Pay £20 a month for each AI, or only when you use one?

The sum is easy, which is why it stings: a subscription is around £20 a month. If you want the two or three good AIs on hand — because the same one doesn’t always win — that’s £40 or £60 a month. Roughly £700 a year.

And the question almost nobody asks out loud: how many times did you actually use them last month?

For a lot of people the honest answer is “four or five”. That’s £12 per question, paid in advance, without noticing.

When a subscription is worth it

It isn’t always a bad deal. It clearly pays off if:

• You use it nearly every day. If it’s a work tool you open several times a day, the cost per use drops to pennies. No argument.
• You need what only the paid plan includes. Large files, image generation, specialised modes, integrations.
• One is enough for you. If you always work with the same one and don’t care about cross-checking, subscribe and move on.

If that’s you, you already know it and this article isn’t for you.

When it’s money down the drain

• When you use it in bursts. Two intense weeks preparing something, then six weeks without opening it. You pay all twelve months regardless.
• When you pay for several just in case. The most expensive habit of all: three fees to use each a handful of times.
• When what you want is to cross-check. Subscribing to two AIs to compare answers means paying £480 a year for the privilege of pasting the same question into two tabs.

What paying by usage means

It’s the electricity-bill model: you pay for what you use. No monthly fee, no tie-in, no “I didn’t use it this month”.

You top up a balance, each question deducts what it consumed, and you see the exact spend after every one. An ordinary question costs pennies. One with a sixty-page document costs more, because reading sixty pages costs more — and you can see it.

Two consequences that matter:

No end-of-month surprise. There’s no bill that grows on its own: there’s a balance that goes down when you use it and stops when you don’t.

You don’t pay for not using it. Two months without asking anything costs zero. On a subscription, it costs £40.

The part we won’t dress up

Pay-as-you-go isn’t cheaper always. If you ask something every day, a flat subscription will probably work out better. It’s only fair to say it: usage-based pricing wins for occasional or irregular use — which happens to be most people — but not for heavy use.

And it has a real drawback: you have to top up now and then, and that’s friction a monthly fee doesn’t have.

The sum worth doing

Don’t look at the price. Look at last month’s usage:

1. How many times did you open an AI for something that genuinely mattered? (Not to play with it: to decide or resolve something.)
2. Multiply by what you pay monthly in subscriptions and divide.
3. That’s what each useful question costs you.

If the number surprises you, you have your answer.

Where The Judge fits

We don’t sell an AI: we convene several for the same question and a fixed judge delivers a verdict with its confidence level. You pay by usage, with a prepaid balance, no fee and no tie-in.

The fair comparison isn’t “£20 a month versus pennies per question”. It’s this: getting the cross-check of several AIs on your own would take two or three subscriptions and doing it by hand every time. Here that’s what happens on every question, and you only pay for the ones you ask.

If you ask something daily and one AI does the job, subscribe and don’t think twice. If what you have is four important decisions a year and you want to be sure about those four, paying a fee for twelve months doesn’t make much sense.