Current pricing dated to the day, head-to-head scorecards, every figure linked to its source, and a daily brief on what changed.
Fresh off the bench
Google shipped whole-deck editing for Gemini in Google Slides on October 30, 2026. What changed, which plans actually get it, the setup steps, and where the documentation still has gaps.
OpenAI's October 28 changelog lets eligible ChatGPT Pro and Business subscribers link an API organization and draw down up to $500 a month in free API usage, scaled to their plan tier or seat count.
Microsoft's October 29 Copilot for finance launch adds more than 25 accounting, capital-markets, and corporate-finance skills, but the audit-trail feature accountants may want most only ships on the Frontier tier.
GitHub shipped a public-preview image-generation and editing tool inside Copilot chat on October 28, powered by a model called GPT Image 2.5 Flare and billed separately through AI credits.
Google's Gemini 4 Carbon topped the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5.0 at 59 points on October 28, but only vetted cyber defenders get access while wider rollout waits on safety review.
Google's October 29, 2026 update lets Gemini generate, preview, and edit docs, sheets, slides, and PDFs inside the chat itself. What it does, who gets it, what it costs, and where it still routes you to the real app.
Google's October 28 update lets Fill with Gemini show the web page behind each AI-filled cell in Sheets and raises its per-request cap well past the original limit.
Agent Teams is still an experimental flag in Claude Code, nearly nine months after launch. Here's how it differs from subagents, how to turn it on, the three jobs where a team earns its token bill, and the side effect that changes ordinary delegation.
Copilot can now watch a pull request on GitHub.com and fix the two things that usually stall it, a failing Actions workflow or a merge conflict, without you re-clicking anything. Here's the mechanism, who gets it, and the review gap it opens when paired with auto-merge.
AWS added InvokeModel support and an ordered fallback chain to Bedrock AgentCore Gateway in October 2026. What the gateway rule actually does, what it costs per the AWS pricing page, and the two limits that still mean writing your own retry code.
Google shipped a Gemini Notebook connected app and two new Google Vids editing tools in the same week. What each one does, who gets it, what it costs, and the exact clicks to turn all three on.
A consolidated GitHub app now lets you @mention Copilot's cloud agent straight from a Teams thread to open a pull request. Here's the mechanism, the admin gate most teams will trip over, and the new usage-metrics field that finally shows which tools are driving your Copilot bill.
OpenAI's Decisions API left beta on October 22, 2026, with a 400-question cap and a caching model that can cost more per call than the flat $0.10 rate suggests. Here is the request shape, the real cost math, and when to just use Structured Outputs instead.
Anthropic just handed its Agent Skills standard to a neutral foundation. Here is what a SKILL.md package actually does, who maintains it now, how to ship one, and whether your team should adopt it this week or wait.
Recursive's Flint is a free, Apache 2.0 coding model that runs on a laptop and was built largely by an automated AI research system. What it is, what it costs, how to run it locally, and who should install it today versus wait.
What changed today
OpenAI's October 28 changelog lets eligible ChatGPT Pro and Business subscribers link an API organization and draw down up to $500 a month in free API usage, scaled to their plan tier or seat count.
Microsoft's October 29 Copilot for finance launch adds more than 25 accounting, capital-markets, and corporate-finance skills, but the audit-trail feature accountants may want most only ships on the Frontier tier.
GitHub shipped a public-preview image-generation and editing tool inside Copilot chat on October 28, powered by a model called GPT Image 2.5 Flare and billed separately through AI credits.
Google's Gemini 4 Carbon topped the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5.0 at 59 points on October 28, but only vetted cyber defenders get access while wider rollout waits on safety review.
Six stories: Mistral's open-weight Large 4 scores 82% on vulnerability reproduction where Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra refuse the task; n8n ships a 3.0 beta with breaking changes ahead of a December stable release; Gemini adds in-chat file editing; Meta quietly ships its fourth unannounced AI app; Google Sheets' Fill with Gemini adds per-cell citations and a 3,000-cell cap; and Sakana AI opens enterprise API access aimed at reducing vendor lock-in.
