Why every AI tool costs twenty dollars a month now

I went down a rabbit hole this morning reading the late-2025 Juejin AI pricing guides back to back, and the thing that finally crystallized for me is that the entire AI tool industry has quietly converged on a twenty-dollar-a-month price ceiling, and almost nobody is talking about it as the story it actually is. ChatGPT Plus at twenty dollars. Claude Pro at twenty. Google AI Pro at 19.99, which honestly might as well be twenty. Cursor at twenty. GitHub Copilot at ten for the basic plan but twent...