I posted on LinkedIn earlier about this, but I think that while we are still in the early days of AI capabilities, we are almost assuredly in the golden era of AI pricing. AI companies are hemorrhaging money left and right, but that’s not going to continue forever. The point of that post was to encourage people thinking about using AI for a project: don’t put it off, do it now. Because when these AI companies switch to a per-token model instead of just a flat monthly fee, it’s going to become much more cost prohibitive to use AI to complete large projects.
That said, I realized it was likely time for a blog post on what AI I actually use, because I’ve stopped using some things that I was using in 2025.
ChatGPT Pro ($200/month)
Just like in 2025, I still pay $200 a month to OpenAI for the baller ChatGPT Pro subscription. I’m not 100 percent convinced I need it, but I use it daily, multiple times throughout my life, both personal and professional. I use it to analyze potential investments. I use it to analyze companies. I use it to answer dumb questions. I am using it constantly.
And back to the losing money point: if I have it on Pro, either standard or extended thinking, it is very common for the AI to think over 20 minutes to answer my question. A couple of times it’s even crossed over into 30 minutes. This is why I pay. I’ve had friends who are like, “No, no, I have the Pro,” but they have the $20 a month version, and their answers are coming back in two to three minutes, not 20 to 30 minutes. Sometimes speed is what I want, so I don’t have it on the Pro thinking. I just take the general usage. But as long as I’m not in a rush, I want it to take its time, because what it’s doing is double checking, avoiding the hallucinations, and giving me results that I can trust that are extremely high quality. For me, that is worth every bit of the $200. There have been times when there’s probably at least once a week when ChatGPT pays for itself.
Claude ($200/month)
In 2025 I was a big fan of using Cursor to write my Python code. Cursor is still fine, but basically the only option now for writing code of any language is Claude Code. It is just amazing. And it can do a lot more than code now as well, but I realized that I needed to upgrade my Claude subscription from the $20 a month to the $100 a month to get the five times usage before I hit the cap and it tells me to cool down for three or four hours. So I did that, and I made up part of the $80 in extra money by canceling Cursor since I wasn’t using it anymore. I was just using Claude Code.
Now recently, about a week and a half ago, I upgraded my Claude even further from the $100 a month to the $200 a month. The difference is with the $100 a month plan you currently get five times the usage of the $20 a month. With the $200 a month plan you get twenty times the usage. And if you’re wondering, am I really using it that much? The answer is absolutely. It is currently hammering away on a major project for me and just taking care of things. It will run for hours and just do amazing things for me, and I don’t have to worry about hitting the limits.
I have never written a line of Swift code in my life, but I used it about a week ago to write a functional iOS app that I plan on putting in the App Store. I’m just waiting on Apple to approve me as a developer. But that’s the thing with Claude Code. It just takes care of things. It makes documents. It’s really kind of amazing what it is doing. It is not hype. So once again, for $200 a month I don’t blink. I get my value out of it in one day if I’m using it on a major project.
Google Gemini Pro (Free with .edu)
That’s really the only AI that I’m paying for right now. I also have a Google Gemini Pro subscription, which I think is like the equivalent of the $20 a month tier, but I have that for free with an .edu email address. The only thing that I use Gemini for currently is image generation. I recently had to make a PowerPoint presentation for a briefing I was giving to a company, and the diagrams that Imagen, which is the image generator for Google Gemini, makes are jaw dropping. It looks like a professional graphics artist worked on it all day. The text is amazing. Yeah, fantastic. I would pay the $20 a month for the graphics of Google Gemini Pro as well.
If You Can Only Pick One
So that is the current AI that I am paying for and how I am using it. If someone asks me, “If I can only have one, just one $20 a month plan,” I would say Claude. Not only because number one, Claude is still better at writing actual written tasks than ChatGPT is (I use it for my dictation), but number two, that opens up Claude Code. If you’re using it extensively, you may start to hit the limit where it tells you to cool down for three or four hours, and at that point you can decide if it’s worth the upgrade or not. But if you can only get one, I would get Claude.
Like I said, you don’t need the baller price tiers. But that said, I promise you, we will look back in a year or two at these price points and would kill to be able to pay for this amount of throughput for that price. Like I said, they are hemorrhaging money at these price points, and that is not going to last forever. So take advantage of it while you can.