Free tools
The true monthly cost of 19 AI coding tools for your team. The sticker seat price is the floor, not the cap.
ComparatorRank 70+ model and provider rates by your token volume, including open models priced across every host.
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Built by Pondero
Home maintenance on autopilot. A local-first iOS app: seasonal tasks tuned to your climate, an item and document vault, local pros, and a built-in AI helper. Free.
An installable, annotated system for Claude Code: 7 model-routed subagents, working hooks, slash commands, and tiered CLAUDE.md templates. One-time, no subscription.
What we'd pay for
Open-source terminal AI pair programmer whose real differentiator is one commit per change. Why the git-native model is the tradeoff to evaluate, and who should skip it.
Open-source VS Code coding agent with a per-step human approval gate and bring-your-own-key billing. The Apache 2.0 license and direct provider billing are the whole reason to pick it over a closed IDE fork.
LLM-ready web scraping API that turns URLs into clean Markdown, JSON, HTML, or screenshots. Open source under AGPL-3.0 at github.com/mendableai/firecrawl with a managed API hosted at firecrawl.dev.
Firecrawl raised a $75M Series B and launched Alexandria on Sept 22, 2026. Browsing Alexandria's tools is free, each tool call bills at its own listed credit price, and the pricing page has no Alexandria line. The 4.6 holds; here is who should turn it on.
Alexandria is the first Firecrawl product built for an agent that has to find which source holds the answer, and it arrived with plan prices unchanged. Existing customers should try it inside their current plan and set a per-key spend limit first. New evaluators should start on Hobby, move to Standard once monthly burn clears about 6,000 credits, and treat Alexandria as a reason to pick Firecrawl only if the agent's job is multi-source research. Rated 4.6 of 5, unchanged.
Claude Opus 5.5 launched September 22, 2026 at $4/$20 per million tokens, a 20% cut from Opus 5 and the first Opus-tier model Anthropic has priced below its predecessor. Here is what the 40% savings claim actually means, the four breaking API changes, and the buy call for API teams and subscribers, with pricing dated 2026-09-22.
Claude Opus 5.5 is a stronger model at a lower sticker, and the price cut is the part you can bank. Anthropic ships it at $4/$20 per million tokens, down 20% from Opus 5, with cache reads down 60% to $0.20, per digitalapplied. If you run Opus 5 in production, migrate: change the model ID in a branch, clear the four breaking API changes, then compare two or three effort levels on real traffic before you move it. Benchmark legal, medical-coding, and tax agents first, because Vals AI measured regressions there. If you run Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5 lists at 40% of its per-token price and the first three breaking changes are already handled, so test it at high effort against your Fable baseline on your hardest tasks. If you hold a Pro, Max, or Team subscription, do nothing: five-hour limits rose 20% automatically, and the smart move is saving your one-off rate-limit reset for a long agent run instead of spending it on day one. The rating is 4.5 of 5. The half-point it gives up is migration friction plus the regression categories, not the model.
Cloudways just added Velocity managed Node.js hosting from $20/mo and shipped Managed AI Agents. Current September 2026 pricing across Flexible, Autonomous, and Velocity, which tier to pick, and where DigitalOcean App Platform or Render win instead.
For a team shipping a Next.js frontend, an Express API, or a self-hosted n8n on a fixed budget, Velocity's $20 Starter with bundled Cloudflare Enterprise is the pick, and it is the single biggest reason this review moves up from July's 4.0. For a WordPress agency that wants autoscaling and hands-off ops, Autonomous from $99/mo still fits; for a solo dev prototyping one small service, DigitalOcean App Platform's $5 entry or Render's free tier is cheaper. Skip Cloudways only if you need a GPU or you are happy managing raw compute yourself. We rate it 4.3 of 5.
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