Member-only story
Your AI Subscription Has a Hidden Meter Running
Why the monthly price doesn’t tell you how much AI you can actually use.
Ask ten friends who pay for an AI subscription what they get for their money, and most will give you the same answer. Twenty dollars a month. It is the one number everyone knows.
Now ask how much AI that actually covers. How many questions, how many hours of work, how much on a heavy day. Most people pause. Some guess. A few say they have never hit a limit, so they assumed there isn’t one.
Think about what else is on your card statement. A cloud storage plan tells you it holds two terabytes. You know the storage capacity before you hand over your money. With an AI subscription, the price is printed in large type, while the amount of usable work it covers is much harder to calculate.
It gets stranger. Two people can pay the same monthly price for the same AI subscription and get very different amounts of usable work out of it, depending on which models they use and how they use them.
The old deal
Traditional software subscriptions generally made the bundle easy to understand: access to particular features for a fixed monthly price. Limits existed, of course. Cloud storage, bandwidth and API calls have had them for years. But they were usually stated in a…
