Most people are paying for at least one subscription they don't need. Answer 4 quick questions and we'll tell you exactly what to cut — and what to keep.
Pick the one that describes the majority of your prompts.
The most common $40-a-month mistake: one plan for writing, another for coding, because each felt weak at the other job. In almost every case one plan plus a few dollars of API spend covers the gap, because the second subscription is bought for occasional work and billed as if it were daily work.
A consumer plan is a flat fee for unmetered chat. If your real pattern is a few dozen requests a week through an editor or a script, metered API access is usually a fraction of the price — a light-to-moderate month of API calls on a mid-tier model typically lands well under a single consumer subscription. Flat-rate plans win when you are a heavy interactive user; they lose badly when you are not.
Frontier models are priced for the hardest tasks, and the price gap between a flagship and the tier below it is routinely five to ten times per token. Most drafting, summarising and boilerplate work does not distinguish between the two. Paying the flagship rate for that work is the single largest line item on most AI bills.
If you send the same system prompt, codebase or document with every request, prompt caching is the difference between paying for it once and paying for it every call — often a 75-90% discount on the cached portion, and it costs nothing to switch on. Batch endpoints cut another large fraction off anything that does not need an answer this second.
Work out your actual monthly volume first — roughly how many requests, and how long the inputs and outputs are. Nearly everyone guesses high. Put those numbers into the API cost calculator and compare the result against what you pay now. Then check the plan limits: a subscription that throttles you at the point you actually need it is not the cheaper option, whatever the headline price says.
The quiz above applies the same four checks to your answers and names what to cut. It runs entirely in your browser — no sign-up, and nothing is sent to us.