I’m trying to get a handle on our actual spending across multiple AI model subscriptions, and I suspect I’m not alone in being shocked by the real numbers.
Right now we’re on separate plans with OpenAI (which we use for code analysis and content generation), Anthropic (for reasoning-heavy tasks), Deepseek (we got cheap access early), and Cohere (one team insists on it for specific NLP tasks). Each has its own billing cycle, rate limits, and usage tiers.
When I pull all the invoices for last year and add them up, the total is… not great. But more frustrating than the total is that some of these subscriptions are maybe 30% utilized because we over-provisioned just to avoid losing access when we hit rate limits unexpectedly.
I’ve been hearing about unified AI model subscriptions that supposedly give you access to 400+ models under one plan. The promise is that you stop managing five different vendor relationships and just pay one bill.
Before I pitch this to finance, I want to understand from people who’ve actually done it: Did consolidating your AI model subscriptions actually reduce your annual spend? Or did it just make the bill easier to read while your actual usage stayed the same? And were there any hidden trade-offs, like losing preferred pricing on specific models or dealing with rate limit issues you didn’t have before?
We were burning about $8,500 a month across four separate AI subscriptions. Not huge, but we also weren’t using all of it. We had credits that rolled over, tier overage charges we didn’t anticipate, and this administrative overhead of managing four different support tickets when something broke.
When we switched to a consolidated subscription, the monthly bill dropped to around $4,200. Some of that is because we stopped over-provisioning out of fear. But honestly, a big chunk was eliminating the per-subscription overhead and negotiating volume pricing once instead of negotiating with four vendors.
The trade-off was that we lost some of the fine-grained control. With OpenAI directly, we had dedicated support and could optimize our prompts specifically for their models. With the unified subscription, we’re using multiple models in parallel and letting the platform route requests intelligently. It’s less optimized per model but more optimized overall. For our use cases, that was the right trade-off.
One thing I didn’t expect: consolidating actually forced us to figure out which models we actually needed. Turns out we were paying for Cohere because “what if we need it” but never touched it. When everything’s on one bill, you’re suddenly paying for optionality you don’t use. The consolidation made us ruthless about pruning unused models. That’s where a surprising amount of the savings came from—not negotiating better unit pricing, but stopping spending on things we didn’t need.
We consolidated three subscriptions into a unified plan. Annual savings were around 30-35%, though your mileage will vary depending on which vendors you’re consolidating. The real win was operational simplicity. One contract to negotiate, one bill to reconcile, one support channel. That eliminated a lot of back-and-forth management overhead. From a pure TCO standpoint, if you’re paying for models you barely use, consolidation will catch that immediately.