I started with ChatGPT the way most people did – it was the first AI tool I took seriously, and when Plus came around I figured why not, I was already using it every day. But after only a minute on the paid plan, I kept running into this feeling of “what am I actually paying for here?” The better models were nice, but I wasn’t doing anything with them that justified $20 a month. Especially when the free tiers of other tools were getting better at a pretty alarming rate.