Accepting AI Costs
Remember dime a minute cell phone voice?
This article is about a painful truth.
Artificial Intelligence is NOT free.
Those of you who are too young to have memories of paying a dime a minute to talk on a cell phone are perhaps a bit confused. Let me pause my “old man yells at cloud” job duties to explain these things.
Attention Conservation Notice:
Things that are free used to cost a lot. AI is taking us back to the future. Or something like that.
Ancient History:
The first phone I had in this century was the classic indestructible Nokia 3310.
No later than 2002 I switched to a Palm Treo. It wasn’t as durable as the Nokia, which could double as a bludgeon if you needed to see off a would-be mugger, but it had a near magical capability - when plugged into USB it was a 56k modem, permitting me to deal with wireless backhaul outages.
When I got into politics I knew the staffers all had Blackberry, so I got a Curve 8520. And if they still made this, I’d still be using it - best darned phone ever.
I recall during the 2010 election cycle that my partner used 5500 minutes of voice in September. We had only recently upgraded to these newfangled unlimited plans, I think they were … $110/month?
AI Haves/Have Nots:
One of the things I picked up from Nate B. Jones immediately made sense for me. The AI market is going to bifurcate, there will be people who get it, and they are the ones who will have it. The ones who don’t will end up with the free service, which several players are attempting to hammer into the advertising funded model.
Not only do I pay for AI, I’m in that “spending three digits” tier that means I get to see Claude Cowork before most of the rest of you. I just accept that I’m going to have the following through 2026, and may upgrade some of them.
Claude Max - $100/month, absolute must have.
Perplexity Pro - free at the $20/month level due to promo, might upgrade.
Things I’ve discarded should be noted as well:
ChatGPT - $20/month I don’t need to spend, having adapted to the Perplexity way.
Figma - $20/month thing that seems important, but never proves out.
Things I am probably going to add:
Exa.ai - $49/month for search that actually works.
Cloudflare - $20/month so I can see some features free does not have.
Rubbing my battered crystal ball to get a better look, I think ChatGPT will come back for the sake of Codex, I will certainly sample and perhaps keep Google’s $125/month Gemini offering, and the next level of Perplexity is $100/month.
So … I’m moving from a turn of the century cell phone bill to a car payment, just as soon as funds allow.
Conclusion:
As we saw earlier today in Identifying Opportunity, the world has gone inverted. Execution used to be precious, now it’s squirting out of every crack and crevice under the immense pressure of multi-trillion dollar investment in inference hardware.
Capabilities will increase, we saw dramatic model gains the last month of 2025, there’s more of that in the pipeline. The Nvidia first inference is giving way to strategic deals with companies like Cerebras and Grok in the lead. AMD is nipping at Nvidia’s heels, so much so that one of their systems is liable to join my fleet later this year. Come summer, the least of the machine here will offer 96GB of memory for models, and a 256GB Mac Studio will probably be a defensible expenditure.
Quality at the bottom end is going to degrade badly, as the advertising funded internet content model tries to adapt to this new reality. OpenAI has publicly aired some sort of advertising integration and I’m tolerating it in my Perplexity setup, because what they offer me is actually stuff that I might use. This will be the land of have nots, the kids … and adults who didn’t realize they needed drastic change.
You need some inference, a search system that doesn’t jerk you around, and a means to coordinate. That’s Claude Pro ($20/month), Perplexity Pro ($20/month), and Notion which remains free for individuals. I often hear Nate mention Zapier for task automation, but since I’m an automation ninja, I don’t know much about this. Maybe the free plan is OK, worst case this is also $20/month for a Pro account.
So … $60 - $80/month is the minimum for a functional setup …
And if you don’t have this, or worse, don’t even see how you’d use it, well … better get your learn on, because this is only going to accelerate.