B-02 · Category pricing economicsarchive-recorded · snapshot 2026-09-27
Research AI Tools: Pricing Economics
Pricing economics for the Research category across 56 archives: 48 carry a numeric starting price, 46 are free-tier listings, and 8 archives without a numeric amount are compared by pricing label only. Unit groups are never mixed — every comparison below is within a single billing unit.
Key numbers
Archives
56
data/tools · N=56
Numeric starting price
48
pricing.startingPrice.amount · N=56
Free-tier listings
46
pricing.model · N=56
Median mo starting price
$10/mo
unit=mo amounts · N=38
Label-fallback listings
8
pricing.label · N=56
Unit groups
5
startingPrice.unit · N=48
Starting-price spread by billing unit
only numeric amounts; null amounts excluded (R5)
| Unit | Listings | Min | Median | Max |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| mo | 38 | $0 | $10 | $49 |
| user | 7 | $9.99 | $12 | $49 |
| 1m-tokens | 1 | $0.15 | $0.15 | $0.15 |
| 1k-req | 1 | $7 | $7 | $7 |
| credit | 1 | $0.01 | $0.01 | $0.01 |
Lowest mo-unit starting prices (top 10)
the largest unit group in this category: unit="mo", N=38
| Tool | Starting price | Model | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| Andi | $0/mo | free | Completely free (no paid tiers) |
| Doubao | $0/mo | free | Completely free (daily limits apply) |
| ERNIE Bot | $0/mo | free | Completely free since Apr 2025 |
| ChatGLM | $0/mo | free | Free web app (paid developer API separate) |
| HuggingChat | $0/mo | free | Completely free (open-source models) |
| Inciteful | $0/mo | free | Completely free (open-access, OpenAlex-based) |
| Komo | $0/mo | freemium | Free forever (daily credits) · paid tiers exist but prices not verifiable from official page |
| Metaso | $0/mo | free | Free to use via metaso.cn (no public paid tiers listed) |
| Morphic | $0/mo | free | Free open source (self-host) |
| OpenAlex | $0/mo | freemium | Free ($1/day API budget) · Pay-as-you-go $1 increments · Member $5,000/yr · Member+ $10,000/yr · Partner from $20,000/yr |
Pricing model distribution
Count of archives per recorded pricing.model across the 56 Research archives.
Method
- Population: category = "research" archives (N=56); pricing fields as recorded (pricing.model, pricing.startingPrice.amount, pricing.startingPrice.unit).
- Unit discipline: amounts are grouped by startingPrice.unit and compared only within the same unit; cross-unit arithmetic is never performed.
- Null discipline: archives with a null startingPrice.amount (8 here) are excluded from every numeric statistic and fall back to pricing.label, then pricing.model, for display.
- Median over each unit group uses the standard median; min/max are the observed extremes in that group.