I Cancelled ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro for a Month. Here's the Bill.

I'll be honest: for a long time I paid for both ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro and never questioned it. $40 a month, automatic, invisible. I work on ByteChat — a tool whose whole pitch is that you probably don't need those subscriptions — and I was still quietly paying for both. That bothered me enough to actually test it. So one month I cancelled both and ran everything on API keys instead. Here's the real bill.

Why I dragged my feet for so long

The subscriptions were comfortable. I knew the apps, my history was there, and $40 didn't sting enough to make me move. That's the trap, honestly — it's not that the subscriptions are a scam, it's that the friction of switching feels bigger than the monthly charge. I told myself I'd deal with it "later" for about a year.

What finally pushed me was watching our own usage data (anonymized — I can't see anyone's keys or chats) and realizing most people, me included, use these tools in bursts. Heavy on a Tuesday, nothing on a Saturday. That's exactly the pattern where a flat fee loses to paying per use.

The setup, which took me about ten minutes

I created an OpenAI API key and an Anthropic API key, set a $15 monthly spending cap on each so I couldn't get a nasty surprise, and pasted them into ByteChat. That was the whole migration. The part I'd been dreading for a year took less time than making coffee.

The one thing I made myself do properly: I named each key "personal-test" in the dashboard, so if anything looked off I could revoke just that one.

What I actually did all month

I didn't change how I work to make the numbers look good. Same as always: drafting and editing writing, rubber-ducking code, the occasional long research rabbit hole, and a lot of "ask GPT and Claude the same thing and see who's more convincing." If anything I used AI more than usual, because having both models in one window made comparing them effortless and I got a bit addicted to it.

The bill

Here's the part you came for. Across the whole month:

• OpenAI (GPT-4o and 4o-mini): about $3.10
• Anthropic (Claude): about $2.40
• Total: roughly $5.50.

Against the $40 I'd been paying, that's a saving of around $34 for the month — call it $400 a year — for what felt like the same access to the same models. The first time I checked the dashboard I assumed I'd misread it and the real charge would land later. It didn't.

What I gave up (the honest part)

It wasn't free of trade-offs, and I'd be a bad source if I pretended otherwise:

• Image generation and voice. I didn't have ChatGPT's built-in image tools or advanced voice. I barely used those, so I didn't miss them — but if they're part of your daily routine, that's a real cost, and you might keep one subscription just for them.
• A moment of "am I doing this right?" The first couple of days I kept second-guessing whether the cheap number was real. It was. That feeling passed.

That's genuinely the whole list. For text-first work, I didn't feel like I'd downgraded anything.

Would I go back?

No. I didn't renew either subscription. The money is part of it, but honestly the bigger win was having GPT and Claude in the same thread — I compare them constantly now, which I almost never bothered to do when they lived in separate tabs behind separate logins.

If you're on the fence, my advice is boring but it's what worked for me: set a spending cap first so you can't get burned, then just try it for one month and look at the actual bill. The number convinced me far more than any pitch — including the one I help write.

Frequently asked questions

How much does running GPT and Claude on API keys actually cost per month?

In this one-month test it was about $3.10 on OpenAI and $2.40 on Anthropic -- roughly $5.50 total, versus the $40 the two subscriptions had cost.

How long does it take to switch from subscriptions to API keys?

About ten minutes: create an OpenAI key and an Anthropic key, set a monthly spending cap on each, and paste them into a BYOK chat app.

What do you give up by dropping the subscriptions?

Mainly bundled extras like image generation and advanced voice. For text-first work the experience felt the same; if those extras are part of your routine, keep one subscription for them.

I'm Chris, I work on ByteChat. It's a chatroom that runs GPT, Claude and seven other providers on your own API keys, stored only in your browser. Try it free — no card needed, and you can set a spending cap before you start like I did.