The full damage report

Every month, my bank account haemorrhages money towards various AI companies. I keep telling myself I'll do an audit and cancel the ones I don't use. And then I don't, because "what if I need it next week?" is the most powerful subscription retention strategy ever invented.

Well, today is audit day. Full transparency. Every tool, every cost, and an honest verdict on whether it's worth keeping.

The stack

ChatGPT Plus - $20/month (about 16 quid)

Usage: Daily. It's the first AI I open most mornings.

What I use it for: Quick questions, brainstorming, drafting emails, research when I need current information. The browsing feature is genuinely useful. I ask it about recent events, current prices, news stories. Things Claude can't help with because it can't see the internet.

Worth it? Yes. This is the one subscription I'd keep if I could only keep one. The GPT-4o model handles most tasks well, and browsing the web makes it uniquely useful.

Would I recommend it? To most people, yes. But try the free tier first. For casual use, it's often enough.

Claude Pro - $20/month

Usage: Daily, but for specific tasks.

What I use it for: Writing, coding, and working through complex problems. When I need to draft an article, Claude produces text that needs about half the editing that ChatGPT's output requires. For coding, Claude's explanations are better and it holds context across longer conversations.

Worth it? For me, yes. For the average person, probably not. Most people don't need two chatbots.

The uncomfortable truth: I keep both ChatGPT and Claude because they're better at different things. I know this is a luxury. I know I should pick one. I've been saying I'll cancel one of them for six months. I haven't.

Cursor Pro - $20/month

Usage: Every time I write code, which is most days.

What I use it for: It's my code editor. AI-assisted autocomplete, inline editing, and chat that understands my entire codebase. It's replaced VS Code entirely for me.

Worth it? Absolutely. This is the tool that saves me the most time in pure hours per month. The Composer feature (where it generates and edits across multiple files) is something I genuinely couldn't go back to living without.

The catch: It's made me lazier. I accept autocomplete suggestions without reading them properly. I know this is making me a worse programmer. I don't care enough to stop.

Midjourney - $10/month (Basic plan)

Usage: Two or three times a week.

What I use it for: Article header images, social media graphics, occasionally mocking up ideas that I can't draw because I have the artistic ability of a confused potato.

Worth it? Marginally. The Basic plan gives me about 200 images per month, which is more than I need. I could probably drop this and use free tools for the handful of images I generate.

Why I keep it: The image quality is genuinely better than anything else at this price point. When I need a good-looking header image for an article, Midjourney produces something usable on the first or second try. DALL-E takes five or six attempts to get something that doesn't look stock-photo-ish.

Notion AI - $10/month (add-on to Notion Plus)

Usage: A few times a week, if that.

What I use it for: Summarising meeting notes and occasionally generating action items from long documents. That's basically it.

Worth it? Honestly, no. This is the subscription I'm most likely to cancel. Everything Notion AI does, I could do by pasting the same text into ChatGPT or Claude. The convenience of having it inside Notion is real, but it's not ten-quid-a-month real.

Why I haven't cancelled yet: Laziness. Pure, unfiltered laziness.

Perplexity Pro - $20/month

Usage: Almost daily.

What I use it for: Factual research. Whenever I need to find out something specific and I want sources I can verify, Perplexity is my go-to. It's like Google but it gives you the answer instead of ten blue links to ad-filled websites.

Worth it? This one is complicated. I love Perplexity. I think it's brilliant. But $20/month for a search engine feels excessive. The free tier is good enough for maybe 60% of my queries. The Pro features (more queries, file uploads, access to different models) are nice, but I keep going back and forth on whether they're $240-a-year nice.

Current status: Keeping it, but it's on probation.

The total

| Tool | Monthly cost | |---|---| | ChatGPT Plus | $20 | | Claude Pro | $20 | | Cursor Pro | $20 | | Midjourney Basic | $10 | | Notion AI | $10 | | Perplexity Pro | $20 | | Total | $100/month ($1,200/year) |

One thousand two hundred dollars a year. On AI tools. I wrote that number and felt mildly ill.

What I should cancel

Being honest with myself: - Notion AI is going. The moment I finish writing this article, I'm cancelling it. There's no justification for it when I already pay for ChatGPT and Claude. - Perplexity Pro might drop to the free tier. I need to actually track whether I hit the free limits. If I don't, the Pro subscription is just a comfort blanket. - Midjourney could go if I committed to using Flux or DALL-E instead. But I know I won't, because Midjourney images look better.

Realistic future monthly cost: $70/month if I have the discipline to follow through. That's $840/year, which is still a lot, but at least I'd be using everything I pay for.

The lesson

If you've read this far, go look at your own subscriptions right now. I'm serious. Open your bank statement. Add it up.

The number will surprise you. It always does.