AI on the Cheap

Repeatedly, I get asked whether ChatGPT is worth paying for, what other products I would recommend, and, if not ChatGPT, which product one should subscribe to. 

Here’s the answer.

Yes. ChatGPT is worth paying for; it is even worth paying $200 for every month… for some people. If you are one of these people is the real question.

So let’s start here. There’s ChatGPT, but there are also several competing products with both free and paid tiers. These are: Anthropic’s Claude AI, Google’s Gemini, Mistral’s Le Chat (which is EU-based, GDPR, privacy, etc.), xAI’s Grok, and Perplexity. With the exception of Mistral, these are US-based services. And there are many additional free ones worth mentioning, like Meta (Facebook) has a free chatbot, which may or may not be available in your country, there’s the Technology Innovation Institute’s Falcon Chat (from the United Arab Emirates – great for Arabic) which is free, and there are a number of Chinese products, like Deepseek Chat or Baidu’s Ernie Chat. There’s even a free Hungarian Puli Chat developed specifically for Hungarian use by the ELTE Research Centre for Linguistics.

If you are wondering whether you should subscribe to a paid product, you should be using all of these chats (especially the ones with the paid tier) regularly. Try them out. Compare. See which gives you better answers. Which one do you like the best for your own use cases? I can give you a few of my impressions. Gemini is a good workhorse, and its research team is second to none, even before the ChatGPT era. Claude AI is pushing AI safety and ethical development, which I like. I also think that its models are the best writers. Mistral’s Le Chat is weaker than the others, but its coding model impressed me. It is also cheaper, and if privacy and GDPR are important for you, this is an EU-based company. xAI’s growth was impressive. They built the biggest data center in almost no time and caught up to the rest. Their most advanced models’ approaches are interesting. (But that costs $300 per month.)  It is trained on Twitter (X) data, and Elon Musk is the head. So buyer beware. I personally don’t have enough experience with Grok. Perplexity does not use its own models for the most part. They buy the AI from others. Their product is generally well-liked, and their paid tier lets you use many different models, though I would expect these models to be limited in some ways. Personally, Perplexity has not impressed me at first. But now I have a Pro plan, and they released a whole AI browser (which is cool, and they did this before OpenAI released Atlas), so I am using it more and more. It is growing on me. If I did not already have a subscription to Claude and Gemini (just cancelled ChatGPT, actually, though not sure how long this will last), I would be all over Perplexity, specifically because I can use many different models in their chat.

Ethan Mollick, someone whose name you should know if you care about the AI world, once said, You need to use an AI chat product for 10 hours before you really know what it is capable of, before you really know how to effectively use it.

So, if you have not put your 10 hours in on the above products, you do not need a subscription.

Once you have put in your 10 hours, you will also know the limits of these free products. You will have preferences. You will know which one you like and which one you don’t. That will answer your next question. Which product should I subscribe to?

But if you really want to do a better-than-free AI on the cheap, there are two options. Mistral is a bit cheaper than the others, and if you are in “Education” (student or faculty), you are eligible for their discount, which brings the price down to 6 EUR (+VAT), or even less with the annual plan. Again, I don’t think their models are as good as the others. I see more hallucinations, factual errors, though their coding and Linux tech support skills impressed me over the past few weeks. 

The other, slightly cheaper way to get one of these products is through Revolut. Right now, Revolut offers a Perplexity subscription as part of their Premium (and above) tiers. If you already subscribe to a Premium Revolut plan, you can get this for free. And if not, a Premium plan is much cheaper than the subscription. If you sign up because of this post, please use my invite link to sign up.