Nobody gives you a straight answer on this, so here it is up front. The short version: you can do a huge amount for free, the paid tier is about the price of two coffees a week, and you almost certainly shouldn't pay for more than one to start.
🆓 Free gets you a long way
Every major tool has a free tier, and they're genuinely useful — not crippled demos. You can write, brainstorm, summarise, and ask endless questions without paying a cent. For a lot of people, free is enough for months.
So start here. Don't pay for anything until free actually starts getting in your way.
💳 The ~$20 tier — what you're buying
The standard paid plan across the big tools sits at around US$20 a month — roughly AU$30, a little less if you pay yearly. What the money actually buys:
The smarter model
The free version is often a step down. Paid gets you the sharper, more capable one.
Much higher limits
You stop hitting the "you've reached your limit, come back later" wall mid-task.
The useful extras
Uploading files, projects, memory, image tools — and the newer features land here first.
It pays for itself
For someone using it most days, it earns its keep the first time it saves you half an hour.
🏔️ The expensive plans (ignore for now)
You'll see $100 and $200 a month plans advertised. They're for heavy, all-day professional users — developers, people running enormous workloads. If you're reading a post called "what does it cost," you are not the customer for these yet. File under "good to know it exists."
⚙️ "Pay per use" (only if you build)
There's another pricing model where you pay tiny amounts per use rather than a flat monthly fee — fractions of a cent per request. That's for when you're building something that runs automatically (we get into it in the API post). For chatting and getting work done, ignore it — the monthly subscription is what you want.
🧭 So what should I actually do?
Start free. Use it properly for a couple of weeks. The moment you find yourself hitting limits — or wishing you could upload a document — pay for the one tool you reached for most. One subscription, not three. You can always switch later; you're not married to it.
That's the whole cost picture. No hidden tiers, no catch. Roughly a coffee a week for a very capable assistant on tap — and free to find out if it's even for you first. (Prices shift around, but this shape has held for a while.)