How To Find Out If You Should Pay For Gemini Advanced, ChatGPT Plus, Or Copilot Pro

Key Takeaways

There are a few mainstream subscription plans that offer access to artificial intelligence features for a monthly $20 fee.
ChatGPT Plus, Copilot Pro, and Google One AI Premium each provide unique tools that appeal to a specialized user.
Free AI chatbots are still sufficient for most users, so you should only upgrade to a paid tier if the exclusive features will help you save time and money.

Artificial intelligence can help you with a little bit of everything, from writing code to planning meals. The great thing about using AI in 2024 is that it’s incredibly easy to get started, and more importantly, it’s free. Chances are, you’ve played around with a great AI chatbot by now, whether it was ChatGPT, Copilot, or Gemini. These chatbots cost nothing and are simple to use, with ChatGPT no longer requiring an account for access, for instance. But the companies behind each of these services want you to think you need the advanced features and exclusive benefits of their paid tiers. OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google all offer AI subscriptions for $20 per month, and they all come with unique AI tools. If you think your needs might have outgrown the free tiers of these services, we’re going to take a look at what premium features each one offers and whether it’s worth your money.

Priority access during peak times, beta features, and custom GPTs

ChatGPT on an iPhone with laptop in the background

OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus costs $20 per month and is marketed as a supercharged version of ChatGPT. Compared to the other subscriptions on this list, ChatGPT is limited in its ability to work with other productivity apps and workflows, but you can get it to work with data from Excel with a bit of creativity. ChatGPT Plus is for people who want a powerful AI chatbot, first and foremost. The main benefit to purchasing ChatGPT Plus is gaining access to OpenAI’s flagship GPT-4 model. However, the appeal of this has been diluted slightly by Microsoft Copilot, which offers GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo for free. Still, if you feel like the free version of ChatGPT isn’t meeting your needs, you can get GPT-4 and internet access for $20 per month. Other benefits include early access to beta features, image generation with DALL-E 3, and multimodal input.

ChatGPT Plus’ most “professional” feature is probably support for custom GPTs. Essentially, custom GPTs are variants of ChatGPT optimized and designed to function in a specific way and to meet specific needs. There’s an entire community building custom GPTs tailored to a specific purpose and making them available on the GPT Store, which is another advantage. Since custom GPTs use the GPT-4 model, they are exclusive to the ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise plans for now. You should have an idea of what you’d use a custom GPT for before you subscribe to ChatGPT Plus, but if this feature sounds appealing to you, it’s unique to ChatGPT’s paid tier.

Microsoft launched custom Copilot GPTs for Copilot Pro subscribers last month, but the feature has a “preview” badge for now. ChatGPT’s version has been available for longer and has more available custom GPTs.

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AI integration with Microsoft 365 productivity apps like Word and Excel

Microsoft made one of ChatGPT Plus’ best features free when it made GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo available in Copilot. So, what’s left for the $20 per month Copilot Pro subscription? The paid tier matches the functionality of other offerings for the most part, with Copilot GPTs, image generation, and priority access to higher-end models. However, Copilot Pro’s differentiating feature is Microsoft 365 integration. You have to be subscribed to both Copilot Pro and Microsoft 365 to utilize it, but it’s still a killer feature.

Copilot Pro will work with Word, Excel (preview), PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote. There are a lot of ways that generative AI and Copilot Pro can be used to make life with Microsoft 365 easier, including summarizing emails, creating drafts, and analyzing data. Microsoft seems particularly interested in growing its subscription offerings lately, so you can expect more integration between Copilot Pro and Microsoft 365 in the future. If you use Microsoft 365 apps and think AI can help you work more efficiently, Copilot Pro is the best way to combine the two.

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You get AI in Google Workspace, plus a ton of great Google One features

At its core, the benefit of Google’s One AI Premium plan — which grants access to Gemini Advanced and Gemini in Workspace — is that it gives you more than just AI features. This plan costs $20 and includes 2TB of cloud storage, Google Photos editing features, 10% back in the Google Store, premium Google Workspace features, and can be shared with up to five people. That’s in addition to Gemini Advanced access (with Google’s flagship Ultra 1.0 model) and Gemini in Workspace. All those extras cost $10 on their own, so if you were already a Google One Premium subscriber, it’s only $10 more per month to upgrade to the One AI Premium tier.

Although the Google One AI Premium plan can be shared with up to five others, some of the AI features — like Gemini Advanced access — are limited to the plan owner.

In terms of raw value, Google’s One AI Premium plan is the best of any mainstream AI subscription because it includes other useful non-AI benefits. That alone makes it appealing to casual users who want to experiment with more powerful AI tools. However, Google One AI Premium also grants Gemini in Workspace, which offers AI features for Google’s productivity apps. Tools like Help me write in Google Docs will get you started with drafts, and others in Sheets can crunch numbers. If you want to use AI to streamline your productivity workflows, you want Copilot Pro if you’re a Microsoft 365 user and Google One AI Premium if you’re a Google Workspace user.

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Each of these services has free alternatives, and they’ll do just fine for most

The text box in the Microsoft Copilot app.

While we’ve outlined a few benefits of each AI subscription that might justify the cost, the simple truth is that the overwhelming majority of people do not need to pay for AI-based features. The free versions of ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini are very good, considering the nonexistent price of entry. Copilot is the sneaky winner in some ways, since users can access OpenAI’s best GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo models without paying a cent. Before paying for an AI subscription, you should try each of the free versions and see if they meet your needs first. Chances are, you’ll be impressed with how much these services can do. After all, if you just want to tinker with a chatbot, there’s absolutely no need to pay for that kind of functionality.

The real reason you might want to pay for an AI subscription service is if you think it can help you work more efficiently. We’ve all heard the saying, “time is money,” and these AI subscriptions are worth it if they save you enough time doing monotonous tasks at work. Microsoft’s Copilot Pro and Google’s One AI Premium are appealing for this reason, because they integrate with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, respectively. Generally, in a market where so many services are becoming subscription-based, you should try to make the most of free AI features for as long as you can.