Not another benchmark post. I don’t care if one scored 82.7 on Terminal-Bench and the other got 81. I care about which $20 (or $100, or $200) is better spent for a normal person who uses these every day. Both companies just shuffled their pricing decks in April: Claude shipped Opus 4.7 on April 16 — same $5/$25 per M tokens, same Pro at $20, same Max at $100/$200. Default 1M context now, no “long-context SKU” nonsense. OpenAI shipped GPT-5.5 on April 23 — Plus stays $20, but the API jumped to $5/$30 (double 5.4), and they launched a new $100 Pro tier specifically pointed at Claude Max. So at every consumer price point, you’re now choosing between two things that cost the same. Here’s where each one is actually the better buy. At $0 — ChatGPT wins, not close Free Claude gets you Sonnet 4.6 with daily caps. Free ChatGPT gets you GPT-5.3 Instant, web search, file uploads, image generation, Custom GPTs, and now Images 2.0 Instant Mode. Yes there are ads now in the US. Still more product. If you’re not paying, use ChatGPT. At $20 — Claude Pro wins for me, but it’s a real fight ChatGPT Plus: GPT-5.5 access, Sora, Codex, Deep Research (10 runs/mo), Agent Mode, Images 2.0 Thinking. Bigger feature surface area. Claude Pro: Opus 4.7 with 1M context default, Claude Code included, Projects, Artifacts. Smaller feature surface, but the model itself is better at the things I use AI for (coding, long-doc reasoning, writing that doesn’t sound like a LinkedIn post). If you do video, image generation, or want a swiss-army-knife — Plus. If you mostly write or code — Pro. The Plus argument is stronger for a general user. The Pro argument is stronger for builders. At $100 — Claude Max wins Pro $100 launched April 9 specifically to fight Max at the same price. 5x Plus usage, GPT-5.5 Pro, the Codex 10x promo until May 31. Claude Max $100 = 5x Pro capacity, Opus 4.7, Claude Code included with real limits. Reason Max wins here: Codex is good but Claude Code with Opus 4.7 and 1M context is, right now, the best agentic coding setup money can buy at this price. The 30% lower median latency on long-context requests in 4.7 is the kind of thing you only feel after using both, but it’s real. At $200 — depends entirely on what you do Pro $200: 20x Plus limits, 1M context, GPT-5.5 Pro, 250 Deep Research runs/mo, Sora at scale. If you do research-heavy work or generate video, this is the only tier that makes sense. Max $200: 20x Pro capacity. That’s it. No video, no Deep Research equivalent, just more of the same Claude. If your work is “I need to read 200 sources and write a report” or “I need to generate video assets” — Pro $200. If your work is “I’m running parallel coding agents 8 hours a day” — Max $200. The API picture (worth knowing even if you don’t use it) Opus 4.7: $5 in / $25 out per M tokens. Same as 4.6. GPT-5.5: $5 in / $30 out per M tokens. Doubled from 5.4. Output tokens are where you pay. GPT-5.5 is now 20% more expensive on output than Opus 4.7. That’s a real flip — for most of 2025, GPT was the cheaper API. Worth pricing your workload before defaulting. Catch on the Claude side: the 4.7 tokenizer can produce up to 35% more tokens for the same input text. So same rate card, possibly higher bill. Run your prompts through both before committing. TL;DR $0: ChatGPT $20: Claude if you write/code, ChatGPT if you want everything else $100: Claude Max $200: ChatGPT Pro unless you’re a coding power user Anyone running both at the same tier — happy to be told I’m wrong, especially on the $20 question. That’s the closest call. submitted by /u/VidekVipPro
Originally posted by u/VidekVipPro on r/ArtificialInteligence