Can someone explain clearly what value you can get from a paid LLM that you can't get from what is freely accessible?
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2026
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I don't pay for them yet, just use the free version for my phone, but Mistral AI seems like and ethical company.
They run a a more lightweight and environmentally friendly model and think they even open-source/weight their models too. I think like 56B parameters instead of like 600b that open ai and antrhopic probably use.
Being a smaller model it's not as powerful as the big ones, but it's pretty good!
none. I have never, and will never, pay for it.
People pay for this shite? 🤣
oh the mistake of writing "AI" in lemmy lol. I have made this mistake before, you'll recover
I’ve paid for a few months of Midjourney to create some portraits for a few gaming characters. That’s about it.
All of them. Not directly, but RAM and SSD price explosions hurt. Also buying electricity for my home heater from the same market as billion dollar data centers hurt too
eh, i figure we'll all pay for it some day, when an overzealous capitalist AI harvests the poor for raw material.
They'd have to pay ME to use their bullshit, and it wouldn't be cheap.
I don't pay for a single one, I'll use their free services for a specific question to have it summarize the internet basically. I try and avoid chatgpt.
At work we have an internal AI system, and Claude. I utilize both of these to make my workload smoother - but have been finding myself just coding more often than using them because they almost all eventually produce garbage and refuse to listen when you say it's wrong.
Claude plans for both personal and corporate. My personal is the $100 plan.
And then I have a small amount of credits for API usage on Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter.
Haven’t really jumped on the Cursor train and I think I have Jetbrains AI product sub that I should probably cancel.
Had Github Copilot for a bit a while back but canceled that.
Mind my asking what you do that requires the high tier Claude?
Edit: what you use it for, that is :x
I use the desktop/mobile app for general purpose questions/search/brainstorming.
If that’s all I needed it for I’d be on the $20 plan.
I also use Claude Code for general troubleshooting and some Ansible provisioning assistance on a home network/lab - and some light coding.
Professionally it’s similar usage - but I’m using Claude Code a lot more heavily in writing code and troubleshooting – and am semi-frequently hitting usage limits.
Thank you for actually answering OPs original question and the follow up.
Not much. But I did pay actual money for Sid Meier's CivilizationⓇ VI, which includes AI that controls the computer players. That's the one that comes to mind just because its performance was so amazingly weak.
Perplexity
I run it locally when needed. Can do LLMs and ImageGen, and i'm not stuck with those companies. Installation for LLMs was stupid easy, Imagegen was a bit more involved. Since I'm a Gamer, I already need a beefy GPU, so it's nice to have a second use for my hardware.
None... or Apple Intelligence, if you count being in the Apple Ecosystem as paying for it. The only way I know of to pay directly is to use the new creative suite, which is like $13/month. I don't have that.
I don't actively support (or use) any of them, and my computer/phone platform of choice since 2016 (so, before this mess) always used the derpy AI (Siri/Apple Intelligence).
I pay for Copilot because I have an Office subscription for the family. I never asked for Copilot to be included in it, but here we are.
There is a way to downgrade to Office Family Classic that removes the co-pilot features and is cheaper.
Oooh gonna look that up tx
🙏
It's ridiculous and should be illegal. I hope you get it figured out!
What do you need from Office that you pay for it? There are great free alternatives
Did your price change when Copilot got included?
I don't think so
I pay nothing and just rotate between gmail accounts when one hits a usage limit. I have about a dozen accounts so between all of them i get about as many tokens as i would a single paid account.
I started doing it first with Cursor AI, and i still use that too, but now googles Anti-gravity gives access to Claude and the usage limits are separate from the limits for Gemini. With all of it combined I have more then enough usage to do whatever i want without paying any of the corps a dime.
Seeing as AI has been in video games since about 1977, I'd say quite a lot.
None of this new horseshit though, fuck all that. It's just a buzzword for morons.
Yeah whoever had the idea of selling LLMs like they are AGI I hope has a special room in hell.
It seems that Thaura and Lumo are not beholden to big tech or involved in genocide / mass surveillance, so I'm comparing those at the moment. But I keep my usage as low as absolutely possible.
None, I find the free plan enough for me.
I'm in IT, my company is trying to offer it as a service and sell it. I'm fully against it, but can't voice my opinion since I do like my job and what I do. It really sucks.
Perplexity and grammarly
me personally none, but our family has the 2tb Google drive subscription for family photos (in case of our NAS fails). That subscription comes with Gemini but I just use free chatgpt because I mostly use it as a 'straight to the point search engine'.
For example I asked today if Vive 3.0 VR trackers work under a blanket, then a followup if competitor SlimeVR does.