You may be thinking about using ChatGPT to help write pages for your website or do research. This review is intended to help answer whether ChatGPT is worth your time and money.

I have used ChatGPT on and off since 2023. I have also used Claude, Grok, Gemini, and others, so I have some frame of reference for what else is out there. I’m not affiliated with any of these companies.

Are you a business owner who’d rather get the benefits of AI tools like ChatGPT without having to figure them all out? I can handle that for you.

For basic queries and information gathering, the free versions of ChatGPT, Grok, and Claude are pretty similar. (I’ve mainly used Gemini with a paid Ultra plan, so I can’t speak to how that stacks up to free versions.) There’s no particular reason to use ChatGPT over the others, or to avoid it. The choice more comes down to personal preferences, as each chat has a slightly different personality, and whether you like or dislike one of the companies.

In my experience, the main reason to subscribe is to increase the daily usage limit for the GPT-5 model. Currently the free plan gives you 10 messages per five-hour time period, and three file uploads.

I’ve found this is often enough for casual use, particularly when I’m subscribed for a different LLM and use its higher limits.

The quality of the responses goes down noticeably when the system switches from GPT-5. There are some times when I’ve found it’s worth a Plus subscription, which is $19.99 per month, to get a higher number of GPT-5 responses. 

Not having to write it yourself is a big selling point of ChatGPT and AIs in general. ChatGPT’s writing style has gotten better since I wrote about it. But it still writes like an AI, whether the average reader consciously notices that or not.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend relying on ChatGPT (or any other AI) to write something and then use it verbatim. Where ChatGPT can be helpful is in creating rough drafts, particularly for subjects you have no inspiration about or experience in. This way, at least you have something to edit, revise, and build from, instead of working from a blank page.

The other way it can be helpful is at the end of the process: catching typos, pointing out sentences that might be confusing, and offering ideas for additions and subtractions.

Beyond this, writing is a solitary process, and finding a responsive reader has historically been a big challenge for writers. ChatGPT has faults, but so do people. Even considering all its quirks, as an on-call second opinion, it provides a genuinely valuable service.

If you want to subscribe mainly for writing, though, instead of ChatGPT I recommend using Claude. It’s a similar price, but its writing is more human. ChatGPT uses a lot of em dashes, colons, bulleted lists with bold headers, and sentences saying “whether you’re…” and “from…to…” It also overuses words like showcase, key, ensure, and feature.

Claude does some of this also, but less overall, which helps cut down on editing later.

Besides whatever datasets they were trained on, ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok all have access to the internet for research. So unlike a couple years ago where ChatGPT’s knowledge was clearly cut off at a certain date, it can now help with researching current topics by searching online.

For basic questions, I’ve found that ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok will all give answers of about equal usefulness.

I’ve noticed, though, that each of them will often find different sources. So, for example, when I was researching the history of the electric motor, while no AI was obviously flatly better than the other, they worked well together. Each had a slightly different perspective. If they all agree on something, there’s a higher probability it’s correct; but if one disagrees, that’s useful to know as well.

Even if ChatGPT isn’t your main AI, it’s worth using to double or triple check work created elsewhere.

This has never been a main use of mine, though periodically I’ve experimented with images for one reason or another. When I started in 2023, it was still common for hands to be distorted, and it had a lot of trouble generating text.

I don’t have saved examples of the old ugly pictures, but picture generation has come a long way since then. Here are some examples of what it looks like now:

These images certainly aren’t perfect. Overall, though, for free or $19.99 per month image generation, it’s amusing if nothing else, and is now good enough to also be potentially useful.

ChatGPT can be helpful answering math questions, if one doesn’t know how to do them, or just doesn’t feel like doing the calculations manually.

For non-work related tasks, I’ve gotten the most use out of it troubleshooting the health of some of my plants. This is a situation where uploading pictures is helpful, because it can see how the plant looks, and then give suggestions.

For things like this, I’ve found it can save time talking to it through the phone, instead of typing on the computer. Its ability to transcribe audio is very good, so it’s easy to talk naturally, and it will comprehend what you say.

