The AI subscription market has quietly become expensive. If you are a knowledge worker using AI tools across your workflow in 2025, you are probably subscribed to two or three services, each charging $20 per month. That is $480 to $720 per year — before you factor in API costs for programmatic access, which add another $50 to $200 depending on your usage.
The Subscription Stack Most Power Users Are Running
A typical power user in late 2025 might be paying: ChatGPT Plus ($20/mo) for GPT-4o access, GitHub Copilot ($10-19/mo) for IDE completions, Perplexity Pro ($20/mo) for research, and Claude.ai Pro ($20/mo) for writing and analysis. That is $70-79 per month, or up to $948 per year. Each service is valuable in isolation. Together, they are a significant recurring cost with overlapping capabilities.
What the Local Alternative Actually Costs
Skales is free for personal use. Ollama is free. Running Llama 3.1 8B on your laptop costs nothing per query — the only cost is the electricity, which is negligible. For queries that genuinely need frontier models, OpenRouter offers pay-as-you-go access to GPT-4o, Claude, and others. Most users spend $3-10 per month on OpenRouter tokens, even with heavy use.
The honest comparison: Skales plus OpenRouter puts your monthly AI spend at $3-10 instead of $70+, while giving you local privacy for sensitive work and cloud capability when you need it. You keep $60-70 per month. Over a year, that is over $700 back in your pocket. Download Skales free and connect OpenRouter in under two minutes.