Notes · Note 01
Which AI should you actually pay for?
Three good options, one $20 decision, and a two-week test that tells you whether you chose right.
The short version
- Pick one and pay for it. The free tiers are demos, not the product.
- Claude for writing and documents. ChatGPT for the widest feature set. Gemini if your company lives in Google Workspace.
- If you have no strong opinion, take the first one. The difference between them is smaller than the difference between using one and not.
People lose weeks comparing these. It is the most common way we see an AI project die before it starts — not from picking wrong, but from not picking at all. They are all good now. The gap between the best and third-best is far smaller than the gap between paying for one and reading about all three.
The free tiers are demos
This matters more than which brand you choose. Free accounts route you to smaller, older models, cut you off mid-task, and drop the features that make the thing useful for work — file uploads, longer memory, the better reasoning. People try the free tier, get a mediocre answer, and conclude AI is overhyped. They were never actually using it.
A paid seat is about $20 a month. That is less than one billable six minutes for most of the businesses we work with.
The three worth your money
- Claude — best at long documents, writing that sounds like a person wrote it, and anything code-adjacent. This is what we use for most client work.
- ChatGPT — the widest feature set: image generation, voice, the biggest ecosystem of add-ons. Pick this if you want everything in one place.
- Gemini — reaches into Docs, Sheets and Gmail natively. Worth it if your company already runs on Google Workspace.
How to decide in about a minute
If most of your day is writing, reading contracts, or producing documents, start with Claude. If you want one subscription that does images and voice as well as text, start with ChatGPT. If your files and email already live in Google, start with Gemini and let it see them.
Still torn? Take the first one. You can switch in a month for the price of a lunch, and by then you will actually know what you need.
Buy one, for yourself or whoever is most likely to use it daily. Roll it out after somebody in the building can demonstrate a real win. Company-wide licences bought before that almost always go unused — we find them in nearly every audit.
The two-week test
Use one tool for two weeks before you judge it, and bring it something real. A messy spreadsheet. A proposal you need to write. A week of email you are behind on. The trap is testing with riddles, trivia, or “write me a poem” — those tell you nothing about how it handles your work.
At the end of two weeks you will know whether it saved you an hour. If it did not, the tool is rarely the problem — the way you are asking usually is, which is the next note.