What My Monthly A.I. Bill Looks Like in 2026

In 2025, my monthly AI spending was likely around $10-20 or so. And even that felt like too much at the time. Why pay to generate something that I can do in slightly a longer amount of time, I asked myself.

Well, 2026 is here and models are faster, smarter and way more capable of doing things that I can't do. At least not quickly.

So needless to say my costs have indeed gone up. Let's take a look at where that spend is actually going this year.

Coding Agents

The bulk of my spending is (obviously) in coding agents. And the breakdown looks like this:

• Codex - $20 a month
• Claude Code - $20 a month
• Grok - $30 a month
• GitHub Copilot - $10 a month
• Total - $80 a month

You might wonder why I have a subscription to every major agent. And I personally wonder that myself from time to time.

The main reason though, is that I don't fully know which agent is the best so far. So I use all of them each and every day.

Some weeks GPT Sol is the clear winner, spitting out refactors and security vulnerabilities like a champ and other times Claude Code seems to understand the subtle nuance of my codebase a bit better.

And Grok in general is just a great value for the price. It's pricier by 30%, sure, but I've yet to even remotely hit any limits in my monthly caps.

And GitHub Copilot just integrates the best into my VS Code setup, so I'm willing to shell out the money to just have it on standby automating commit messages.

And because I'm able to split tasks among the different models, I don't quite yet have a need for any $100+ max or ultra plan.

API Usage

As most developers know, the days of reusing your monthly subscription plan to make API requests are all but gone now.

And while I'm not a huge API connoisseur when it comes to AI, I do tend to experiment alot. So I typically have around a $10 budget set for certain API's:

• Claude API - $10 a month max
• Google Gemini - $10 a month max
• Total - $20 a month

This covers most of my development needs and leaves room for random AI experiments.

Overall, Claude still spits out the best designs, so I'm mainly using it to generate email templates from my backend admin.

And the Gemini API is just a good value overall, as the Flash models are very cheap and can generate relatively decent content very quickly.

Productivity Tools

Just recently I've begun to experiment with various popular AI Coworking tools, like Viktor, to see if they can help fill in the gaps in my day.

Viktor promises to be your AI employee that runs entirely in Slack and that can handle your day to day chores that you're too busy to handle.

Things like checking my inbox and responding to emails regarding the blog or letting me know of interesting things happening in the tech world.

Viktor starts at around $50 a month, however when you sign up you get $100 in free credits to take it for a test drive.

I'm still trialing it out for now, but I can say that it's actually one of the better tools when it comes to actually focusing on my business and making suggestions on where to go next.

When I first fired it up, it scanned my Gmail, read my blog, Googled my brand to get an idea of who I am, and suggested things that needed taking care of.

Definitely more than I typically do on a day to day basis. So time will tell whether this is a yay or nay for me.

Going into 2027

Overall, I think my AI burn is pretty reasonable. I often see posts online of developers spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month on their AI usage and I can never figure out how they manage to rack up that kind of bill.

There's a good chance that my bill will inevitably keep going up though. There's still model providers that I've yet to test out, like Kimi Code or Deepseek.

There's also a few agent tools that I'm curious about like Grok Bot, the multi-agent harness powered by Grok.

At the end of the day, spending $100 to $150 a month on tools that reliably save me dozens of hours of repetitive coding, writing, and admin work is easily a net positive.

It pays for itself after a single afternoon of avoiding tedious debugging or pumping out boilerplate.

As long as the productivity gains keep outpacing the monthly bill, I'm fine letting my spend creep up a bit higher as new agents drop.

How about you? What does your AI stack look like this year? Are you keeping it lean with a single primary subscription, or are you running a multi-agent toolkit? Let me know in the comments below.