If you’ve followed AI news at all, you’ve probably heard about various controversies involving OpenAI and ChatGPT. And you may wonder about its bias and have concerns about your privacy. I can’t put any of those concerns to rest. This review is simply looking at its potential usefulness as a productivity tool.

Though there are higher tiers, I’ve only subscribed to the Plus plan, which is $19.99 per month. This price is in line with the basic plans of other similar AIs.

One thing ChatGPT does very well is make it extremely easy to subscribe and unsubscribe. There are no confusing user interfaces or convoluted actions needed to make it happen. Whether you’re subscribing or unsubscribing, it only takes a couple button clicks.

Looking for an AI generated audio service with text-to-speech and sound effects? Wondering if ElevenLabs is worth the time and money?

This review is not meant to be an exhaustive listing of every feature and how it compares to every other audio AI out there.

Over the last year I’ve subscribed to ElevenLabs several times for different client projects. Here are my impressions as an actual user who needed the product to work for specific tasks. I am not affiliated with ElevenLabs in any way.

The client projects I’ve used ElevenLabs for include creating video ads for businesses. If you’re a business owner or marketer who could use video ads without learning all these tools yourself, see what I’ve produced or get in touch.

I have the most experience with the “Instant Speech” generator, used for speech chunks of 3,000 characters or less.

There is a large selection of pre-made voices. While some are better than others, and some sound more obviously AI than others, overall there is a lot to work with here.

For the most part, the voices pronounce words correctly and add emphasis or pauses that sound natural. They are way beyond the horrible text to speech of the past.

When you select a voice to generate speech, it will generate two outputs at a time, each with a little variation between them (there’s no way to change this number). Occasionally, one output is perfect on the first attempt, but I found that this is rare. When I want precise emphasis or cadence, even for short paragraphs, it often takes five or ten tries to get something I’m happy with.

1. It often cuts the last word short. It doesn’t actually cut it off, but the clip will end on the last sound of the last word in a way that sounds terse and unnatural. It’s not easy to hear this while generating outputs, though, but usually becomes obvious later when assembling a video and listening to the audio in context. I like to include a filler sentence that can be cut out later, but provides a buffer for the parts I want to make sure are not cut off. A short sentence works better than just one word, because one (or two) random words are often not read aloud when placed after a regular sentence. 

2. The voices can vary too much between outputs. The variation is a problem because sometimes the same voice can sound like different people. Here’s “Liam” reading the same two words: First take. Second Take. This can cause a lot of extra work trying to match outputs from different prompts.

There’s a slider to help control the variability, which can make the outputs a bit more consistent with the tradeoff of sounding potentially more robotic. This is better than nothing, but ultimately, it’s not a good choice between an inconsistent voice and a robotic one.

There is the ability to insert words in brackets to better indicate how the text should be read. This is somewhat helpful. For instance, here’s a line where I told it to [laugh] at the end. But the system sometimes just reads the words in the brackets out loud, like in this recording where I put an [anxious] direction at the beginning to set the tone.

3. Occasionally there will be background noises or sound effects that can ruin otherwise good outputs. This isn’t too common, though. If I like the output itself, I isolate the voice later using CapCut, which is a simple editing program. (I’ll have a review of it soon.)

4. The user interface to select voices is convoluted. If you’ve used ElevenLabs and have been confused by this part, it’s not just you.

How it should be: Select a voice and press a button to use that voice.

How it is: Find a voice and press a button next to “Select a voice” but the button takes you back to the previous page. That’s because you need to add the voice to your “voice library” in order to select it. But if your library is full (10 voices on the Starter plan) it won’t let you add the voice. So you now have to leave the page and navigate to the voice library, to delete one of the saved voices and free up more room. But this takes you away from the voice you’ve found, so now you have to navigate back to the voice options and find it again to add to the library.

On top of this, the catalogue of voices is cut up into different sections, and it’s unclear if there’s a way to search all the voices at once.

The Studio interface allows generated content to be organized in chapters, and is generally better at handling large amounts of text than Instant Speech. I used Studio when a client asked if I could make some audiobooks.

The same voices are available as in Instant Speech, and from a usability standpoint, Studio is relatively easy and straightforward. There are plenty of options to fine-tune the reading, though my client didn’t want me spending a bunch of time on that; I mainly went with the default output.

