The free starter set

You can try almost everything in this guide without paying anyone. Free tiers in 2026 are unusually generous because every company wants you to get hooked before you decide to pay. Use that to your advantage.

For a useful starter kit, pick one of the three main assistants:

• Claude (free) — limited daily messages, but enough to feel out the strongest reasoning model on the market.
• ChatGPT (free) — GPT-5 Instant for chat, occasional access to better models, image understanding.
• Gemini (free) — daily message limits but generous, and it integrates with Google search.

Plus these support tools, also free:

• NotebookLM — free across the board for the core product. Drop in PDFs and get a chat-with-your-documents notebook back.
• Perplexity — generous free tier for AI search.
• Suno — five songs a day on the free tier. Enough to play with.

Three or four of these will let you do almost anything described on this site. There is no rush to pay.

Should you pay? Probably $20/month, eventually.

If you find yourself using AI daily — every morning, multiple times a day — upgrade to one of the $20 tiers. The improvement over free is large: more capacity, the better models, and features like Research mode, integrations, and image generation that the free tiers throttle or omit.

Pick one, not three. They overlap heavily. I default to Claude Pro (US$20/~A$32) because of how it writes. Many people prefer ChatGPT Plus (US$20/~A$32) for image generation, voice mode, and the breadth of integrations. People who live inside Google Workspace get genuine value from Google AI Pro (US$20/~A$32) because it lives directly inside their Gmail, Docs, and Sheets.

Above $20, you're into power-user territory: Claude Max, ChatGPT Pro, Google AI Ultra. These cost roughly A$160 to A$400 per month and are only worth it if you are working AI hard for a living. Don't start there.

When does it get expensive? When you start stacking and building.

Let me be transparent about what I actually pay each month, so you can see how a working stack accumulates.

This month — April 2026, an outlier because I'm finishing a book and running consulting work — my AI subscriptions look like:

• Claude Max 20x: US$200 (~A$320). The heaviest-use tier. I'm on it because I'm using Claude extensively this month — most months I drop back to Pro at US$20.
• Perplexity API credits, paid as I go for research queries from inside other tools. An API (Application Programming Interface) is the pipe one piece of software uses to talk to another. API credits are the pay-as-you-go usage units the tool sells.
• Gamma, for AI presentations.
• Google AI Plus, the entry-paid Google tier — gives me extra Workspace AI features. Honestly I don't use it heavily, but I want the basics covered.

Then there's a separate stack of services keeping this website running: Netlify (hosting), Cloudflare (DNS and edge caching), GitHub (source code), plus the same Claude and Perplexity subscriptions doing double duty as my development assistants. Most of those run on generous free tiers — but the dependencies compound, and once you're paying for one thing you tend to start paying for adjacent things.

And then there are project-specific spikes. I once spent close to A$2,000 on Lovable over a single consulting project. Credits get consumed fast when you're iterating on a complex application, and each round of changes costs more than the last. What starts as a US$20 subscription can become hundreds of dollars if you're building something ambitious. The same is true of API usage, where you pay per token of input and output. A token is roughly three-quarters of a word; a typical chat message uses a few hundred tokens, a long document many thousands.

Two simple rules:

1. Set a budget before you start. Most platforms let you cap your monthly spend so a runaway loop can't drain your account.
2. Track what you're spending weekly. AI bills sneak up. Once a week, log in and look at the number.

I flip between Claude Pro (~A$32) and Claude Max (A$160-320) depending on the month. Most months Pro is enough; during intensive projects I temporarily jump to Max, then drop back. You can do the same with monthly billing.

The honest reassurance, though: for a typical home user, the free tier or the next-up paid tier (US$20/month) is plenty. Most tools also offer a free tier or a trial — try things before you pay for them. The kind of stacking and project-spike spending I describe above only happens once you're using AI for serious professional work, or building something ambitious. None of it is necessary for everyday use.

Is it actually good value?

A useful exercise: list every monthly subscription you already pay for. Streaming TV, music, news, the gym, cloud storage, that productivity app you signed up for in 2023, the mobile data plan, software licences. Add it up. The number is usually larger than people remember.

A capable AI assistant at US$20/month — Claude Pro, ChatGPT Plus, or Google AI Pro — buys you research support, writing help, document summarisation, image generation, voice conversations, custom workflows, coding assistance, and a tireless brainstorming partner. Compared to what most subscriptions actually deliver each month, AI is unusually good value.

But — and this is the catch — that value only materialises if you take the trouble to master it. A US$20/month subscription you open twice and forget is a waste of money. A US$20/month subscription you talk to every day, build into your work, and use across writing, research, planning, and creative tasks pays for itself many times over. The price is the same. The return depends entirely on the effort you put in.

That's the genuine framing question. Not "can I afford US$20/month?" but "will I make the time to learn a tool that costs less than my streaming bundle?"

Monthly vs annual

Annual billing is usually 15-30% cheaper but locks you in for a year. My advice: start monthly. Switch to annual only once you're certain you'll still be using the tool in twelve months — which is a longer commitment than it feels in this market, where the leading tool can change in six.

A note on Australian dollars

Almost every AI tool charges in US dollars. Your Australian bank converts the charge and you'll see the AUD amount on your statement plus a small currency conversion fee (typically 1-3%). At the time of writing the rough conversion is US$1 ≈ A$1.60, so a US$20 subscription is roughly A$32 once everything's settled. The actual amount floats with the exchange rate.

For tool-by-tool prices

For the price of a specific tool, check the Top 100 AI Tools page — every tool listed there shows its current free and paid tiers.

Honestly, though: check the tool's own website before you subscribe. Pricing changes constantly across this industry, and the source of truth is always the company itself, not this site or any other.