Basics
A chatbot is a window onto a model.
You type. A product sends that text to a model and shows the reply. The monthly plan, the model, and the company that trained the model can be three different things.
What you are choosing
A consumer plan is a subscription on the product’s own site. An API price is a meter on tokens, used by software. PowerfulBot keeps those apart. The prices page shows what an official pricing page said. The compare page puts models next to each other. The benchmarks show published scores, with a badge for who measured them.
A sensible first pass is small. Open two products, paste the same ordinary prompt, and see which reply you can use. The prices page lists a monthly figure only when the official page stated one.
Privacy and safe use
Treat a prompt as a message you are sending to a company. Do not include passwords, payment numbers, health details, or someone else’s private mail. A free plan is still a service with its own rules.
Read the policy on the company’s site before you rely on it. Two policies that responded when checked: Anthropic’s privacy policy and Google’s privacy policy. OpenAI’s policy page did not respond to our check, so it is not linked. Use the link inside the product itself.
Ask the model to say when it is unsure. Then check anything that matters against a source you trust. A fluent paragraph is not a citation.