I've tried dozens of AI tools this year. Most were free trials that I never converted. A few earned a permanent spot in my monthly budget. Here's exactly what I pay for, why, and what I tried and dropped.
What I Pay For
ChatGPT Plus - $20/month
This is the most valuable subscription I have. Full stop. I use it for coding help, debugging, writing, research, brainstorming, and learning new concepts. The GPT-4 access alone is worth the price. It's noticeably better than GPT-3.5 for complex reasoning, and the speed improvement over the free tier means I actually use it instead of getting frustrated by slow responses.
I use it at least 20-30 times per day. At $20/month, that's less than a dollar per day for a tool that saves me hours. The ROI is absurd.
The new features keep coming too. Code Interpreter (now Advanced Data Analysis) lets me upload files and have GPT-4 write and execute Python code on them. I used it to analyze a dataset last week that would have taken me an hour to clean up manually. It did it in 2 minutes.
GitHub Copilot - $10/month
Lives in my editor. I barely notice it anymore, which is the sign of a great tool. It's become part of how I type code. Write a comment, Tab to accept the suggestion, move on. For repetitive patterns and boilerplate, it's indispensable.
I accept roughly 35-40% of its suggestions. The rest I either modify or ignore. But even that acceptance rate translates to significant time savings across a full day of coding. The suggestions have gotten noticeably better since I started using it in January.
Midjourney - $10/month (Basic plan)
I don't use this for work as much as I thought I would. But I use it enough to justify $10/month. Blog post images, social media graphics, placeholder art for projects. The quality is consistently excellent and it saves me from the stock photo hunt.
I go through phases with Midjourney. Some weeks I generate 50 images. Other weeks, zero. The Basic plan gives me about 200 generations per month, which is plenty for my use.
Perplexity Pro - $20/month
This one surprised me. I started using Perplexity as an alternative to Google for research queries and I'm now using it more than Google for anything that isn't navigational ("take me to this website") or local ("restaurants near me").
Perplexity answers questions with sources. Real, cited sources that I can verify. It's like ChatGPT but with footnotes. For technical research ("what's the difference between these two AWS services?"), it's faster and more reliable than bouncing between Google results and trying to piece together an answer.
The Pro tier gives GPT-4 level responses and unlimited queries. Worth it for how much I use it.
What I Tried and Cancelled
Tabnine - $12/month (cancelled after 3 weeks)
Inferior to Copilot in every way that matters to me. The suggestions were less contextual, less accurate, and less helpful. The privacy angle (local model option) is appealing in theory but the quality trade-off wasn't worth it for my use case.
Jasper - $49/month (cancelled after 1 month)
An AI writing tool marketed at marketers. I tried it for writing blog posts and documentation. The output was generic and corporate-sounding. ChatGPT writes better content for free. I can't see who this is for now that ChatGPT exists, unless you really need the templates and team collaboration features.
Notion AI - $10/month (cancelled after 2 months)
AI features built into Notion. Summarize pages, brainstorm, write drafts. It's fine. But it doesn't do anything I can't do faster by copying text into ChatGPT. The integration is convenient but not $10/month convenient when I'm already paying for ChatGPT Plus.
Otter.ai - $17/month (cancelled after 1 month)
Meeting transcription and summarization. The transcription quality is good. But I don't have enough meetings to justify the cost. If I were in 3-4 meetings a day, this would be a no-brainer. For my 2-3 meetings per week, it's overkill.
The Total
ChatGPT Plus ($20) + Copilot ($10) + Midjourney ($10) + Perplexity ($20) = $60/month. Plus about $5-10/month in OpenAI API usage for my code review bot and other experiments.
Call it $70/month total on AI tools. That's less than my coffee budget and it has a bigger impact on my productivity than any other category of tooling I pay for.
My Prediction for Next Year
I expect this list to consolidate. ChatGPT is adding features rapidly and might absorb some of what I use Perplexity for. Copilot is getting chat features that overlap with ChatGPT. There will probably be fewer, more capable tools rather than many specialized ones.
But the total spend will go up, not down. These tools are genuinely useful and I'll pay more for better versions of them. AI tooling is the best investment I've made in my productivity this year.