The cheapest way to use Claude and GPT together
Short answer: if you send fewer than about 28 AI messages a day, paying per message is cheaper than a $20 subscription, and the gap is large. If you send more than that, buy a subscription. The break-even is around 830 messages a month against one $20 plan, and roughly double that against two.
That is the whole answer. The rest of this page shows the working, covers the four real ways to do it, and says plainly which one is cheapest at each level of use — including the ones that are not us.
Prices checked 2026-08-22.
Why people end up here
The usual path is this. You pay for ChatGPT because everyone does. Then you find Claude writes better, so you pay for that too. Then something needs live search, so you add a third. Now it is $60 a month, and you are using perhaps a tenth of what each plan allows.
The subscription is not badly priced. It is priced for someone who uses it all day. If that is not you, you are buying capacity you will never touch.
The four options
1. Pay for both subscriptions
ChatGPT Plus is $20 a month. Claude Pro is $20 a month, or $17 if you pay for a year up front. Both at once is $40.
Worth knowing: OpenAI now sells a cheaper tier. ChatGPT Go is $8 a month. If price is the only thing you care about and you only want OpenAI, that is the cheapest official door.
Who this genuinely suits: anyone using AI for hours a day. Subscriptions are all-you-can-eat within limits, and at high volume nothing beats a flat fee. If you regularly hit a plan's cap, you are exactly the customer it was built for.
2. API keys plus your own client
Get an API key from OpenAI and Anthropic, then run them through a client you control: LibreChat, Jan, Cherry Studio, or TypingMind.
TypingMind sells a one-time licence rather than a subscription: $39 Standard, $79 Extended, $99 Premium at the time of checking, with API costs on top and paid directly to the providers. OpenRouter gives you one key for hundreds of models, passing provider rates through untouched and taking 5.5% on credit purchases instead, with a minimum fee of $0.80.
This is genuinely the cheapest way to run these models, and it genuinely works. It is also the most-recommended answer in every thread where somebody asks this question, and the recommendation is sound.
What it asks of you: creating and funding accounts at each provider, storing keys somewhere safe, rotating them if they leak, and accepting that when something breaks you are the support team. Some people find that trivial. Many people bounce off it, which is why they end up reading pages like this one.
Who this genuinely suits: developers, and anyone comfortable holding API keys.
3. A bundled subscription
One fee, many models. Poe runs a ladder from $4.99 up to $249.99, with $19.99 the common tier, and meters you in compute points rather than messages, so an expensive model burns your allowance faster than a cheap one. MultiChats is $20.99 a month for 1,500 messages, or $34.99 for 3,000. Perplexity Pro is $20 a month and is really a search product with models attached.
Read the cap, not the headline. “Every model, one subscription” is true, and it comes with a ceiling. MultiChats Pro works out at about 1.4 cents a message if you use all 1,500. If you send 200, you paid ten cents each.
Who this genuinely suits: steady, predictable, medium-to-heavy use across many models.
4. Pay per use
No monthly fee. You put money in a balance, each message costs what it costs, and the balance goes down. Two products worth knowing here, and they are not the same.
NanoGPT bills at list price. The provider charges $5 per million tokens, NanoGPT charges $5, and they add no percentage on top. Minimum deposit is $1 by card or $0.10 in crypto. If your only goal is the lowest possible number per token, that is the answer, and we are not going to pretend otherwise on our own page.
AiFuse marks provider rates up. That is how it makes money, and there is no version of this page where we hide it. What it buys is the thing around the models: every message shows what it cost after it arrives, two models can answer the same prompt side by side so you can compare the answers and the prices together, an auto mode routes each question to a model that suits it, and chat, image generation and voice all draw on one balance. Minimum top-up is $10. Credit does not expire.
Pick on which of those you actually want. If it is the floor price per token, that is NanoGPT. If it is a workspace that shows you the bill as you go, that is us.
Who pay-per-use genuinely suits: anyone whose usage is bursty, occasional, or spread across several models, and who would rather see a number than a monthly charge.
The break-even math
This is arithmetic, so you can check it.
Take the monthly cost of the subscription. Divide by the average cost of one message. That is how many messages a month you need to send before the subscription is the cheaper deal.
Using $0.0241 a message, which is what one real account here averaged:
| You are comparing against | Break-even | Per day |
|---|---|---|
| One $20 subscription | about 830 messages a month | about 28 a day |
| Two subscriptions, $40 | about 1,660 messages a month | about 55 a day |
That number moves with the models you pick, and it moves a lot. Cheap models cost a fraction of a cent per message. The most expensive frontier models can cost twenty times that. Somebody running every question through the largest available model will reach break-even far sooner than 28 messages a day, and might reach it at five.
So treat 830 as one worked example, not a law. The method is the part that transfers: your average, divided into the subscription price.
What it actually cost us
Here is one real account, thirty days, no editing.
210 requests. $5.07 total. About 2.4 cents each.
That covers chat messages across several providers, some web searches, and a handful of generated images, all from the same balance.
Against $40 of stacked subscriptions, that is roughly an eight-to-one difference for that month.
Two honest caveats. This is one account, not a promise, and that account's model mix leans toward mid-priced models rather than the most expensive ones. And it is a light-to-moderate user, which is exactly the profile pay-per-use suits. A heavier user would see a bigger number, and at some point would be better off on a subscription.
We can show you this screen because the cost of every message is recorded and visible. A flat monthly plan cannot show you the equivalent, because the entire point of a flat plan is that you never see what anything cost.
When not to use AiFuse
If you send a hundred messages a day, buy a subscription. You will spend less, and you will stop thinking about it. That is not a grudging admission, it is arithmetic: at that volume the flat fee wins and nothing on this page changes that.
If you want the absolute lowest price per token and you are happy managing your own API keys, use OpenRouter or a provider key directly with a client of your choice. That will be cheaper than us.
If you want pay-per-use with no markup at all, use NanoGPT.
If your usage is bursty, if you switch between models, if you want to see what each answer cost, or if you have tried holding API keys and did not enjoy it, then keep reading.
How AiFuse works
One login. One balance. Claude, GPT, Grok, Gemini, DeepSeek, Perplexity and Kimi — you pick which one answers, or let it pick for you.
Every message shows its cost once the answer arrives. Nothing renews, nothing expires, and there is no monthly fee. Top up from $10 when you want more.
The markup is real and it is in the price you see. There are no hidden costs on top of it.