I added it up in December. $14,200 in AI tool subscriptions across the year. Content tools, prospecting tools, analytics dashboards. All of them monthly.
Here's what made me angry: most of them run on MY infrastructure. My API key. My data. The vendor isn't hosting anything for me. They built a wrapper and they charge me $300/month to use it.
That's a subscription for software that costs them basically nothing to maintain after they sell it to me.
The math nobody does
A $300/month AI tool costs $3,600 in year one. $7,200 by year two. $10,800 by year three.
A one-time purchase at $497? That costs $497. Forever. By month two of the subscription, you've already paid more than the one-time buyer ever will.
I keep a spreadsheet now. Every time I consider a new SaaS tool, I run the 24-month math. It's embarrassing how often I was paying thousands to rent something I could own.
When subscriptions make sense
Look, SaaS isn't inherently bad. If a company maintains servers for you, processes your data, provides customer support infrastructure — recurring fees make sense. They have recurring costs.
But that's not what's happening with most AI tools. Your data stays on your machine. You provide the API key. The tool runs locally. Their cost to serve you after the initial sale is approximately zero.
They charge monthly because they can, not because they need to.
The question I ask now
Before I subscribe to anything: does this tool actually require ongoing infrastructure from the vendor? If the answer is no — if everything runs on my machine with my API key — why am I paying monthly?
The honest answer is usually: because they didn't offer a one-time option. And the reason they didn't is because recurring revenue looks better on their fundraising deck.
That's their problem, not yours. Find the one-time option.