The AI Tools I Actually Pay For (And the Ones I Cancelled)

I've tried a lot of AI tools. I've kept a few. Here's the honest list — what I pay for, what I cancelled, and why. No affiliate links, no sponsored picks.

What I actually pay for

Claude Pro — $20/month

The one I use most. Better writing output than anything else I've tried. Follows instructions properly. Claude Code is worth the subscription on its own if you're doing any kind of development work. The Projects feature — where you give it persistent context about your work — is genuinely useful for ADHD brains who are tired of re-explaining themselves every conversation.

Would I pay for it if it went to $30/month? Probably. It's the tool that's changed how I work more than any other.

ChatGPT Plus — $20/month

I kept this for a specific reason: Advanced Voice Mode and browsing. I use voice mode in the car and when I'm doing something with my hands and need to think out loud. The browsing is useful for quick research where I need current information.

Honest take: if I had to drop one, I'd drop this before Claude. But the use cases are different enough that I keep both.

n8n (self-hosted, $6/month for the VPS)

Not technically an AI tool subscription but it powers most of my automation. I run it on a cheap VPS and pay nothing per execution. The AI nodes — Claude, OpenAI, HTTP calls to any API — let me build workflows that are actually intelligent rather than just "if this then that."

The upfront effort to self-host was real. The long-term cost is basically nothing.

Perplexity Pro — $20/month

This is the controversial one. Perplexity is an AI search engine — it gives you cited, sourced answers instead of hallucinated ones. For research, fact-checking, and staying current on fast-moving topics (AI, especially), it's the tool I reach for first.

Some people say you can replicate this with ChatGPT browsing. You can, sort of. But Perplexity's interface is faster, the citations are cleaner, and the "Spaces" feature for organising ongoing research topics is something I actually use.

What I cancelled

Notion AI (add-on)

Notion is great. Notion AI felt like a tax on a product I was already paying for. The AI features are fine — draft, summarise, rewrite — but nothing it does is worth an extra $8/month when I can do better work in Claude with a well-crafted prompt. Cancelled after two months.

Grammarly Premium

Used it for years before AI writing assistants made it redundant. Grammarly Premium is $12/month to fix commas and suggest synonyms. Claude does this and about 50 other things on the same subscription. Cancelled.

Jasper

Tried it during the hype cycle. It's a ChatGPT wrapper with a marketing-flavoured prompt library and a price tag that assumes you don't know that. Cancelled after the free trial.

Various "AI meeting note" tools

Tried three of them. They all do roughly the same thing: transcribe your meeting, summarise it, extract action items. The transcription quality varies. The summaries are generic. The action items are rarely accurate enough to trust without re-reading the transcript anyway.

I now use Whisper (free, runs locally) for transcription and Claude to structure the output. Costs nothing and works better.

The pattern I've noticed

The tools worth paying for either:

1. Do something I genuinely can't replicate by prompting a frontier model directly (Perplexity's sourcing, n8n's automation infrastructure), or
2. Are so deeply integrated into how I work that the friction of switching costs more than the subscription (Claude, ChatGPT voice mode)

Everything else — the wrappers, the add-ons, the "AI-powered" features bolted onto existing tools — has a short half-life. The underlying models improve, the prompt templates become unnecessary, and you stop opening the app.

Before you pay for another AI tool, ask: is this doing something the frontier models can't do directly? If the honest answer is no, it's probably a subscription you'll cancel in 60 days.

Total spend

For the amount of work this stack replaces — writing assistance, research, automation, coding — it's not a hard number to justify. The test I apply: what would I pay someone to do what this tool does? If the answer is more than the subscription, I keep it.