🎮 The Next Input — Issue #049

Are You Overpaying for AI?

Aaron Bost
September 08, 2025

In partnership with

⚡ The Briefing — 60 sec

DuckDuckGo adds advanced AI models to its subscription plan. And to think I’m out here paying hundreds for Pro versions…
Switzerland launches its own open LLM, Apertus. Swiss bank? Nah. Swiss LLM? Maybe 🤔.
Trump’s Silicon Valley dinner attendee list drops. Valley power-dressed—sorry Elon, no invite this time.

🛠️ The Playbook — Subscription AI Tracker

Mission Keep tabs on AI subscription services (pricing, included models, feature changes) and alert your team when new value unlocks.
Difficulty Medium | Build time 60 min
ROI Finance & ops teams save ≈ 6–8 h/month by surfacing hidden pricing changes.

Step	Action
1	Trigger – Zapier Schedule → weekly scan.
2	Web Scraper (Apify/Pagecrawl) – Monitor pricing pages of OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, DuckDuckGo, etc.
3	Claude 3.5 Sonnet – Prompt: “Compare this week vs last. Highlight pricing changes, new features, and added models. Return JSON {provider, change_type, details}.”
4	Google Sheets – Append `{provider, change, date}`.
5	Slack Push – Alert “⚡ DuckDuckGo just added Opus to $20/mo plan” to #ai-subscriptions.
6	Looker Studio – Dashboard showing spend vs features unlocked.
7	Fail-safe – If scrape fails, send fallback: “Manual check required” with links.

Pro tip: Add a column for “Overlapping Features” so finance can spot which Pro tiers are redundant.

🎯 The Arsenal — Tools & Prompts

Asset	What it does	Link
Apify	Scrape & monitor pricing tables.	https://apify.com
SpendSense	Live dashboard of AI tool costs.	https://spendsense.ai
LangChain Router	Swap model calls dynamically.	https://langchain.dev/router
Prompt · Subscription Change Alert	Condense diffs into Slack-ready alerts.

Summarise provider updates: 
- Pricing changes 
- Features added/removed 
- New models available 
Output: “⚡ {Provider} updated: {summary}”

💡 Free Office Hours

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Book a free 15-minute Office Hours slot—no sales pitch, just workflows solved.

→ Grab a slot: https://calendly.com/aaron-cylentis/the-next-input-office-hours

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🕹️ Game Over

Track one subscription tonight—tomorrow your budget will thank you.
Share your win; you could headline Issue #050.

— Aaron
Automating the boring. Amplifying the brilliant.

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