I Audited My AI Subscriptions and Found $480 of Pure Overlap

Last Sunday I finally did the thing I'd been avoiding for months: I opened my bank statement and searched for every AI charge. ChatGPT Plus. Claude Pro. Google AI Pro that I upgraded to in March for one project and forgot about. Total damage: $59.99 a month. That's $719.88 a year — quietly, automatically, whether I used them or not. And here's the uncomfortable part: in 2026, the big providers have converged on nearly identical $20 tiers, which means most of us are paying two or three times for capabilities that overlap heavily. So I built the audit I wish someone had handed me.

📌 Quick answer · The standard AI tier in 2026 costs about $20/month: ChatGPT Plus $20, Claude Pro $20, Google AI Pro $19.99, Perplexity Pro $20.
· Budget tiers now exist: ChatGPT Go is $8/month and Google AI Plus dropped to $4.99/month in June 2026.
· Stacking two or three $20 general assistants costs $480+ per year in overlap — money most people can reclaim by keeping one and using free tiers for the rest.

The overlap problem nobody prices in

Here's what changed. Two years ago, paying for both ChatGPT and Claude made sense — they were genuinely different tools. In 2026, every flagship tier does long documents, coding help, image understanding, and web search. The differences are real but marginal: Claude edges ahead on long-form writing, ChatGPT bundles more media tools, Gemini lives inside your Gmail. Marginal differences don't justify duplicate $240/year line items. Yet subscription inertia is powerful. You subscribe for a project, the project ends, the charge doesn't.

The fix isn't "cancel everything." It's knowing your actual number. Check what you pay for below — prices are pre-filled with current 2026 rates, and you can edit any of them if yours differs (annual plans, regional pricing, promos).

🧮 Your AI Stack Audit

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What I actually did with my own stack

I ran my three subscriptions through this exact logic. Kept Claude Pro because long-form writing is most of my paid work. Cancelled ChatGPT Plus and dropped to the free tier — which, honestly, got scary good this year. Downgraded Google AI Pro to the $4.99 Plus tier since I mostly needed the Gmail integration, not the flagship model. New total: $24.99 a month. That's $420 a year back for a change that took eleven minutes, and three weeks in, the only thing I've genuinely missed is one image-generation feature I used maybe twice a month.

Your keeper will be different. If you live in spreadsheets and Gmail, keep Google. If you want one app that does images, voice, and video, keep ChatGPT. The point isn't my answer — it's that the audit takes two minutes and the average multi-subscriber is sitting on hundreds of reclaimable dollars.

Disclaimer — Prices shown are standard US monthly rates as of July 14, 2026 and change frequently; annual billing, regional pricing, and promotions will differ. This tool is a budgeting aid, not financial advice. Always confirm current pricing on each provider's official page before subscribing or cancelling.

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