Why AI subscriptions are so hard to budget for
A newsletter post by Elena Verna argues that AI companies are struggling to price their products because running each request costs them wildly different amounts. ChatGPT and Claude advertise vague usage limits, and Lovable sells credits without saying what they will build.
If you pay for these tools, that vagueness lands on you. A credit or token (a small chunk of text the AI reads or writes) doesn't translate cleanly into a finished app or a month of captions, so surprise limits and upgrade prompts are easy to hit.
Worth a read if you're paying for an AI app builder or chat plan and keep hitting walls you didn't see coming. If a free tier covers what you do, skip it until you're about to pay.
Your moveBefore upgrading or buying more credits, open your plan's usage page, note what you actually used last month, and compare it to the vendor's stated limits.
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