Every AI company now sells an "agent" — a model that doesn't just chat, it does tasks. What they don't put in the headline is what the agent actually costs: sometimes it's in the $20 plan, sometimes the agent lives two tiers up behind a credit meter. So here is the honest list, checked October 28, 2026: the top models with agents, the monthly price of getting the agent, a link to each, what the company actually is, and who's backing it. Prices move constantly in this industry — every figure below came from the company's own pricing or help pages where available.
1. ChatGPT Agent — OpenAI
Cost: Plus at $20/month is the entry plan that includes Agent Mode (plus Deep Research and Codex). Pro starts at $100/month for ~5x the usage, with higher Pro tiers above that. No annual discount on individual plans.
Official site: openai.com/chatgpt/pricing
OpenAI, founded in San Francisco in 2015, is the lab that kicked off the AI boom with ChatGPT; it's now a public-benefit corporation controlled by its foundation, and ChatGPT is the most-used AI product on Earth. Backers: Microsoft is the big one — about $13 billion invested since 2019, roughly a 27% stake after the 2025 restructuring. A reported $122 billion round closed in March 2026 at a reported $852 billion valuation, anchored by Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank.
2. Claude (Claude Code + Computer Use) — Anthropic
Cost: Pro at $20/month ($17/month billed annually) includes Claude Code and the Cowork agent features. The catch is the meter: chat and agent work draw from one shared usage pool, so heavy agent use eats your chat allowance. Max runs $100 or $200/month for 5x/20x usage plus monthly API credits.
Official site: claude.com/pricing
Anthropic was founded in 2021 in San Francisco by former OpenAI researchers, the Amodei siblings, as a safety-first AI lab. Its Claude models are the main rival to ChatGPT, and Claude Code is its agentic coding product. Backers: Amazon and Google are the largest strategic investors, with Microsoft and Nvidia also in, plus Menlo, Lightspeed, and Spark from the venture side. Its latest reported round (Series H, May 2026) was $65 billion at a reported $965 billion valuation.
3. Gemini Agent — Google (Alphabet)
Cost: Google AI Pro at $19.99/month includes Gemini Agent — but only in the US, in English; the same-priced plan in Europe doesn't get it. AI Ultra, the top tier, now runs $99.99 or $199.99/month (the old single $249.99 Ultra price is gone — don't let an old article sell it to you).
Official site: one.google.com/about/google-ai-plans
Gemini is Google's flagship AI family, and its agent line runs from the Project Mariner research preview to today's Gemini Agent, plus the Jules coding agent. Backers: none in the venture sense — the "backer" is Alphabet's balance sheet, which is its own kind of answer to where the money comes from.
4. Copilot Agents — Microsoft
Cost: two doors. Consumer: Microsoft 365 Premium at $19.99/month includes the Researcher and Analyst agents. Business: Microsoft 365 Copilot at $30/user/month — as an add-on, on top of a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan you also pay for — and custom agents you build are metered separately in Copilot Credits at a penny a credit. The seat price is not the whole price.
Official site: microsoft.com/copilot/pricing
Microsoft, founded 1975 in Redmond, sells Copilot as the AI layer across Windows and Office — Word, Excel, Teams — with agent creation through Copilot Studio. Backers: it's a public company; the interesting flow runs the other way — Microsoft is itself a backer of both OpenAI and Anthropic, so it profits no matter which lab's model wins.
5. Manus — Butterfly Effect
Cost: Pro starts at $20/month for 4,000 credits, with tiers at $40 and $200/month for more; annual billing takes ~17% off. Credits do not roll over — unused credits at month-end are gone.
Official site: manus.im
Manus is the general-purpose autonomous agent from Butterfly Effect, founded in China in 2022 and now based in Singapore. It went viral in 2025 for finishing whole jobs end-to-end — research reports, decks, websites — inside a cloud sandbox. The company story is a saga by itself: Meta agreed to buy it for roughly $2 billion in late 2025, China blocked the deal and ordered it unwound in 2026, and Manus went back to being independent. Backers: Tencent, ZhenFund, and HSG early; Benchmark led a $75M round in April 2025 at about a $500M valuation; the latest is a reported $500M+ round in October 2026 led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital.
6. Perplexity Computer + Comet — Perplexity AI
Cost: the Comet agentic browser is free. Pro at $20/month ($17 billed annually) includes a weekly taste of the Computer agent. The real agent tier is Max at $200/month ($167 billed annually) with 10,000 Computer credits a month. Know your meter: a quick Computer task runs roughly 15–70 credits; a full app build can burn 15,000+.
Official site: perplexity.ai/hub/pricing
Perplexity, founded in San Francisco in 2022, started as an AI answer engine that cites live sources and has expanded into the Comet browser and Computer, a cloud agent for professional work. Backers: Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, SoftBank, IVP, Accel, and NEA, with about $1.7 billion raised in total. A $20 billion valuation was finalized in September 2025; a reported $30 billion figure in 2026 coverage is talks, not a closed round.
