Stop Paying for AI Tools You Don't Need

I added up my AI subscriptions last month. ChatGPT Plus, Midjourney, Copilot Pro, a writing tool I forgot I was paying for. $87/month. For what?

So I ran an experiment: cancel everything and use only free tools for 30 days. Here's what happened.

Chat: Claude free tier + Perplexity

This was the easiest swap. Claude's free tier gives you access to Sonnet, which handles 90% of what I used ChatGPT Plus for. For research questions where I need sources, Perplexity's free tier is better than ChatGPT anyway because it actually cites things.

The only thing I missed was GPT-4's image generation. More on that below.

Image generation: Bing Image Creator + Playground AI

Bing Image Creator runs DALL-E 3 for free. The quality is identical to what you get in ChatGPT Plus. You get 15 "boosts" per day for faster generation, and after that it still works, just slower.

For more artistic stuff, Playground AI has a generous free tier. It's not Midjourney, but for social media graphics and blog images, it's more than enough.

Coding: Copilot free tier

GitHub Copilot now has a free tier for open source contributors and students. If you don't qualify, Codeium offers unlimited free completions. They're not quite as good as Copilot, but they're close enough that the price difference (free vs $10/month) makes the decision easy.

Writing: Just use Claude or ChatGPT free

Dedicated AI writing tools like Jasper charge $49-69/month. For what? A wrapper around the same models you can access for free. If you need AI help writing, paste your draft into Claude and ask it to improve the flow. Done.

What I actually went back and paid for

After the 30 days, I resubscribed to exactly one thing: Cursor Pro. Not because the free alternatives don't work, but because the speed difference in my editor directly translates to productivity. Everything else stayed cancelled.

Total savings: $67/month. That's $804/year for tools I genuinely don't miss.