Short answer: if you use AI a few times a day, the cheapest way to get ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini together is a pay-per-use setup, either the providers' APIs directly (cheapest, but technical) or a single token-based app like LazySusan from $8/month. If you only need one of them heavily, pay for that one and use the free tiers of the other two. Paying for all three flagship plans ($20 + $20 + $19.99) costs about $60 a month, or $720 a year, and very few people use enough to justify it.
Below are the five setups I'd consider, what each one really costs, and who it's right for.
What does it cost to pay for all three?
Here are the consumer plans as of October 2026, US pricing:
| Plan | Monthly price | Cheaper tier |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT Plus | $20 | ChatGPT Go, $8 |
| Claude Pro | $20 | $17/mo if billed yearly |
| Google AI Pro (Gemini) | $19.99 | Google AI Plus, $4.99 |
| All three flagship plans | $59.99 |
Add SuperGrok ($30) or Perplexity Pro ($20) and you're near $110 a month. I know people paying that. Most of them use one of the tools every day and the rest a couple of times a week.
Option 1: free tiers for everything
Cost: $0.
All three have free plans, and they're better than they were a year ago. If you ask a few questions a day and don't mind hitting a limit now and then, this is honestly fine. You'll get pushed to smaller models when you hit caps, you won't get the flagship models reliably, and you'll be juggling three apps and three histories.
Good for: students and casual users who don't depend on AI for work.
Option 2: one paid plan plus two free tiers
Cost: $20/month.
This is what I'd recommend to most people who use one assistant heavily. Pick the one you open first every morning, pay for it, and use the others on their free plans for second opinions.
Which one to pay for:
- ChatGPT Plus if you want images, voice and file analysis in one app.
- Claude Pro if your work is mostly writing, editing or long documents.
- Google AI Pro if you already live in Gmail, Docs and Drive, since it also comes with extra Google storage.
Good for: anyone who uses one assistant for hours a day.
Option 3: the budget tiers
Cost: about $13/month.
ChatGPT Go ($8) plus Google AI Plus ($4.99) plus Claude's free plan. You get more usage than the free tiers, but neither budget plan includes everything its big sibling does. ChatGPT Go, for example, doesn't include Deep Research. And you still have three apps and no way to compare answers side by side.
Good for: people who want a bit more headroom than free without paying $20 anywhere.
Option 4: the APIs directly
Cost: whatever you use, at wholesale rates.
This is the cheapest per message, full stop. You create API accounts with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, add a few dollars of credit to each, and use a chat app that accepts your own keys. Published API prices right now:
| Model | Input, per million tokens | Output, per million tokens |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Haiku 5.5 | $0.10 | $0.50 |
| Gemini 3.8 Flash | $0.75 | $3.75 |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | $2 | $10 |
| GPT-6.1 Sol | $2 | $10 |
| Gemini 3.1 Pro | $2 | $12 |
| Claude Opus 5.5 | $4 | $20 |
| GPT-6 Astra | $10 | $50 |
(Gemini 3.8 Flash is on introductory pricing that is reported to go up in January.)
The catch is all the setup. Three billing accounts, three sets of keys to keep safe, a client app to install and keep updated, and you'll need separate tools for images and video. If you're a developer, that's an afternoon and you'll save money. If you're not, it's a weekend of frustration.
Good for: developers and tinkerers.
Option 5: one token-based app for all of them
Cost: from $8/month.
This is the middle ground, and it's what LazySusan does. One login, one bill, and ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Perplexity and the image, video and voice models all in one place. You pay with tokens, and 600 tokens equals $1 of model usage.
The plans:
- Starter, $8/month: 1,000 tokens.
- Pro, $19/month: 5,700 tokens. Unused tokens roll over.
- Teams, $39/month: 15,600 tokens shared by up to 5 people.
- Top-ups: $5 for 3,000 tokens, $10 for 6,000, $25 for 15,000.
You pay a bit more per message than going direct to the APIs, in exchange for not having to set anything up and getting every model in one app.
How far do the tokens go?
