Subscribing to AI can feel like applying a force multiplier — or an invisible tax on your attention and budget. But after testing dozens of platforms for coding, content and creative workflows, I maintain four paid tools because they’re fast and measurably higher quality. Two others are within reach of the cut.
I’m not interested in novelty. I’m purchasing throughput, reliability and results that I can ship. It is, in other words, clear productivity gains, stable outputs and integrations that don’t break my process.
Why ChatGPT Plus Is Worth It for Faster Coding and Debugging
Code glue and brutal debugging are laborious drudgework that justify spending $20 a month on ChatGPT Plus. I find myself dropping API docs or snippets into a prompt and banging on working samples faster than I can scour Stack Overflow threads. If I need a sprint I’ll bump up to a higher-tier month to get rid of throttles and push a build over the line.
On two recent projects, this combination has reduced the time it takes to deliver code from roughly two weeks to less than a day by creating test harnesses, writing boilerplate and deciphering opaque error traces. Stack Overflow’s 2024 Developer Survey found 44% of developers using AI tools on a daily basis; it’s easy to see why when you’re slogging through the mud of integration work. I never blindly ship code from a model, but as an accelerator?
Midjourney Delivers Stylized Images with Speed
Yes, GPT-4-class models can generate images, but I still pay the equivalent of $10 a month for Midjourney because the style control and consistency look better to me at brand-grade visual quality. I can head toward specific aesthetics, mention artists as inspiration and iterate till it “feels right” without fighting the guardrails.
One workflow-specific output I recurrently deliver is a monthly promo image for a very specific e-commerce community. What was once a Photoshop, two-hour session is now coded in a 10-minute in-Midjourney loop: prompt, refine, upscale, and done. That time delta, per month, more than makes up for the fee.
How Notion AI Helps Organize Projects and Research
Notion AI is not the smartest model that I use, but it’s what’s closest. And because my specs, notes and research live in Notion, it can summarize, rearrange and build databases in context. I had to play a few times with the hotkeys, and even so I was able to save my afternoon of manual parsing from an ugly hundreds-of-lines dump into a nice table.
The value here is retrieval-augmented work in the tool where the work is already being done. Paying $10 to $20 per month depending on the plan, I view it as a sort of context-aware assistant that drafts, cleans and organizes rather than a source of truth. It’s not perfect; it’s useful.
Adobe Creative Cloud: AI Boost For Design
Photoshop and the larger Creative Cloud continue to be staples in my stack, but with newer AI features they shift from “industry standard” to a “time saver.” Generative Fill, Generative Expand and Harmonize do the gruntwork of compositing, plate cleanup and match-moving that previously would eat hours.
My usual pipeline is Midjourney to ideate on stuff and Photoshop for realism/polish. Firefly-driven edits are taking center stage now, and they were powerful enough to support client assets with fewer hand masks. Creative Cloud is more expensive than one-time tools, but the AI capabilities now are key to fast-turn creative production.
Two AI Tools I’m Watching Next for Potential Upgrades
NotebookLM Pro is compelling as a research brain for saved articles, transcripts and PDFs. The free tier limits sources per notebook, and the paid tier doesn’t do away with but does raise those caps. I have tens of thousands in my archive, so I’m testing the limits of how far I can stretch it for focused deep dives. With the impending closure of Pocket for many, a dependable, queryable archive of your web reading is more important than ever.
Descript is the other contender. I enjoy its automatic filler-word removal, Studio Sound cleanup and multicam alignment for tutorial videos. It also touts the auto-clipping of long videos into shorts, which may help in streamlining social repurposing. My concern is that my technical documents are not just speaking heads; I should be certain it won’t break B-roll, screen captures, and full timelines. If that bears out, $16 to $24 a month is an easy yes.
How I Decide Which AI Tools Are Worth Paying For
My rule is straightforward: can this tool generate enough value to pay for itself in less than 30 minutes of my time a week? If it saves grind, cuts revision loops or allows me to ship more reliably, I’ve got an opening for you. If I’m babysitting it, boom, it’s gone. This way of thinking can help you avoid tool sprawl, which several reports on SaaS management suggest is becoming more and more an operational cost for teams.
Trending lines are in support of being selective. McKinsey’s recent survey on generative AI adoption reveals widespread experimentation and uneven ROI. The teams making progress are putting AI inside well-tested workflows, rather than chasing novelty. Which has also been my experience: embed where the work is, and measure the delta.
So there, these four tools each have a place in my “keeper” drawer for the time being. The two on deck could be up next, but only if they demonstrate real, repeatable lift. In a market that is sprinting ahead, restraint is a feature, not a bug.