I run a team of ten, and for twenty dollars a month, we get access to a premium ChatGPT account that saves us roughly 320 hours. Every month. Not theoretically. Not in some McKinsey report. In actual, lived reality.
And for the life of me, I still don’t understand how this is allowed to cost the same as a chicken salad.
It feels like the market is letting small businesses buy a superpower at a discount. A productivity glitch. A leverage mismatch. I’m paying cents. I’m getting thousands of dollars’ worth of output back. And naturally the thought creeps in: how long does this last? When do they raise the price to something that actually reflects its value?
And before someone says it — yes, I know there are people out there who’d scoff at my “advantage.” The same people who point out that entire marketing departments worth over a million a year have already been trimmed down because of AI. Or that movie studios are quietly swapping out whole divisions. Or that what I’m calling leverage is just a tiny crumb in comparison.
They’d probably say I’m thinking like a frog at the bottom of a well.
But I don’t think that’s fair.
For a small business owner, this isn’t a crumb. This is seismic.
It’s not about the size of the advantage — it’s about what that advantage represents when you’re competing in the trenches.
Let’s say the subscription jumps from $20 to $200.
Okay, still manageable.
What about $2,000?
At what point does a small business owner start feeling financial pressure just to stay competitive?
And here’s the strange question I keep circling back to:
Would I take out a loan to keep up?
Not because I’m in trouble, but because the maths might genuinely justify it.
If my competitor has a bigger war chest, they can afford the better models long before I can — deeper analysis, faster turnarounds, bigger context windows, more comprehensive insights. They don’t just become better marketers or operators. They become better thinkers because the tools think with them.
And that leads me to a more unsettling thought — the kind you feel but rarely say out loud.
Maybe we’re drifting toward an “Elysium tier” of AI access.
A top deck where the richest companies get faster models, richer agents, fully automated workflows, and private LLMs humming quietly in the background, while people like me are left to stretch the $20 version as far as it’ll go.
So what does someone like me do?
Do I spend above my comfort zone just to keep up?
Do I try to ride the coattails of the big players and hope that proximity keeps me within striking distance?
If that’s the risk I have to take, then maybe that’s part of the game now.
But then I stop myself and come back to earth.
Because I don’t want to get caught in doom loops or imaginary futures I can’t control.
The more grounded question is this:
Where do I even find the right information to avoid getting blindsided?
How does a small operator keep a pulse on an industry moving this fast?
I’m not looking for secrets or insider plays. I just want to know the shape of the road ahead so I’m not waking up one morning to realise the ground shifted underneath me.
And maybe that’s the real point here.
Not the price of AI.
Not the tiers.
Not whether big companies have private models or whether small businesses are falling behind.
The real story is that we’re all running companies during a moment where leverage is artificially cheap and wildly accessible. None of us know when the bill comes due. None of us know how fast the gap will widen. And none of us know what tier we’ll land in once the dust settles.
And to me, the only thing worse than being behind is being surprised you’re behind, and if thinking about these questions keeps that from happening, that’s reason enough to ask them.