It can struggle with punctuation and pauses. I spent a while in trial and error, adding and removing paragraph breaks and ellipses, to get it to read chapter headings correctly before the body text.

The default reading is more robotic than with Instant Speech for the same voices. Overall, there are fewer quality-of-life issues here, though.

I’ve found the sound effects generator to be a very useful feature for adding background audio to videos. Things like far-off bird sounds, breathing, electrical shorts, air-conditioner hum, and suburban backyards. When a prompt is entered, the system automatically generates four outputs. I haven’t found a way to change this number. It is possible, though, to select the output duration from 0.5 seconds to 22 seconds.

For short clips of basic sounds, I found the outputs to be quite good. Sometimes I had to tweak my prompts and generate multiple batches, but I rarely went away without something I could use.

It’s not uncommon for one of the outputs to be silent or very faint. The system also has a hard time with abstract prompts like “transcended enlightenment.”

Probably the worst thing about Sound Effects is that there’s no clear way to delete the output history. This is a problem because if I need to try five times to get the right bird sounds, now the history is forever clogged up with 20 outputs, and it becomes harder and harder to find old but good outputs as time goes on.

There is, apparently, some method to delete the history using API access, though I haven’t attempted it.

ElevenLabs has multiple features beyond text to speech and sound effects: voice changer, voice isolator, voice clone, music generator, dubbing, speech to text, and some others. As of writing this, I haven’t used these enough to review them.

ElevenLabs has multiple pricing tiers, with monthly and yearly subscription options. I have used the “Starter” plan at $5 per month and the “Creator” plan at $22 per month. The higher-priced plan gives more of everything and a few options not included in the lower plans.

When I needed to make short voiceovers and some sound effects, the $5 Starter plan was genuinely useful.

I used the Creator plan when making the audiobooks. It’s definitely necessary to have a higher plan like this, if you want to narrate multiple thousands of words. While I did run out of credits pretty quickly making audiobooks, I think the Creator plan is a reasonable value for the price.

One thing about ElevenLabs that’s great compared to some AI subscriptions is that it’s fast and easy to unsubscribe whenever you want.

Update: I’ve revised this post from its original version, to reflect changes to Google’s AI Ultra plan, which increased monthly credits from 12,500 to 25,000 for and made Veo 3 Fast generations free in Flow for Ultra subscribers (changes implemented in August 2025).

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If you’re thinking about using Veo 3 to generate videos, or aren’t sure about the economics of credit usage, this post is for you.

Be aware: “Veo 3” the AI video generation model, and “Veo3.ai” the website, are not the same thing. One could cost you a lot more.

“Veo 3” = an AI video creation model made by Google.

“Veo3.ai” = A website NOT affiliated with Google, and may be a scam site based on user reports.

If you’re a business owner or marketer who wants video ads made with Veo without dealing with the confusion around access, pricing, and scam sites, I do this for clients. See examples of what I’ve made or get in touch.

The backstory to this post is that when I started making AI videos for a client, he asked me to use Google’s Veo 3 video creation model. Seems simple, right? But even figuring out how to sign up—and where—was confusing.

The economics were also unclear. There appeared to be ways of generating videos for free, or with credits bought from Google, or through third-party sites running the Veo 3 model, also using credits, but not affiliated with Google.

(Credits = what you can use to pay for a video generation. These aren’t a universal monetary standard, so how much actual money a credit costs, and how much it buys, varies between companies that use credits.)

I was hesitant to sign up for anything without research ahead of time, because in 2024 I subscribed to a bad AI service, and had to change my credit card number to keep them from billing me.

Here’s the long version of what I found when researching these questions.

No Free Access
Free Gemini accounts don’t get Veo 3 video generations.

If you subscribe to Google AI Pro, you get three Veo 3 “Fast” video generations per day through the Gemini app.

With the Ultra plan, you’re bumped up to five generations per day.

In the Gemini app, these generations don’t cost credits, but you’re capped at those daily limits. 

Want more? You’ll need to use Google’s Flow tool, where generations use credits.

