Guide
Cheaper than three $20 AI subscriptions: aggregators, BYOK clients and the API
ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro and Google AI Pro together cost about $60 a month, and the Reddit thread asking for a cheaper way has hundreds of answers. The honest comparison needs one scale: what the alternative charges (flat fee, credits, or per token), what models it reaches, what it caps, and whether you bring your own API key. Below are the services people recommend, with figures only where an official page states them.
The three plans, as published
ChatGPT Plus (consumer)$20.00
Claude Pro$20.00
Google Gemini Google AI Pro$19.99
Per month, before tax$59.99
Prices from the verified profiles, checked Sep 30, 2026
The alternatives people recommend, on one scale
| Service | How it charges | Price | What you get | Caps | BYOK |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenRouter ↗ Not a chat app by itself; you pair it with a client |
Pay-as-you-go credits, no subscription | No monthly fee; 5.5% platform fee on credit purchases (Standard), 8% (Business); model token prices as listed | One API key for hundreds of models; free clients (Jan, Chatbox, Cherry Studio) connect to it | Free models: 20 requests per minute, 50 per day (1,000 per day after $10 of credits bought) | Yes: $25,000 of list-price inference per month without fee, 5% above that |
| ChatLLM (Abacus.AI) ↗ Team pricing shown at the same $10; per-seat terms not stated |
Flat subscription | $10 per month ($7 for the first month per the promotion shown) | 100+ models in one assistant: GPT 6.1 Sol, Fable 5.1, Sonnet 5.5, Opus 5.5, Gemini 4 Argon, DeepSeek, Kimi, Grok 4.7 and others | Not stated | Not stated |
| Chatbox AI ↗ Points are consumed at different rates per model |
Free apps with BYOK, plus hosted plans | Apps free; hosted Lite $3.99/mo, Pro $19.99/mo, Pro+ $39.99/mo (cheaper on annual billing) | Lite: standard models, web search, image chat; Pro: advanced models, document chat, MCP service; Pro+: largest quota | Compute points per month: 2,000,000 (Lite), 12,000,000 (Pro), 30,000,000 (Pro+); hosted free tier 10,000 points per day | Yes, in the free apps with your own API keys |
| Jan ↗ License not stated on the homepage; only a Mac download is shown |
Free, open source desktop app | Free | Runs open models locally or connects to online models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, Mistral, Qwen, DeepSeek, Gemma, Kimi) | None from Jan itself; the connected provider's API billing applies | Yes (how cloud providers are connected is not stated on the homepage) |
| TypingMind ↗ Listed because Reddit threads recommend it; figures unverified |
License purchase (BYOK chat UI) | Not stated: the site shows a Buy a License button and its pricing page did not render for our reader | Not stated | Not stated | Not stated |
| Poe ↗ Listed because Reddit threads recommend it; figures unverified |
Subscription with points | Not confirmed: the pricing landing page shows no figures and the about page blocks our reader | Models named on the page: GPT-5, Claude-Sonnet-5, DeepSeek-R1, Veo-3.1, plus thousands of others | Not stated | Not stated |
Figures read from each service's own pages on Oct 28, 2026. "Not stated" means the page gives no figure; "Not confirmed" means the page could not be read by us. No affiliate links on this page.
What the $60 buys that the alternatives do not
- Coding agents are bundled: Claude Code comes with Claude Pro, Codex with ChatGPT Plus. An aggregator gives you the chat models, not those agents.
- Vendor features such as Projects, memory, Deep Research, file creation or Gemini inside Google apps live in the vendor apps only.
- Flat plans cap usage in windows; credits and per-token billing never stop, so a heavy month can cost more than $60. The calculator shows where the lines cross.