The AI bill you forgot to cancel

The bill

Here's what you're looking at if you're subscribed to all three coding surfaces:

Copilot Pro — $10/month. Inline completions inside whatever editor you already use. Does one thing, does it quietly, stays out of the way.
Cursor Pro — $20/month. An entire AI-native IDE. Composer, multi-file edits, the works. (Hobby tier is free. Pro+ is $60. Ultra is $200. Teams is $40/seat.)
Claude Max — starts at $100/month. The Pro plan is $20/month or $200/year, but Max — which is what you'd want for genuine terminal-agent work via Claude Code — starts at $100.

Add them up and you're at $130 for the same coding job, which is the phrase you'll hear from anyone who's audited their stack. Grok SuperGrok is another $30 if it's sitting open in a second tab, and Grok Plus runs $100 — though at this point you have to ask what job that's doing that Claude or Copilot isn't already doing.

Keep

These are meaningfully different tools — the problem is paying for more than one of them:

Copilot Pro ($10) if you want to stay in VS Code or JetBrains and just get better completions. It's the cheap inline layer. No context switching, no new IDE to learn.

Cursor Pro ($20) if you actually want an AI-native editor. Composer is genuinely different from an autocomplete tab — it understands multi-file context and rewrites chunks on request. Worth the upgrade from Copilot if you're doing serious editing work. Not worth it if you already have Copilot and rarely use anything beyond Tab.

Claude Max ($100+) only if your actual workflow involves long terminal agent sessions on a real repo. Not for chat. Not for occasional questions. For the people running Claude Code autonomously on large codebases, this tier earns its cost. For everyone else, Claude Pro at $20 is the same thing with usage limits you'll probably never hit.

Cut

The overlapping surface. If you have Cursor, you probably don't need Copilot — Cursor's completions cover the same ground, and paying for both is paying for the same tab twice. If you have Copilot and it's working, Cursor Pro is a bigger commitment than an upgrade: it's a new IDE, and the switching cost is real.

The protocol: take 45 minutes, run one real bugfix through each subscription you're paying for. Score how much you edited the output. Keep the winner. Cancel the rest 48 hours before renewal so you don't get charged for inertia.

Before you renew

Grok SuperGrok ($30) / Plus ($100). Lineup last confirmed 2026-08-26 — verify current Grok 4.6 / Grok Build tier names on X before you commit. SuperGrok at $30 is easy to forget about when Copilot or Claude is already handling the same questions.

ChatGPT (GPT-5.4). Recorded as the GPT-5.4 family as of 2026-08-26. Don't buy a plan based on a model name bump — there's no reliable US-dollar Plus/Pro price to quote here because it wasn't clearly exposed on the pricing page when we checked. Verify openai.com/pricing before you gift them an annual subscription.

Claude. Chat plan and Claude Code are not the same invoice. Make sure you know which one you're paying for.

Worth a look

HtmlSlides — $9.90/month at launch. Interactive HTML decks. It's interesting if you're already frustrated with PowerPoint and don't want to pay Gamma prices. That said: novelty is not a job. Test it against your actual presentation workflow before you add a seat. Verdict: keep an eye on it, skip for now unless slide-building is a real recurring pain point.

Whop CLI — free to install. Terminal control for Whop products and checkout flows. If you sell on Whop, this is a genuine quality-of-life tool — no extra subscription, just transaction fees on what you're already selling. If you don't sell on Whop, this is not a reason to start. Verdict: keep if you're already on Whop, skip otherwise.