Using Your Google AI Ultra Credits
When you subscribe for Ultra, you’re given 25,000 credits per month. As credits aren’t directly used in the Gemini interface, to generate more than five videos a day you need to sign into Google Labs Flow. Here you can generate as many videos as you want until your credits run out, and then you can buy more.

Third Party Sources
As I mentioned, using the Veo 3 model is sometimes available through sites not affiliated with Google. For example, LTX Studio offers this. You pay them their subscription fee (varies by plan), and then they meter your access to Google’s model. As far as I know, LTX Studio is legitimate, and I’m sure there are others.

Before I did all this research, though, I was confused by Veo3.ai. They say they aren’t affiliated with Google, but that’s a pretty spot-on name that comes up easily in the search results. They say they use Google’s model and sell a credit package for $49.99, which seems like a lot less of a risk than signing up for Google AI Ultra at $124.99 per month.

I found too many sources indicating that Veo3.ai is a potential security risk to use to sign up for them. But let’s say they’re legitimate. Are they offering a good deal?

To answer that question, we need to figure out how much money a credit is worth.  

If you sign up for Google AI Ultra, for the first 3 months of your subscription at $124.99, you get 25,000 credits per month.

At this price each credit costs you 0.5 cents.

When you are using your credits in Flow, the usage depends on the model you pick, and number of outputs per prompt generation.

You can choose between four models:

Veo 2 – Fast (10 credits per output)
Veo 3 – Fast (0 credits per output)
Veo 2 – Quality (100 credits per output)
Veo 3 – Quality Beta (100 credits per output)

For the purposes of this post, we don’t need to get into the weeds over all the differences between these options. It’s enough to know that Veo 2 – Fast is the most primitive and doesn’t create audio, while Veo 3 – Quality Beta is the fanciest and creates audio. Videos made with it are probably what most people who are trying to get access want to do.

For each model, when you enter a prompt, you can have the AI generate between one and four outputs. Because each output is a little different even with the same prompt, generating several at once can save time because you’re more likely to get something you like. However, if there’s a problem with the prompt, it can be costly to find that out from four bad outputs at once.

Here is a breakdown of how many credits you can spend, depending on your settings:

Veo 2 – Fast (10 credits per output)
1 output: 10 credits
2 outputs: 20 credits
3 outputs: 30 credits
4 outputs: 40 credits

Veo 3 – Fast (0 credits per output)
This is anecdotal, but in my experience the quality of these outputs noticeably dropped when they were switched from their old cost of 20 credits to being free.

Veo 2 – Quality or Veo 3 – Quality Beta (both 100 credits per output)
1 output: 100 credits
2 outputs: 200 credits
3 outputs: 300 credits
4 outputs: 400 credits

Each output can be as low as 0 credits or as high as 400, depending on your settings. At $0.005 per credit, you’re paying between $0.00 and $2.00 per generation.

When the 3-month promotional period ends for Google AI Ultra and the price doubles from $124.99 to $249.99, the credit usage stays the same—but your cost per credit doubles from $0.005 to $0.01.

Now, each generation will cost between $0.00 and $4.00.

How does Veo3.ai stack up? Their cheapest monthly plan is $49.99 for 7,500 credits. Keep in mind these are credits to use through their website, not interchangeable with Google’s credits. However, that’s a cost of $0.0067 per credit, about 33 percent cheaper than Google’s $0.01 per credit.

According to Veo3.ai, there are two options for a Veo 3 model video generation:

Fast: 200 credits per generation.
Quality: 1,000 credits per generation.

They don’t say how many videos are created per generation. I’m going to proceed as if it is only one, figuring if it were more, they would announce that.

So now the question becomes, never mind how much each credit costs—how much does each generation cost?

Veo3.ai Fast: 200 credits × $0.0067 = $1.34 per output.
Veo3.ai Quality: 1,000 credits × $0.0067 = $6.70 per output.

Using Google’s Veo 3 directly (single output for comparison):
Fast: free.
Quality: 100 credits × $0.005 = $0.50 per single output.

Credit Value Comparison
Even though Veo3.ai credits cost less per credit, they require 10x more credits per generation. The lower per-credit price is misleading.

Unless Veo3.ai is giving you multiple outputs per generation—which they don’t advertise—you’re paying significantly more per video.