times later. The decision that follows is not which model is cheapest per token but which models have no cliff at all.
Cursor Loses OpenAI Models: What Survives, What Doesn't, and What the Exits Cost
OpenAI is winding down the contract that supplies GPT models to Cursor, with a proposed shutoff of 12 November 2026. Bringing your own OpenAI API key restores local Chat and Agent — and does not restore Tab, Auto mode, cloud agents, Automations or the CLI. Here is the feature-by-feature survival table, why 12 November is a ceiling rather than a deadline, the Cursor markup that BYOK does not escape, and every realistic exit priced per developer per month.
Best AI Chatbots & Assistants in 2026
The five AI chatbots that actually matter in 2026 — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok — with the verdict first, verified plan prices, and the reach-and-memory comparison no vendor page publishes.
Migrating Off Gemini 2.5: What to Move To, and What It Costs
Gemini 2.5 Pro, Flash and Flash-Lite have no shutdown date and are not deprecated — but since 18 September 2026 Google only serves them to projects that already used them, so a new API key cannot call them at all. You are migrating for access, not for a deadline. Here is the replacement map, the real cost of each move priced on a reference workload, and the three gotchas Google's pricing page does not do the arithmetic on.
Which AI APIs You Can Actually Buy With EU Data Residency
EU data residency has stopped being a yes/no question about a vendor and become a per-model, per-tier matrix. On OpenAI, Google and Anthropic the flagship is the model a European buyer cannot fully purchase; on Mistral it is the only one. The residency uplift itself is a known market price — 10% nearly everywhere, 20% on Microsoft's EU Data Zone — but it is the smallest number in the decision. This is the matrix, the SLA column, and the monthly arithmetic on one workload.
Running Claude Under EU Data Residency: Bedrock vs Vertex AI
Anthropic's own API has no EU option, so a European team that picked Claude has exactly two procurement paths: Amazon Bedrock or Google Vertex AI. They cost the same — both charge 10% over the global endpoint — and they are not the same product. Vertex keeps structured outputs, web search and the whole current lineup; Bedrock drops them. And the two platforms do not agree on what 'EU' means: Google excludes the UK and Switzerland in writing, while Bedrock's EU inference profile spans eight eu-prefixed regions, two of which are neither.