7. Devin — Cognition
Cost: Pro at $20/month for a single user, Max at $200/month for a much larger quota, Teams from an $80/month minimum plus per-seat pricing. Usage is quota-based since March 2026 — heavy agent work past quota is pay-as-you-go.
Official site: devin.ai
Cognition is the San Francisco lab behind Devin, the first widely known autonomous software engineer: hand it a ticket from Slack, GitHub, or Jira and it plans, writes, tests, and ships the code itself. It also bought the Windsurf editor in 2025. Backers: Founders Fund backed it early; the latest reported round (Series E, September 2026) was over $2 billion at a reported $48 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel with a long syndicate behind them.
8. Genspark Super Agent — MainFunc
Cost: Super Agent access comes on every plan. Plus is $24.99/month ($19.99 billed annually) with 10,000 credits; Pro is $249.99/month ($199.99 annually) with 125,000. Credits don't roll over.
Official site: genspark.ai
Genspark, built by MainFunc (founded 2023 in Palo Alto by ex-Baidu, Microsoft, and Google engineers), doesn't sell its own model — its Super Agent orchestrates 70+ outside models plus 80+ tools and delivers finished work: reports, decks, sheets, even phone calls. It started as an AI search engine in 2024 and pivoted to agents in 2025. Backers: Emergence Capital, LG Technology Ventures, SBI Investment, and Pavilion Capital (Temasek-affiliated), among others — a $275M Series B at a $1.25B valuation, then a reported $100M extension in June 2026 at $2.6B.
9. Lindy — Lindy AI
Cost: Plus at $29.99/user/month (3,000 credits), Pro at $99.99 (adds Computer Use), Max at $199.99. Monthly billing only — no annual discount — and credits pool across the workspace but don't roll over.
Official site: lindy.ai
Lindy, founded in San Francisco in 2023, sells an "AI teammate" that lives in Slack: inbox triage, scheduling, meeting prep, CRM updates, and research across 1,000+ integrations, asking for approval before it does anything outside-facing. Backers: Battery Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Coatue, and Tiger, with roughly $50 million raised in total per industry trackers; no verified public valuation.
10. Muse — Meta
Cost: Free to start — and the shape is different from everything above: Muse isn't a chat app with an agent mode, it's a personal agent as the whole product. Every user gets their own agent running on its own dedicated computer; the free plan runs it with a usage limit, and paid monthly plans raise the limit instead of unlocking the agent. For developers, Muse Wonder via Meta's model API runs $4.00 per million input tokens and $20.00 per million output tokens.
Official site: muse.ai
Muse is Meta's personal AI agent, launched September 8, 2026 in the US, Canada, and Japan across web, iOS, Android, and Mac. It browses, schedules, builds documents and apps, and runs scheduled work in the background — powered by Meta's Muse model family, Muse Spark and the frontier Muse Wonder. Backers: Meta itself. Like Google and Microsoft, the "backer" is a tech giant's balance sheet — here, funding a land-grab for your daily life.
11. DeepSeek — DeepSeek (High-Flyer)
Cost: There is no subscription. The chat app and website are free. The money door is the API, priced like a commodity: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at $0.30 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output at peak hours — half that off-peak — and V4 Pro at $1.32 / $3.96. Its Search and Fetch APIs for agents, launched October 17, 2026, run $0.75 per 1,000 calls. The models are open-weight under the MIT license, so running them yourself is also on the table.
Official site: deepseek.com
DeepSeek is a Chinese AI lab based in Hangzhou whose models rival the US frontier at a fraction of the price — which is why its models quietly sit inside other people's agent products, including Genspark's orchestra above. Its own agent play is tooling (its Harness for coding agents) plus being the cheap engine in everyone else's stack. Backers: none — and that's the story of this whole list. DeepSeek was created and is funded by High-Flyer, the quantitative hedge fund co-founded by Liang Wenfeng. No venture rounds, no subscription business to feed: the money comes from trading, and that's how the API can sell for a tenth of US prices.
The pattern (read this before you subscribe to anything)
Add up the cheapest paid door into each agent above and the stack runs about $195 a month — roughly $2,340 a year — and two of the eleven (Muse and DeepSeek) don't charge at the door at all: one is a tech giant buying its way into your daily life, the other is funded by a hedge fund. Free has a backer too — ask who it is. And even the $195 is before the meters start. Because the meters are the real business model here: shared usage pools (Claude), credits that expire monthly (Manus, Genspark, Lindy), per-credit charges on custom agents (Microsoft), and quota overages (Devin, Perplexity). The subscription price is the cover charge; the agent's work is billed by the sip. None of that makes these tools bad — several are genuinely useful, and the free doors (Comet, Manus's free tier, Devin's free tier) are real. It just means the BogusAPY question applies to AI tools exactly like it applies to yield: don't ask what the headline price is. Ask what the work costs, and where the money actually goes.
Prices and plan details checked October 28, 2026, against each company's official pricing or help pages where available; funding rounds and valuations are as reported by reputable coverage and are marked "reported" where the company hasn't confirmed them. Nothing here is sponsored, and no link is an affiliate link. This is a pricing snapshot, not a promise of what any tool will earn you — and it's not financial advice.
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