Poe will not tell you what Premium includes

Two AI subscriptions got smaller this summer. One produced a week of headlines, a Community Note on the announcement post and a revival of interest in two lawsuits. The other, as far as we can find, reached one pricing tracker and nobody else. The size of the change had very little to do with it. One of those companies announced its change with a number attached, and the other announced nothing.

On 29 August 2026 the official @ClaudeDevs account said that from 14 September it would permanently raise standard weekly limits in Claude Code by 25 percent for Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise plans. The second post in the same thread did the arithmetic out loud: because a temporary 50 percent boost had been running since May, the change works out to a 17 percent reduction against the temporary allowance subscribers had before 14 September. That announcement had around 7.1 million views by 2 October and carries a Community Note stating the reduction plainly. Trade coverage followed within hours.

Poe changed what its $19.99 plan includes in late July, and it produced almost nothing. We spent a working day in September trying to establish exactly what, using Poe's own published material, and missed the one page that answers most of it. This version, rechecked on 2 October 2026, corrects that.

What a prospective subscriber can actually read

Start with the obvious place, which is where we went wrong. Poe's old pricing address, poe.com/about/pricing, showed no price, plan name or allowance when we fetched it on 1 September 2026, and it now redirects to the home page. The real shop window is poe.com/subscription_plans, and a logged out visitor can read it. It lists five plans by allowance alone: 10 thousand points a day for $4.99 a month, then 660 thousand, 1.65 million, 3.3 million and 8.25 million points a month for $19.99, $49.99, $99.99 and $249.99. Those are the US prices; from Belgium the 660 thousand plan shows as €22.99. No plan has a name, so the word "Premium" appears nowhere on it.

The help centre is where those numbers ought to live, and reaching it took the longest. In September every article page on help.poe.com returned 403, which is where our first attempt stopped. Poe runs its help centre on Zendesk, and Zendesk's public content API answers when the rendered pages will not. A request to help.poe.com/api/v2/help_center/en-us/articles.json returned all five published articles in full, including the two that matter: "Poe FAQs", last updated 27 August 2026, and "Poe Purchases FAQs", last updated 18 June 2026. So we do have Poe's own current words on how any of this works. Below is what they and the plans page commit to in public.

Read that middle column again. Poe tells you in public how many points you get, what each model charges per thousand tokens, that points expire monthly and that replacing them costs $30 per million. What it never does is join those up. A reply costs whatever its length makes it ("Message cost is variable, so longer messages are more expensive than shorter messages", says the rates panel), so the plans page never says how many conversations 660 thousand points buy, and your running balance lives behind the login: "You can check your plan details and remaining points at any time by visiting the 'Settings' page."

The number we are not putting in the headline

Half of this is now confirmed: Poe's own plans page shows the $19.99 plan at 660 thousand points a month. The other half rests on a third party. usagepricing.com, a pricing tracker, recorded on 28 July 2026 that the same plan had carried 1,000,000 points until then at the same price, which is also what our internal research said in September. That would be a 34 percent reduction, roughly double the Anthropic cut, inside the same eight week window.

We could not verify the old figure ourselves, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The tracker says it read Poe's own plan data. Poe published no announcement, the help centre articles name no plan, and the Internet Archive holds no 2026 snapshot of the plans page to compare against. Treat the 1,000,000 as a reported figure with a label attached, and the 660 thousand as Poe's own. If Poe publishes anything that contradicts either, we will correct this page.

The related claim that Poe cut its free daily allowance by roughly 90 percent earlier in 2026 has the same problem and carries the same label. Poe's FAQ confirms only the mechanism, that "non-paying users receive points daily, which reset at the end of each 24-hour period", with no figure attached to it.

One piece of arithmetic is still worth doing, because it runs on Poe's own published rate. If the reported cut happened, the 340,000 points removed would cost about $10 to replace at $30 per million, on top of a $19.99 plan. Poe sells precisely that top-up. Its FAQ says subscribers "can buy add-on points starting at $30 per 1M points, with no transaction fees", those add-on points are usable for one year and are not refundable, and the page code the site serves a logged out visitor carries a flag for whether an account is permitted to buy them. We checked that flag ourselves on 1 September 2026.

Same summer, opposite weather

Anthropic made the smaller cut and took the larger beating, and the sequence of events shows why. They published a percentage attached to a named plan, which is a thing people can argue with. Within a day the argument had produced the Community Note, a viral post about what the "20x" label on the Max plan actually delivers over a week, and a reply from Tibo Sottiaux, who works on Codex and ChatGPT at OpenAI and used the episode to contrast his own employer's terms. That reply had roughly 2.6 million views by 2 October, which is a fair measure of what a rival's confusing pricing page is worth to a competitor who can explain his own in one sentence. Nothing in it is an Anthropic admission, and it has been miscast as one in a few places already. Anthropic supplied the phrase that did the real damage on its own, promising changes that would "make it feel like you're getting more from Claude." One word in that sentence carried most of the anger.

