I just finished a $23k engineering job in 3 months, entirely solo, that would have taken a year without these tools. That’s real money to feed my kids and working tech that made a client happy.

That’s one job and I have several in the pipe.

The “financial payoff” for no more than a few 100 a month at absolute most is there and it’s real. If you aren’t seeing it then you’re doing it wrong.

I usually don’t even spend more than $20 a month each for chpt and claude, deepseek free is solid. I am about to switch fully local too so that should drop to basically cost of watts.

I dunno what yall are doing

That only works until everybody else is doing the same thing, then you won't be able to charge $23k any more.