I Spend RMB 2,000 a Month on AI Tools. Is It Worth It?

Happy first day back at work, bosses.

First post of the new year, and it’s not about AI ads. It’s about money.

A friend asked me: how much are you spending on AI tools each month now? I did the math: a little over RMB 2,000.

Honestly, at first I thought it was expensive too. But after running it for the better part of a year, my conclusion is: this may be one of the highest-ROI expenses in all my years doing Affiliate.

1. It’s not piling up tools, it’s building a system

First, what I’m mainly using right now:

ChatGPT Plus, $20/month. My main chat tool, with the most accumulated memory and context. Almost every non-coding conversation happens here. And it’s also one of the models behind Lobster (OpenClaw): GPT-5.3 Codex.

Claude Max, $120/month. Currently the biggest chunk of spend. But it also carries the heaviest load: all of the ad automation development was written by Claude for me.

Gemini Pro, $20/month. Mainly the web version of Gemini and AI Studio, for image and text creatives for my WeChat Official Account and Facebook. NotebookLM is great too: I drop English materials into it and have it pull out the key points. The boost to my learning efficiency is obvious.

Kimi Code, RMB 99/month. Plugged into OpenClaw, dedicated to handling integration and communication for my China-side business. The volume is high, some scenarios just go more smoothly with a Chinese model, and it responds fast.

AWS Lightsail, $12/month. OpenClaw runs on it, and it also handles connections to various APIs and automation tasks. $12 a month, online 24/7; the value for money is actually very high.

Vercel, $20/month. Auto-deploys the automation systems Claude builds.

2. Expensive or not depends on how you count

Looking only at the number: RMB 2,000 a month is RMB 20,000+ a year, and that’s before token costs.

But count it another way:

The time I spend on repetitive operations each day is at least 2-3 hours less than last year. Watching data, adjusting budgets, pausing bad creatives: most of that is automated now.

With the time saved I can test new creatives, think about other things, and put more time into my family.

More importantly, a lot of things I wanted to do before but had no energy for are now doable.

Like integrating a complete data platform, or custom automation rules for every campaign.

Like having Claude Cowork organize my Hong Kong company’s audit materials; all I do is download the invoices periodically and tell it.

The value of these things is far more than RMB 2,000.

3. A few thoughts

There are usually two extremes:

One is wanting everything for free: spending huge amounts of time hunting for alternatives, messing with cracked versions (like still messing with cracked copies of the IM tracker), putting up with all kinds of limitations.

The other is spending what needs spending without hesitation, and putting your time into things that are worth more.

Everyone doing Affiliate knows time is money. Save an extra 2 hours a day and that’s 60 hours a month.

How many creatives can you test in those 60 hours, how many new campaigns can you launch, how much incremental revenue can that bring?

I’m not saying everyone has to spend this much. Tools serve the business; whatever your business needs is what you equip.

But if you’re still hesitating over whether to subscribe to some AI tool, my advice: first work out how much time it can save you, then work out what your time is worth.

In the new year, I hope to keep digging deeper into the value of these tools, and to find more good stuff and share it with you the moment I do.

Happy first day back. Let’s go make money together.