My monthly AI spending

12 Aug, 2025

Here's a monthly breakdown of all the AI related stuff I spend on:

• Claude $20 - Useful for everything from writing code to explaining code. I can't justify paying $100 for the Max plan when I can get the job done for cheaper, though I admit I haven't levelled up my usage with tools/MCP/whatever yet.

• ChatGPT Plus $20 - I use it as a StackOverflow replacement. Deep research also is sometimes useful. o3 was my daily driver till they replaced it, and GPT-5 is also not bad for my trivial use-cases.

• Cursor $20 - My default IDE now. Useful to explain snippets of code and also for coding when I run out of Claude credits. The tab model is sometimes useful (e.g. for anticipating print arguments), but I keep it turned off by default.

• OpenRouter ~ 10$ - I use it as alternative to Claude Code using Claude Code Router, which enables me to try different models. Current favorite model is zai/glm-4.51, which is an insanely capable model.

• Vast.ai ~ 10$ - Occasionally I will rent out GPUs to try running a large model. It's pretty cheap and easy to setup.

I would also buy a Gemini subscription if Veo/Genie had a $20 offering, but AFAIK they don't.

So roughly 80$/month, give or take. Much cheaper than running inference on a H100...