What I’m spending on AI every month
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I spent over $1,000 on AI tools for my business last month. Crazy? Maybe. But these tools are helping me save money and ship projects faster than ever. Every day I write a 500-word newsletter. I use Grammarly to catch typos and mistakes. It costs $30 per month, but its AI-powered assistant is a timesaver. I can quickly accept changes and suggestions at a click, going from draft to published much faster. Get a discount here. A year or two ago, I relied on a human editor. That got expensive quickly - $1,000 to $2,000 per month, depending on the amount of content I commissioned and published. Today, for short and medium-form content, AI is faster and cheaper. If I was writing a book, I’d still hire a human editor. But for editing newsletters and social media posts? AI wins. I also use Lovable and Replit. Both are vibe coding tools where you write prompts, and it creates apps and websites. They start at $20–25 per month, though you’ll hit higher tiers quickly on complicated projects. Claude is my $20-per-month workhorse for content. I’ve trained it on 150,000 words of my daily emails. I upload them as Google Docs, then ask for YouTube video ideas. Claude analyzes all my emails and extracts themes I can turn into video scripts. I created other Claude projects for content editing, headlines, and subject lines. It’s more useful than ChatGPT. I spend $40 to $50 per month on Claude API tokens. I use them for my Prompt Writing Studio and some related interactive tools that teach users how to write effective prompts. I’ve set up Claude on GitHub to analyze my vibe coding projects for bugs and issues. Claude’s usage limits are getting more restrictive. I regularly hit “usage limit reached.” That’s why I also pay for ChatGPT Pro. I have a “business coach” GPT where I spent 60 minutes training it on who I am, what my business does, and my goals. When I have questions about content strategy or products to create, I prompt GPT for ideas based on what it knows about me. The more I use it, the more tokens it consumes. However, it’s still more cost-effective than hiring developers. A developer recently charged me over $500 for a vibe coding fix. Cursor is where I spend the most. I started with Lovable, but it got restrictive when I wanted to build my book roundup site, ReadingCurator.com. I had a huge database of WordPress posts to import, which Lovable couldn’t handle easily. Cursor starts cheap with a hobby version, then $20 per month for pro. I quickly upgraded to ultra because I was using it several hours daily. Ultra provides access to all the latest models, including the Claude Sonnet, Gemini Pro, and more. Turn on max mode, and it consumes more tokens but codes faster and more efficiently. Yes, it gets expensive. But you can set restrictions on monthly token consumption. I pay $10 monthly for Copilot. Probably don’t need it with Cursor Ultra, but I like trying the latest tools. It gives access to the latest models inside VS Code. I have a love-hate relationship with X, but Grok can be helpful for trending information. Ask about a popular stock, and it gives real-time updates based on what people are saying on X. Perplexity is great for research. When I was buying a turbo trainer for my bike, instead of wading through Google results, I prompted Perplexity. It collated information from YouTube videos, forums, Reddit, and blogs - dramatically cutting my research time. I also pay for the Perplexity API for my AI Flash Report project. It updates daily with AI space developments. A specific prompt I wrote for Perplexity creates the daily summary. Costs are minimal - I topped up $20 six weeks ago and haven’t needed more. Do I need all these AI tools? Honestly, no. If I had to refine my list, I’d keep:
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