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"Which ones do you actually pay for?"
My old general manager asked me that last week. He'd called about something else, some idea he wanted to run past me, and I couldn't tell you now what it was, because the conversation turned into this instead. He asked what AI programs I use, I started listing them off, and somewhere in the middle he cut in with that question.
So I counted out loud. And I surprised myself.
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Grok, mostly for Grok Imagine, the image side of it
Midjourney, for making AI art
Mirrorize.ai, for the image and video side
Suno, for making music
Claude, which I use constantly, for writing, my memoir, and figuring out how to do just about anything. It even connects straight to Beehiiv now through MCP, so it can save drafts of this newsletter for me
ChatGPT, for everyday questions, though that one is free for me
Perplexity, for research and looking things up, also free
n8n, for building automations, though I only paid while I needed one
DistroKid, for getting my music onto streaming platforms
Beehiiv, for these newsletters
CapCut, for editing video
And Coursera, for courses, which isn't even AI, but it comes out of the same pocket for the same reason
I know how that list sounds. A lot of money going out and not one dollar coming back in.
One thing I want to be clear about before you decide I've lost it. AI doesn't do the work for me. I write everything. I create as far as my own hands can take it. What AI does is connect the dots and point me toward the finish line. The ideas, the words, the story, those are mine. The tools just help me get them across.
So why keep paying? The short answer is that every one of these tools taught me something about the next one. After a while you can sit down with a program you've never opened and kind of feel your way around it, because they all think in similar ways. When I got stuck setting up part of my music distribution, I didn't spend a week digging through forums. I asked Claude for the steps, followed them, and it worked. A year ago that would have been a wall I stared at for days.
The long answer is what happened while I was writing my memoir.
For a while now I've been dictating my life story to an AI. I had a long drive to work and back, so I'd just talk, and it would write everything down. Different days, different years of my life, no order to any of it.
One day it stopped me.
I had just finished telling it about something I did to a person years ago. And it said, more or less, hang on. A while back you told me somebody treated you this exact way. And now you're telling me you turned around and did the same thing to someone else.
My mouth literally dropped. I'm not saying that to be dramatic, I mean my mouth was open. Because it was true, and I had carried both of those memories around for years without ever once putting them together.
Overpaying for your phone plan? Meet Tello.
Paying over $25/mo? You haven't met Tello yet.
People like to say AI doesn't really think, it just guesses the next word. Maybe so. All I know is a next-word guesser saw a pattern in my own life that I never saw, and I was the one living it. Nobody's monthly subscription covers that. It came with the territory of just showing up and using the thing.
Here's why all this matters so much to me. I'm an older guy with a high school education. I've worked multiple jobs most of my life. There were always things I figured were for other people, people with degrees, people who got training I never did. Doors I didn't even bother knocking on.
Somewhere in all this it hit me that my excuses are gone. The physical ones are still real, sure. But "I don't know how" doesn't hold up anymore. You can get a tutorial for anything, built around exactly where you're stuck, in about the time it takes to ask the question.
I even tested that without meaning to. I did a free trial of Grok Build. I'm not a coder. I've opened a terminal a few times and poked around, and that's about it. An hour and a half later I had a working web app. I put my information in, it gave me back exactly what I wanted. Keeping it running for real would mean paying for an API, which I can't justify right now, so it just sits there. But it worked, and I built it.
I still feel like I'm scratching the surface. The people making real moves right now are regular people who went one step further than me, coders and half-coders using these same tools to build actual things, and a lot of days I don't know where to even start with that.
But an hour and a half. No experience. I keep coming back to that.
So now I'm curious. Do you use AI for anything? And if you do, what have you figured out that I haven't? Hit reply and tell me. I read everything.
Shine on,
Neon