QUESTION · ARCHIVE

How do you think about AI plan costs relative to the value and time savings they provide?

ASKED BY · Unknown · 19 SEP 2026 · ▶ 00:39:30

THE PANEL'S ANSWER
Craig

Value the time savings and new capabilities created; if 10% time savings or new apps worth far more than cost, pay accordingly. Plans are subsidized now; revisit monthly based on needs and potential vacation pauses.

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IN THEIR OWN WORDS

From the transcript.

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39:05and a bunch of other sort of AI monitoring type things because some of these costs can go crazy if you're not watching out for it. especially on the work side because they you pay for everything you use but that's about what i use that's cool and uh guy you want to come back in yeah yesterday i had maxed out the max plan and

39:30so i was sitting there like okay i got a little bit to wait until it resets and i was like oh there's no reset so in chat gpt you get two resets so you could actually flip it and so i was throwing a ton of doubt at it when you're throwing 35 million words at something and it was like hey hey, we could do this in waves.

39:47Why don't you do it while you're sleeping so you don't max out your plan? And it's like, or you could pay 80 to $200, $300 and we could just get this done with the API. And I was like, man, this is crazy. And it goes, or if you had your own machine, we could do just with your own model on it, you could just do it for free locally.

40:02And it just gets me thinking because we're going to see this as a problem more and more because I'm pretty sure all these plans are subsidized heavily right now. And they're so fast. These machines just tear it through stuff. I'm like, wow, when I run something on a local model, it just feels like molasses. I mean, it's so incredibly slow. And so when I do a prompt like in GrokBots and it just like takes off and you could actually, in GrokBots, all the bots have their own computer.

40:27So you could pull up the screen of the little, of the bot. It's pretty wild. So you could see what it's doing. And to watch these things just take off and go, especially if you send five things. And yesterday when I asked Claude to do this thing, it sent 216 agents off at once. So, I mean, that's the level of stuff that you can do when you have a lot of data in a big project.

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