But what is paying for an AI subscription actually for?
Twenty euros a month for something that also exists free. What that money really buys, who genuinely gains from it, and how to find out before you sign up.
- Level
- beginner
- Time
- 10 minutes
- What you need
- Nothing
You use the assistant for free, it goes well, and at some point the message appears: you have used up today’s messages, or this feature is for subscribers. The paid plan sits at around twenty euros a month, with cheaper options recently appearing at around five.
Twenty euros a month is two hundred and forty a year. Worth understanding what it buys before saying yes.
Free tier: the no-cost version, with limits on quantity and often less capable models. Usage limit: how many requests you can make in a given time. Reasoning model: a version that takes longer to answer and makes fewer mistakes on hard problems. Deep research: the feature that goes off and reads many sources online and hands you a piece of writing with references.
What you actually buy
Setting aside the differences between services, you are paying for four things.
More quantity. More messages, bigger files, longer conversations before the system loses the thread. If “you have reached your limit” comes up often, this line alone can justify the cost.
The better models. This is the most important difference and the least visible, because the interface is identical. On simple tasks almost nothing changes. On hard ones, reasoning through a problem with several constraints, checking a calculation, working on a long text or on code, the difference shows. Often it is not that the free tier cannot get there: it is that it lets you make only a few requests of that kind, and those are precisely the ones you needed.
The heavy features. Deep research with sources, analysis of long documents, image and video generation, connections to your email or your documents.
Less friction. No queues, no waiting at busy times, and in some cases no adverts.
The question that settles it
It is not “how much does it cost”, it is: how many times a week do you open it?
If the answer is “two or three times a month, out of curiosity”, the free tier is enough, and the subscription will be one of those things paid for eleven months after being used for one.
If the answer is “nearly every day, for things I then actually use”, then twenty euros a month is a figure to weigh against the time you save, and that comparison usually goes one way.
There is a third answer, the commonest: “I would open it every day if I did not run out of messages.” That is the situation where a subscription genuinely helps, and also the one where it is worth running the test below first.
These subscriptions are cancelled in a few taps and stay active until the end of the period you have already paid for, with no penalty. Two warnings, though: pick the monthly plan rather than the discounted annual one if you want to be able to stop after a month; and if you subscribed from the app on your phone, you cancel in the App Store or Google Play settings, not inside the assistant. That is the number one cause of subscriptions that carry on being paid long after someone thought they had closed them.
Before paying, the two-week test
It costs nothing and heads off most pointless subscriptions.
- For two weeks, every time you open the assistant, note on paper what it was for. One line, five words.
- Note also how many times you hit a limit or gave up because the answer was not good enough.
- At the end, look at the list and ask which of those things you then actually used, rather than merely read.
- If the useful lines are few, the subscription is not your problem: how you ask is, and that improves for free.
That last point deserves underlining: many people pay to solve a quality problem that was a phrasing problem. Before spending, try changing how you ask, which is the part that is up to you: the practical rules are in how to write an effective prompt.
Which service, if you do
Three things guide the choice better than any league table.
Where you already work. If your day happens inside Gmail and Docs, Google’s assistant slots in there. If it happens inside Word and Outlook, the same argument applies to Microsoft. Integration is worth more than a few points of cleverness.
Whether you need good writing in your own language. Services do not all perform equally outside English. The test is trivial: give two assistants the same text in your language to rewrite and see which sounds less translated.
Whether you need one specific feature. Deep research with sources, analysis of large files, video generation: these vary most between services, and also change most often over time.
On exact prices there are no shortcuts: they change often and vary by country, so read the figures on the official pages on the day you decide (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude). One thing is worth knowing, though: middle tiers have appeared at a few euros a month, which raise the limits while staying below those of the full plan: they change the quantity more than the engine. For anyone in the “I always run out of messages” situation, those are often the right answer.
If you use the assistant nearly every day for concrete things, a subscription pays for itself and is not worth agonising over. If you use it in bursts, the free tier is enough: it is already far more than existed two years ago. And if the reason you are thinking of paying is that the answers are not much good, first change how you ask and check again in two weeks: it costs nothing and sometimes fixes everything.
One thing to check either way
Whichever plan you choose, look in your account settings to see whether your conversations are used to train the models and whether you can turn that off: the option nearly always exists, varies by service, and is not always off to begin with. It is a minute better spent than most.
And if the reason you are considering paying is that you do not want your material leaving the house, that is a different road, covered in what an AI running on your own computer is for.