run a 2-person custom dev agency and we just shipped our own saas, so ai is basically our co-founder at this point.

i currently maintain active subscriptions for claude pro and google ai pro. honestly, the roi is completely undeniable when you factor in how much time it saves us on boilerplate code, debugging, and drafting initial architectures. we also sprinkle in some midjourney and elevenlabs for asset generation when we need it.

for a small team trying to ship fast, the $40-$60/mo we spend on core llms is by far the cheapest overhead we have.