Poe

Poe’s whole reason to exist is that no single AI lab has the best model for every job, and paying for ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini as three separate $20-a-month subscriptions to find out which one is best is wasteful. Poe puts them behind one login and one bill, with a points system standing in for the pricing plumbing each vendor uses on its own site.

The catch is that the points system, not the dollar price, is what actually rations your usage. A message to a frontier reasoning model can burn through far more points than a message to a lighter, faster one, so “660,000 points a month” on Premium doesn’t translate to a fixed number of conversations — it depends entirely on which models you pick. Worth running a week of real usage before assuming a tier will cover you.

Who this actually suits

Someone comparing models for a specific task — which one writes better cold emails, which one handles a messy spreadsheet more reliably — gets real value from having all of them in one place. Someone who already knows they only want Claude or only want ChatGPT is better off paying that vendor directly: you’ll get first access to new features and no points arithmetic to think about.

Against going direct

The individual vendors are still the better buy if you know what you want: their native apps read your files more deeply, and neither Anthropic nor OpenAI treats Poe as a first-class surface for new capabilities — new features and models often land there weeks after they land on the vendor’s own product. Poe earns its subscription in the exploration phase, not as a permanent home once you’ve settled on a favourite.