Rough per-message costs for a normal exchange (a couple of pages of context in, a few paragraphs out). Long threads and heavy reasoning cost more; the app shows the real count after every reply.
| Model | Rough tokens per message | Messages from 1,000 tokens |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Haiku 5.5 | about 1 | about 1,000 |
| Gemini 3.8 Flash | about 5 | about 200 |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 / GPT-6.1 Sol | about 13 | about 75 |
| Gemini 3.1 Pro | about 15 | about 65 |
| Claude Opus 5.5 | about 26 | about 38 |
| GPT-6 Astra | about 66 | about 15 |
The big lesson in that table: model choice matters far more than plan choice. GPT-6 Astra costs roughly 60 times what Haiku does per message. Most questions don't need Astra.
Three people, three monthly bills
Here's how it shakes out for three realistic usage patterns.
The casual user: about $8/month
Five or six questions a day. Recipes, quick explanations, rewriting an email.
- 100 messages to Gemini 3.8 Flash: 500 tokens
- 30 messages to Claude Haiku 5.5: about 30 tokens
- 20 messages to Claude Sonnet 5.5 when something needs more care: 260 tokens
Total: about 790 tokens. That fits in Starter's 1,000, so $8 a month for access to all three, versus $60 for the three flagship plans or $0 on free tiers with all the juggling.
The daily worker: about $19/month
Fifteen to twenty work messages a day, a few long writing sessions, some quick lookups.
- 330 messages to Sonnet 5.5 or GPT-6.1 Sol: 4,290 tokens
- 45 messages to Opus 5.5 for the hard stuff: 1,170 tokens
- 40 quick Gemini 3.8 Flash lookups: 200 tokens
Total: about 5,660 tokens, which fits in Pro's 5,700. $19 instead of $60, and anything left over rolls into next month.
The heavy user: keep a flat plan
Forty-plus long messages a day to Opus 5.5 or GPT-6 Astra. At that volume you'd use somewhere between 20,000 and 60,000 tokens a month, which is roughly $35 to $100 of usage. A flat $20 subscription to your main assistant is cheaper for you, and I'd tell you to buy it. If you still want the other models, Starter on top is $8.
I'd rather be clear about that than pretend tokens are cheaper for everyone. They're cheaper for most people, because most people's usage is spread out and uneven.
What about images and video?
This is where separate subscriptions really add up. Midjourney, a video tool and a voice tool on top of the three chat plans can push you past $100 a month.
On a token plan, images and video come out of the same balance. LazySusan's own estimate is that 1,000 tokens covers roughly 20 images, though it depends on the model. Video is far more expensive: an 8-second clip on full-quality Veo 3.1 is roughly 3,800 tokens, and around 500 on Veo 3.1 Lite. If you make a lot of video, budget for top-ups. I wrote more about video options in what to use now that Sora is shut down.
How to cut your AI bill this month
- List everything you pay for. Bank statement, search "OpenAI", "Anthropic", "Google", "Midjourney". Most people find at least one they forgot about.
- Count active days. For each tool, how many days last month did you use it for more than a minute?
- Keep the one you use daily. If any tool has 20+ active days, a flat plan is probably right for it.
- Move the rest to pay-per-use. Either the APIs or a token-based app.
- Default to cheaper models. Use Flash, Haiku or Sonnet for routine stuff. Save Opus and Astra for the questions where you'd actually notice the difference.
- Start new chats often. Long threads get re-sent every time, so they cost more on any pay-per-use setup.
If you're mainly deciding between keeping ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro, I went deeper on that in is paying for ChatGPT Plus and Claude Pro worth it. The all AI tools compared page has the full side-by-side.
FAQ
What's the cheapest way to get ChatGPT and Claude together? Free tiers of both cost nothing but come with limits. For reliable access to the flagship models, a single token-based app like LazySusan starts at $8/month and includes both, plus Gemini. Using the APIs directly is cheaper per message if you're comfortable setting it up.
Is there one subscription that includes ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini? Not from OpenAI, Anthropic or Google. Third-party platforms bundle them. LazySusan includes GPT-6, Claude Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5, Gemini 3.1 Pro and 3.8 Flash, plus Grok, DeepSeek and Perplexity.
Is ChatGPT Go worth it instead of Plus? If you mainly chat and don't need Deep Research or the heaviest usage, Go at $8 is a reasonable step up from free. If you use ChatGPT for hours a day, Plus is still the better plan.
What happens when my LazySusan tokens run out? You can top up ($5 for 3,000 tokens) or wait for your monthly tokens to refresh. Nothing gets deleted and your chats stay put.
Do tokens expire? On Pro and Teams, unused tokens roll over as long as you're subscribed.