Ask HN: How much money do you spend monthly on subscriptions for AI models?
Monthly total for all AI model subscriptions for personal use, with a breakdown of which models you use and for what purpose (coding side projects, AI assistants, etc.).
You can also mention how much you spend monthly on AI tools for professional work that your company pays for.
For me, the biggest pain point was actually having multiple AI subscriptions just to use different models for different things. I’m working on Talkory.ai, so I naturally use several models—GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, etc.—for things like coding, research, content and brainstorming. Individually, each subscription makes sense, but collectively the monthly cost adds up pretty quickly.
That’s one of the reasons I started building Talkory.ai: instead of paying for and switching between multiple AI tools, you can access and compare multiple models in one workspace and see which one gives the best answer for your particular task.
So rather than thinking “Which AI subscription should I pay for?”, I’m working on “Can I get the best model for each task without maintaining 5–6 separate subscriptions?”
Previously $0 using local models, then $10/mo with GitHub Copilot, cancelled that when it became a bad deal, now $10/mo with OpenCode Go.
I haven't seen a better deal than OpenCode Go yet. You get more in token spend than with using providers directly due to some volume discounts they pool.
exact same path as me. I'm still stuck with 5 more months of Copilot annual subscription, but it was nerfed so badly that I just wrote it off completely. OpenCode go in VS Code is fantastic.
Yep. Exact same take here. I have a private harness I actually integrated GitHub Copilot Chat support with, but you lose an "entire months" credits with any nominal task.
They knew what they were doing and wanted to kick people off.
Thank you for sharing your experience, too. I suspect a lot of us all took this path.
run a 2-person custom dev agency and we just shipped our own saas, so ai is basically our co-founder at this point.
i currently maintain active subscriptions for claude pro and google ai pro. honestly, the roi is completely undeniable when you factor in how much time it saves us on boilerplate code, debugging, and drafting initial architectures. we also sprinkle in some midjourney and elevenlabs for asset generation when we need it.
for a small team trying to ship fast, the $40-$60/mo we spend on core llms is by far the cheapest overhead we have.
That’s one of the reasons I started building Talkory.ai: instead of paying for and switching between multiple AI tools, you can access and compare multiple models in one workspace and see which one gives the best answer for your particular task.
So rather than thinking “Which AI subscription should I pay for?”, I’m working on “Can I get the best model for each task without maintaining 5–6 separate subscriptions?”
$200 claude max through work -- pricing may be different, they don't show me the invoices
Personal: $19.99 on Google AI Pro
I haven't seen a better deal than OpenCode Go yet. You get more in token spend than with using providers directly due to some volume discounts they pool.
They knew what they were doing and wanted to kick people off.
Thank you for sharing your experience, too. I suspect a lot of us all took this path.
Spent tons on hardware. Time is money and FOMO is a waste of money.
Zero at work.
i currently maintain active subscriptions for claude pro and google ai pro. honestly, the roi is completely undeniable when you factor in how much time it saves us on boilerplate code, debugging, and drafting initial architectures. we also sprinkle in some midjourney and elevenlabs for asset generation when we need it.
for a small team trying to ship fast, the $40-$60/mo we spend on core llms is by far the cheapest overhead we have.