Ask HN: How much money do you spend monthly on subscriptions for AI models?
You can also mention how much you spend monthly on AI tools for professional work that your company pays for.
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?”
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.
$200 claude max through work -- pricing may be different, they don't show me the invoices
Zero at work.
Spent tons on hardware. Time is money and FOMO is a waste of money.
All in, thats about 40k.
The amds act as regular pcs so not single purpose. The 2x 48gb will drive some RAG and backup IT admin. The 72gb will develop software.
The 395+ can run the 3.5 qwen A10B model at reasonable rates so using deer flow it can create arbitrary research reports and create green field projects like a cross browser extension scaffold.
Everytging im working on is in a niche that can benefit from custom software but cant invest in it. Its mostly about self resiliency rather than privacy.
If something happens to me, the AI can train anyone on the uses, so we are solving BUS factors rather than anything else.
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.
Personal: $19.99 on Google AI Pro
Personal use is much greater than use for company purposes.
I used to have: $200 Claude-max $10 github copilot $20 chatgpt $20 Cursor
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then, I spent roughly $5000 in tokens for a project which turned out to be a dud. Figured, inference wasn't going anywhere as its now 80% of my day. So, I built a 4x DGX Spark cluster and put GLM5.2 on it. Then put a few qwen models for vision and embedding purposes on my original DGX Spark and completely went local. Tron, my Hermes agent, uses agent storming to orchestrate openCode agents and hermes subagents to handle most of my daily tasks.
For fun, I reworked a public Github vLLM Dashboard to track my usage and cloud cost avoided. original dashboard was by github.com/niklasfrick but I extended it. github.com/Wpnx330/spark-dashboard
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For my day job I spend about $1000 + $20 a month in cursor costs.
At work, I have no life. I don’t have visibility into the cost.
Been doing it this way for ~the last 6 months or so.
I do also use the API's for GPT and Gemini for some side projects, but the spend there is highly variable. It rarely exceeds $100 in a given month.
Mostly for side projects. I use GPT/Opus for planning, while Auto handles the implementation and the majority of the work.
Currently, I'm looking at Opencode Go for Chinese models. Can anyone compare Opencode Go and Openrouter if my use case is coding with K3 and GLM?