AI models 2026: which one to pick and what it costs
AI Models
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Which AI should you take?
If you are here for code - take Claude. This whole site was built with it. It holds a long task in its head, edits files itself instead of dictating commands for you to copy, and stops to ask when something is unclear. Twenty dollars a month. If that is too much, ChatGPT with Codex costs the same and is close behind, and both have a free tier you can try first.
If you are here for text, search and everyday questions - honestly, any of the big three will do. ChatGPT is the one everyone knows. Gemini has the longest memory and the best eyes for images and video. Grok lives inside X, so it knows what happened ten minutes ago, and it comes free with X Premium.
If you want it cheap or local - DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen and Z.ai are a fraction of the price through their APIs and several are open-weight, which means you can run them on your own machine. Quality is a step below the leaders, but for bulk work where you burn millions of tokens the maths changes fast.
For pictures and video the field moves every month, so treat any list as a snapshot. Right now Veo and Wan are where the video is, Flux and Seedream where the images are. Open a card and read the meta before you pay for anything.
One honest note: do not subscribe to four of them at once. Take one, use it every day for a week, and you will know what it cannot do. The full path from zero to something shipped is in the AI roadmap - 75 steps, free, no signup.
If you are here for text, search and everyday questions - honestly, any of the big three will do. ChatGPT is the one everyone knows. Gemini has the longest memory and the best eyes for images and video. Grok lives inside X, so it knows what happened ten minutes ago, and it comes free with X Premium.
If you want it cheap or local - DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen and Z.ai are a fraction of the price through their APIs and several are open-weight, which means you can run them on your own machine. Quality is a step below the leaders, but for bulk work where you burn millions of tokens the maths changes fast.
For pictures and video the field moves every month, so treat any list as a snapshot. Right now Veo and Wan are where the video is, Flux and Seedream where the images are. Open a card and read the meta before you pay for anything.
One honest note: do not subscribe to four of them at once. Take one, use it every day for a week, and you will know what it cannot do. The full path from zero to something shipped is in the AI roadmap - 75 steps, free, no signup.