Defining “work subscriptions” ought to be simple. It is not.
I pay for a mixture of work tools, personal services and things that sit awkwardly in the middle. Once you start listing them honestly, the working budget looks wider than the one coding tool everybody asks about.
I previously had SuperGrok mainly for fun. I have a Google subscription that combines storage and AI benefits. It started mostly as Google Photos storage. Now I use Gemini more. I have ChatGPT Plus for planning, brainstorming, copy updates and writing prompts, and I also use it personally. Cursor is my main AI coding tool. On top of that there is VPS hosting, separate WordPress hosting and domain names. Some domains are paid for by clients. Others are paid for by me.
That is already enough to make a tidy category label feel slightly dishonest.
Does Spotify count as a business expense? Because it is part of my working day. That is a joke about how blurred the edges get, not tax advice.
The expensive tool that still earns its seat
I pay $200 a month for Cursor Ultra. I wrote earlier about using the whole allowance. Recently I used the full included amount with four days still left before renewal, even after studying practices meant to reduce token consumption. I took the weekend off rather than immediately buying more usage.
Cursor stays because of the useful work it helps me finish and the speed at which it does so. I think I could do most of the work without AI, although some tasks would need more learning. I do not think I could match that speed.
If somebody consistently uses only a small fraction of an expensive plan, my instinct is that they should check whether a cheaper plan would actually meet their requirements. That is not advice to burn unused allowance just to hit 100%. Usage and value are not the same thing. Heavy usage shows that the tool is being used. Useful output and whether the plan fits the workload decide whether it earns its place. Hitting a limit is not proof of financial return.
I joke that if Cursor costs $200, earning $201 covers it, and another $49 leaves something for Burger King. That joke covers the subscription alone. It ignores other expenses and my time. It also does not claim the subscription caused the revenue. It is a way of saying the tool has to clear a low comic bar before I start pretending it is free.
Tools that were good, or forgotten, or both
Claude was a short subscription. I quickly hit a usage restriction while using Opus and Sonnet. I remember being unable to continue when I wanted to. I am not sure whether that was a daily limit, a time window or another mechanism. The interruption did not fit the way I work, so I cancelled. A tool can be good and still be the wrong shape for somebody’s working pattern.
GitHub Copilot was different. I bought a personal annual subscription intending to work on a separate project. I got sidetracked and forgot about it until it renewed and another annual bill arrived. Annual billing is not automatically bad value. For me, it was easy to forget.
I later tried Copilot properly, enjoyed using it with VS Code and also enjoyed Cursor. Cancelling did not mean Copilot was a bad product. It meant my attention and my projects had moved. I moved that personal coding spend onto monthly billing while I worked out whether I would keep going with personal projects. After becoming active on a project and hitting limits, I also bought a separate $20 Cursor subscription for one month.
Those personal coding subscriptions are cancelled now. My development work goes through the company. That temporary personal Cursor plan is not the same thing as the company-funded Ultra plan above.