Rather, Dawson has a variety of income streams, from a college prep program to gigs on UpWork<\/a>. He uses the Claude Max plan to help complete those tasks, though he recently switched to ChatGPT Pro.<\/p>\n The hefty bill came from one month of overlap.<\/p>\n “Obviously, $400 a month is quite steep,” Dawson said, “but I’ve been able to recoup it through side projects.”<\/p>\n Drew Dawson spent $449 in May on his AI subscriptions.\u00a0<\/p>\n Drew Dawson<\/p>\n Dawson is one of many who subscribe to Anthropic’s most expensive subscription, Claude Max. For the everyday user who asks ChatGPT or Claude for a recipe idea, spending $200 a year on AI may sound obscene. Claude Max is significantly higher than many other consumer subscriptions, like Netflix<\/a> (up to $26.99 a month) or Spotify (up to $21.99 for a family plan).<\/p>\n Those who use AI in every part of their lives say the triple-digit monthly cost is common sense, though, and that they’d be willing to spend more. Business Insider asked eight of these subscribers why they pay.<\/p>\n The big (personal) spenders of AI<\/p>\n Sterling Cobb pays over $1,000 a month for AI.<\/p>\n The 38-year-old CTO of FlowStay has three Claude Max accounts, a ChatGPT Pro account, and a Google AI Ultra<\/a> account. He orchestrates and rotates the three plans to make sure he rakes in all the tokens.<\/p>\n “I think it’s necessary,” Cobb said. “I think I’m doing the right thing and staying ahead of the curve.”<\/p>\n Most AI users’ bills aren’t reaching the thousands, but many are using similar orchestration techniques.<\/p>\n Dominik Martin pays for the highest Claude plan, plus $20 a month for ChatGPT and $20 a month for Gemini. Like Dawson, Martin said that he recoups the funds through his work. The 29-year-old from southern Germany has “five jobs in parallel,” he said \u2014\u00a0all in product design.<\/p>\n Dominik Martin says that his five product management jobs recoup the AI subscription fees.\u00a0<\/p>\n Dominik Martin<\/p>\n I spoke to Martin before the public launch of Anthropic’s Mythos Fable 5<\/a>, a model he was excited about. “If it’s going to be as crazy as people think, then I would be down to pay $1,000,” he said. (Fable 5’s launch has since proven controversial, with significant safeguards<\/a> limiting which tasks the model handles.)<\/p>\n I asked everyone what their ceiling would be. If Anthropic raised its prices, what’s the most you’d be willing to pay? Some, like Martin, listed high-flying sums.<\/p>\n Others stayed in the neighborhood of $200. Vincent Vukovic, a 41-year-old consultant from Stockholm, said he wouldn’t pay more than $250 a month.<\/p>\n “None of the products that I’ve created are generating sufficient revenue to cover the costs for my subscription,” he said.<\/p>\n Devin Hill, a 33-year-old AI engineer from Nashville, predicted the prices could surge to $300-500 a month \u2014\u00a0a price he said he’d pay. Hill said that his willingness to fork over the cash relied on a “time-money correlation.”<\/p>\n “If you hit a session limit, then you’re back to the stone ages where you’ve got to write it yourself,” he said.<\/p>\n Rebecca Bultsma<\/a> uses her Claude Max plan for research. The 44-year-old from Calgary has multiple agents running through her $200 Claude and ChatGPT plans. One agent scans relevant articles and social media data to compare them to her research. Another goes through her inbox, and another checks her website.<\/p>\n Bultsma called the two subscriptions the “biggest spend in my life.” The tools help her cut through noise and be more efficient, she said.<\/p>\n “For someone who’s super busy, that efficiency is worth money,” she said. “It ends up being no-brainer math.”<\/p>\n Turning away from Claude<\/p>\n Alyssa Clarcq spends her free time learning to vibe code<\/a>. The 31-year-old CPA from Tampa started by chatting with Claude, then moved to Claude Cowork, and eventually Claude Code. She sends $200 a month to Anthropic.<\/p>\n She doesn’t want to feel “dependent” on Anthropic, though. She’s been using Codex recently and spending over $100 a month there, too.<\/p>\n “I’m going to start pulling back from Claude,” she said. “I think Claude is getting a little slower and using a bit more tokens than might be needed.”<\/p>\n Clarcq isn’t alone in that feeling. After the launch of Opus 4.7, Anthropic faced backlash<\/a> for its costliness. Anthropic later said that it found issues with Claude Code, but denied “nerfing”<\/a> the model.<\/p>\n Shopify product manager Michael Averto is also testing out OpenAI’s products. The 41-year-old from Brooklyn said he worries that Anthropic will face a compute shortage.<\/p>\n Averto said that he’s hitting rate limits. He watches his token-tracking CodexBar “constantly,” trying to “pace himself” and not hit his ceiling.<\/p>\n But he’s hesitant to drop the plan. “It works,” he said. “It’s reliable. It does the thing.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Drew Dawson spent $449 on his AI subscriptions in May. He’s also a college junior. The 23-year-old isn’t…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":74071,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[40845,25442,53,3154,580,182,40839,40841,40840,40843,527,1332,9898,40844,40842,573],"class_list":["post-74070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anthropic","tag-41-year-old-consultant","tag-ai-subscription","tag-anthropic","tag-anthropic-claude","tag-chatgpt","tag-claude","tag-claude-max-plan","tag-dominik-martin","tag-drew-dawson","tag-expensive-subscription","tag-model","tag-month","tag-price","tag-product-design","tag-public-launch","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74070\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n
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