I Spend $180–250/Month on AI Tools
I spend $180–250 USD per month on AI 😮
Specifically:
- ChatGPT — $20
- Gemini — $20
- Replit — $20–80
- Cursor — $20
- Claude — $100
- Perplexity API — $1–5
- OpenAI API — $5
Why? 🤔
🔣 Let’s start here: I consider myself an AI enthusiast and I’m genuinely fascinated by exploring each service and finding a use for it in real life.
🔣 Every service has its own pros and cons, its own use cases. For example:
1️⃣ ChatGPT — like Google, but for text work. Less for coding. It’s convenient that it can look at desktop apps: IDEs, terminal, and browser. On Mac you can’t connect your own MCPs to the desktop app (unlike Windows), which is genuinely painful. Tried Codex — works okay, but by default too few tools are available. Also slow.
2️⃣ Gemini — on Android it’s the assistant that launches on quick-tap, and I actively use NotebookLM for analyzing large datasets. Plus all the premium Google services (YouTube, Drive, etc). Should try code assist in terminal at some point.
3️⃣ Replit — great for spinning up app prototypes quickly and deploying them right there. All infrastructure gets created and wired up automatically — love it. Sometimes you do end up grinding through some bug for a long time, going deep into the weeds. That’s just how it is. The $20 monthly limit usually isn’t enough either.
4️⃣ Cursor — my most complicated relationship. I keep buying the subscription and then canceling it. It supposedly has the largest token limits right now, but it’s unstable — sometimes it executes commands on its own, sometimes it dumps them into the interface expecting manual input. Sometimes only intermediate steps show up. You ask it to fix something in the same chat and it’s lost the context, executing commands based on files that no longer exist. This is all GPT-5 auto. Maybe I should use thinking mode — I’m just afraid of hitting the limit. GPT-5 is also just a slow model. Nice that it’s an IDE format though — easy to browse code and files. Maybe I should just switch to Claude Sonnet 4.5 and call it a day.
5️⃣ Claude — this month’s discovery. Especially Claude Code. You launch it in the terminal, give it a task, grant permissions, and it just grinds away while you watch the logs thinking “how far we’ve come.” Really convenient for spinning up agents for different tasks and running them in parallel. Didn’t think I’d part with a hundred bucks so easily, but when Claude independently analyzed and solved a problem and deployed it on its own — something I’d spent 3 hours on the day before and never managed to pull off — I decided it was worth every penny.
6️⃣ Perplexity API — mostly for auto-filling cells in Google Sheets with data from the internet.
7️⃣ OpenAI API — my default for personal projects.
Do I really need all these subscriptions? 😅
🔣 Probably not. But while I’m in exploration mode, trying new things — it makes sense. I think it pays for itself many times over in terms of skills gained and speed of work.
P.S. The Replit link in the original post was a referral link.