Two proposed class actions against Anthropic are also live in the Northern District of California, filed in June and August 2026. They allege, among other things, that the Max multipliers describe a five hour session window rather than the weekly cap, and that the site is "a black box, without any meaningful description of how usage is calculated". Those are allegations rather than findings, and Anthropic declined to comment on the first of them. They matter here only as evidence of where a published number can eventually be taken. Nothing comparable is aimed at Poe, and gentleness is not the reason.

Poe's column is quieter, and the quiet feeds itself. Its blog now sends a logged out visitor to the home page. The creator changelog, the only channel that was still moving, last posted on 20 March 2026. Quora, which owns Poe, announced layoffs across Poe teams in April 2026. Even the plans page title, read on 2 October 2026, still advertises "GPT-5.5, Claude-Opus-4.7, Gemini-3.5-Flash", several model generations behind the bots named in the header of that same page. A vendor whose public surfaces have stopped being maintained cannot generate a pricing controversy when it changes a number without saying so.

Why a compute point resists being priced

A compute point is an invented unit in the way that an airline mile is an invented unit, and there is nothing automatically sinister about that. Different models cost their vendor wildly different amounts to run, and some internal unit has to absorb the difference. The trouble starts when the conversion runs through something the customer cannot know in advance.

Think about what you would actually need in order to price a monthly point allowance. You need the point cost of every model you personally use, which Poe now shows under a Rates button on each bot's page, logged out included. You need to know whether points are charged on what you send as well as on what comes back, which matters enormously if your habit is pasting in long documents, and the same panel answers that: both are. You need to know how attachments, image generation and very long conversations are charged. You need to know whether unused points expire, and here Poe does answer you: they do, "unless specified". And you need to know whether any of those per model rates can move without an announcement, because if they can, your real allowance can shrink while every published number stays exactly where it was.

That last one is worth sitting with. In a plan counted in messages, giving you less means changing a figure you can see, the allowance or a model's per-message multiplier. In a plan denominated in points, the advertised figure can hold steady while the price of the thing you spend it on drifts upward. We have no evidence Poe has done that, and we are not implying it. The problem is that you would only notice by rereading each bot's rate card yourself.

None of this means Poe did something wrong by reducing what a plan includes. Compute costs are real, the bots on Poe's own logged out landing page on 1 September 2026 included Claude Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, Gemini 3.7 Flash and Kimi K3, every one of them expensive to serve, and a company that has just been through layoffs has obvious reasons to tighten what it gives away for free. A vendor is entitled to change what a plan contains. The complaint is narrower: the change was made in a unit few subscribers can convert into messages, and then it was not announced.

Before your next renewal

None of this is specific to Poe, so it is worth running against whatever you are paying for now.

• Can you read the actual allowance without logging in? If the number lives behind an account, the vendor has decided you should commit before you compare.

• Is the unit convertible into something countable, using information the vendor publishes? If the conversion table is missing, the allowance figure is decoration.

• Does a dated changelog exist, and has anything appeared on it this quarter? A vendor that has stopped writing has stopped explaining.

• What happens when you reach zero? A hard stop until reset, a downgrade to a slower model, and a paid top-up are three quite different products.

• Screenshot your current allowance today. It costs nothing, and it is the only evidence you will have if the number moves quietly.

That last habit is the useful one, and it is less cynical than it sounds. Anthropic's own weekly figures from July 2025 were taken down and never republished, which is why every current estimate of what a Claude plan delivers per week is somebody's inference from a fourteen month old press report.

If you are on Poe Premium and your month has not felt any different, there is no urgent reason to move, and Poe carries bots we do not, Claude Fable 5.1 among them, which is absent from our catalogue. But if your month has started ending early, the thing worth knowing is that a metered plan and a counted plan are different purchases, and you are allowed to prefer the second. Ours is denominated in messages, and where a model uses more than one per reply, the picker shows the multiplier before you send. MultiChats Pro is $20.99 a month or $199.99 a year for 1,500 messages a month, Pro+ is $34.99 a month or $349.99 a year for 3,000, and both open the same 60 models from 18 providers rather than a tier gated subset. The full breakdown sits in our pricing section. For the wider field rather than our own pitch, we keep a comparison of apps like Poe.

We could change our limits too. Any company can. What we would owe you is a dated post saying so, and a number you can hold against the one you were sold, which is the part Poe skipped and Anthropic, for all the noise it took, did not.