Paying $20 every month for ChatGPT Plus has always been easy to justify professionally. I use it for research, document analysis, and more than a little organizational assistance around the house.
Still, it’s another monthly subscription at a time when everyone is looking for ways to reduce the amount repeatedly drained from their bank accounts. That’s why I’ve been pressing ChatGPT to justify its own cost using the finance feature it debuted a couple of months ago.
I didn’t ask ChatGPT to defend its place on my credit card bill literally, though it probably could. Instead, I prompted it to use its analysis of some of my finances to identify places where my money might be evaporating without enough justification, or even awareness.
ChatGPT’s finances tool can review connected accounts, including spending. Although it can’t make any changes to how the money moves around, it can point accusingly at a subscription, leaving me to cancel it myself.
If you haven’t done so, the setup is straightforward enough. Using ChatGPT Work on the web, you add the Finances plugin and connect whatever accounts you wish.
You can analyze recent spending right away, but I’ve found the weekly update from ChatGPT and nearly real-time updates to be particularly useful in my quest to make ChatGPT Plus cover its own cost.
Subscription cuts
Only a couple of weeks after starting to use the feature, ChatGPT raised in its weekly report that one of my streaming services seemed abnormally expensive. It turned out to be due to an add-on costing $11.99 a month.
I had subscribed to watch one particular series, finished it, and then apparently just left the subscription in place. ChatGPT found the repeated charge and placed it beside my other entertainment subscriptions.
A second recurring payment belonged to a music app costing $9.99 a month. I remembered signing up for a trial, but I could not remember using it after the first week. The service had quietly collected nearly $60 since.
Canceling those two subscriptions saved $21.98 a month. ChatGPT Plus had technically paid for itself during the first review, with $1.98 left over. That is not enough to retire on, but it is enough to make my article headline legally defensible.
ChatGPT also spotted that my internet bill had increased by $10 from one month to the next. The promotional rate had expired, but ChatGPT suggested I could still get the savings with the right language. The AI wrote out a few talking points to get me any current discounts. After a surprisingly tolerable phone call, the company applied a new promotion and knocked the $10 back off my monthly bill.
Saving on food
The subscription cuts were easy to measure — I only had to cancel them once and the savings appeared again the following month without any further actions necessary. Food spending was more complicated because there was no single charge I could remove and forget about, but ChatGPT helped me save money there too.
Ordinary takeout is more expensive than ever, but it’s the delivery charges and service fees that really raise the final number. I’m not going to stop ordering takeout altogether and deprive myself of all the dishes I can’t make myself. But switching to pickup as much as possible would make a big difference, according to ChatGPT. And it saved me about $35 over the next month.
ChatGPT also picked up several trips to convenience stores. Each transaction was small, usually a drink or some paper goods I’d forgotten to pick up at the grocery store. Nonetheless, convenience stores are more expensive than the grocery store, and the result added up quickly, as ChatGPT found in its analysis.
Just staying aware of that fact changed my habits and made me more likely to remember everything I needed to get at my regular shopping run and to bring my own drink when hitting the road.
After two months, the changes were saving me about $67 in a typical month. That figure included $21.98 from the two canceled subscriptions, $10 from the restored internet discount, and approximately $35 from spending less on delivery. Food costs will naturally move around, but the recurring savings alone were already covering the price of ChatGPT Plus.
I wouldn’t blindly trust ChatGPT with finances or anything else. And I definitely wouldn’t make it my first consultant for any big financial decisions. But these smaller changes are more important than you might think at first.
My Plus subscription still appears on the statement every month, but the reduced streaming and internet costs, not to mention fewer delivery fees, more than justify the $20 a month I’m paying for it.
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