What is your AI stack actually costing you?
Most people signed up one tool at a time and never added the total. Worse, most stacks pay twice for the same capability — two general assistants, two code completers, a search tool that duplicates a browsing feature you already have. Tick what you pay for and see the arithmetic.
Why stacks get expensive quietly
Nobody sits down and decides to spend nine hundred dollars a year on AI. It happens twenty dollars at a time, over months, each subscription justified on its own. The trouble is that the tools overlap far more than their marketing suggests, and nothing in the process ever prompts you to review the total.
The most common duplication is two general assistants. ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro are both excellent, and for most people either one covers the writing, reasoning and analysis they need. Paying for both is defensible if you genuinely use them differently — many people do — but it is worth knowing you are doing it rather than drifting into it.
Where the overlaps actually are
General assistants. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini cover substantially the same ground for writing, summarising and reasoning. Real differences exist at the edges, but the core use case is served by any one of them.
Code completion. Cursor and GitHub Copilot are both AI pair programmers. Cursor is an editor with AI built in; Copilot is a plugin for the editor you already use. Running both is rare unless you are testing them against each other.
Search and research. Perplexity's core value is cited web answers. If you already pay for a general assistant with browsing, you have a version of that, though Perplexity does it better and shows sources more cleanly.
Writing tools. Jasper and Copy.ai are marketing-copy platforms built on the same underlying models you can reach directly. They earn their keep through templates and workflow, not raw capability — which is a real reason to pay, but a different reason than most people assume.
What to do with the number
If the annual figure surprised you, the fix is not necessarily cancelling everything. It is deciding deliberately: keep one general assistant rather than two, keep the specialised tools that do something genuinely different — image generation, voice, video — and drop whatever you signed up for during a project that ended.
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