We Tracked AI Tool Prices for 2 Years Using the Wayback Machine. Here’s Who Raised Prices
TL;DR: AI vendors change prices constantly and almost never announce it. We pulled archived pricing pages for 37 popular AI tools from the Internet Archive, covering July 2024 to July 2026. Of the 19 tools with enough usable snapshots to compare, some entry prices nearly tripled (Surfer SEO, Synthesia), while others quietly moved down-market (HomeDesigns AI $27→$9, Leonardo $9→$5). The other 18 tools didn’t leave enough of a public trail to judge — and that opacity is itself a finding.
Most “best AI tools” articles quote a price once and never revisit it. But the price you paid last year is often not the price a new user sees today — and the tier you signed up for may not even exist anymore.
So we did the archaeology. Using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine CDX API, we pulled up to six evenly-spaced snapshots of each tool’s pricing page between July 2024 and July 2026, extracted every dollar figure with a regular expression, and compared the cheapest paid tier over time.
This is a transparency measurement, not a value judgment. A price increase isn’t automatically bad — the product may have improved. But you deserve to know when the goalposts moved.
How we did this (and where it can be wrong)
We want you to be able to check every number, so here’s the exact method and its limits:
- Source: Wayback Machine CDX API. Only real archived captures — nothing is estimated or guessed.
- Sampling: Up to 6 evenly-spaced snapshots per tool from July 2024 onward.
- Extraction: A price regex (
$followed by 1–4 digits with optional cents) reads every dollar token on the page. - Comparison: We compare the minimum paid tier (excluding $0 free plans) at the earliest vs. latest usable snapshot.
The honest caveats:
- Regex artifacts. The extractor sometimes catches non-plan numbers — a “$10,00” locale-formatted figure, per-unit API rates like “$0.01”, or a “$1,440/year” annual total. We manually flagged these below; treat any single oddly-small or oddly-large number with suspicion.
- Tier restructuring. Several vendors didn’t just change a number — they deleted, renamed, or merged tiers. A “$19 → $120” jump often means the cheap tier was killed, not that one plan quadrupled.
- Monthly vs. annual. Pages mix monthly and annual-billed prices. We report the lowest paid figure, which can flip between the two across snapshots.
- JS-rendered pages don’t archive well. Tools whose pricing loads via JavaScript (ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Midjourney, Perplexity) left no usable price tokens in the archive — so we report insufficient data, not a number.
18 of 37 tools had too few usable snapshots to compare. We’re listing them anyway, because a vendor whose historical pricing you can’t reconstruct is a different kind of transparency risk than one you can.
The tools that raised entry prices
These tools’ cheapest paid plan cost more in 2026 than in 2024 — often because the budget tier was removed.
| Tool | Earliest entry (date) | Latest entry (date) | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|
| Surfer SEO | $19 / $29 (2024-07) | $120 (2026-07) | Cheapest tiers ($19 Basic / $29) removed; entry now ~$120 |
| Writesonic | ~$10 (2024-07) | $50 (2026-07) | Repeatedly restructured upward; cheap $10–$16 tiers gone |
| Synthesia | $10 Starter (2025-05) | $56 (2026-07) | $10 Starter killed; entry paid plan now $56 |
| Jasper AI | $39 (2024-07) | $59 (2025-09→) | $39 Creator tier dropped; entry now $59 |
| Descript | $12 (2024-07) | $16 (2026-02→) | Creator tier $12 → $16 |
| Notion AI | $8 (2024-07) | $10 (2026) | AI add-on / plan price $8 → $10 |
Biggest movers: Surfer SEO and Synthesia. In both cases the entry price didn’t just rise — the affordable on-ramp disappeared. If you’re pricing these today against an old review, budget for 3–6× what that review quoted.
The tools that cut prices or moved down-market
Less common, but real. These added cheaper tiers or lowered the entry point — often a sign of competitive pressure in crowded categories (AI interior design, image generation).
| Tool | Earliest entry | Latest entry | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|
| HomeDesigns AI | $27 (2024-07) | $9 (2026-06) | Entry cut to $9; added $11/$14/$19 tiers |
| Leonardo AI | $9 Apprentice (2025-08) | $5 (2026-07) | Cheapest tier lowered $9 → $5 |
| Interior AI | $17 (2024-07) | freemium/credits (2026-07) | Moved to a low-cost credit model ($1–$9 range) |
| Otter.ai | $8.33 (2024-07) | added $4 tier (2026-07) | Core plans stable; new cheaper $4 entry appeared |
Caveat: Interior AI and Collov AI both show heavy regex artifacts (per-credit micro-prices like $0.24). The direction (down-market, credit-based) is trustworthy; the exact dollar figure is not.
The tools that held steady
| Tool | Entry price | Snapshots | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Copy.ai | $16 | 4 (2025–2026) | Identical across every snapshot |
| Careerflow | $8 | 5 (2024–2026) | Entry held; added higher tiers on top |
| Runway | $12 Standard | 5 (2024–2026) | $12 held; mid-tiers added in 2026 |
| HeyGen | ~$24 Creator | 6 (2024–2026) | Creator stable; entry nudged $24 → $20 |
GitHub Copilot looks volatile in the raw data ($100 → $10) but isn’t: the early snapshots only exposed the $100 Enterprise seat, while later pages surfaced the full ladder ($10 Individual / $19 Business). The $10 individual price has been stable — a good reminder that a “price drop” can just be a more complete page.
The tools we couldn’t verify
No usable price history in the archive — mostly JS-rendered pages or blocked captures:
ChatGPT · Claude · Perplexity · Midjourney · Cursor · DALL·E 3 · Grammarly · Intercom Fin · Teal · Kickresume · Rezi · Final Round AI · Jobscan · RoomGPT · ReimagineHome · Planner 5D · Suno (1 snapshot) · Canva AI (1 snapshot)
This isn’t an accusation — it’s a limitation of archiving modern SPAs. But practically: if you can’t reconstruct a vendor’s past pricing, you can’t catch them quietly raising it. Screenshot the pricing page the day you sign up.
What this means for you
- Old reviews lie about price by accident. A 2024 “it’s only $19/mo” is frequently wrong by 2026. Always click through to the live pricing page.
- Watch for the disappearing entry tier. The most common move isn’t raising a plan’s price — it’s deleting the cheapest plan so new users start higher. Surfer SEO and Jasper both did this.
- Screenshot pricing at signup. It’s your only evidence if a vendor later claims you were “always” on a higher tier.
- “Credits” pricing hides increases. When a tool switches from flat monthly to per-credit (Interior AI, Collov), effective cost is much harder to compare year-over-year. That’s often the point.
We publish our full methodology and the underlying trust scores separately — see how we score tools and the Trust Index. The raw per-tool snapshot dates and extracted figures behind this article are archived alongside our evidence set.
Data window: July 2024 – July 2026. Source: Internet Archive Wayback Machine CDX API. 37 tools sampled, 19 with ≥2 usable snapshots. Nothing in this article is estimated; where the archive was insufficient, we say so.