Most conversations about AI tools devolve into tribal nonsense fairly quickly. Someone insists ChatGPT is the only one worth touching. Someone else swears Claude changed their lives. A third person is using Grok and makes everyone else in the conversation, frankly, feel a little creeped out and uncomfortable.
The honest answer is that different tools are genuinely better at different things. Investing all your money in the world’s best screwdriver when you need a hammer from time to time is pretty pointless, and paying for the wrong one is a real waste of money at a time when these subscriptions are quietly stacking up. So here is a practical breakdown of what is worth your card details in Ireland right now, what is acceptable, and what to avoid outright.
Think of It as a Toolbox
The useful way to slice the AI market is by what you actually need it for.
- Writing and editing
- Coding and technical work
- Research and fact-checking
- Images and video
- Workplace productivity and “please don’t get me in trouble with IT”
With that frame, it becomes a lot easier to see where each tool earns its keep and where it is just marketing.
Claude: The One to Pay for First
If your day involves words or code, Claude Pro is the subscription to justify before any other. At around $20 dollars a month (about €23 by the time it lands on an Irish card), it is priced about the same as ChatGPT Plus, but it punches above its weight for anyone doing serious written work.
What makes it worth it is style consistency. Feed it a few untouched samples of your own writing, and it will match your tone rather than drift into the generic, slightly corporate register that makes AI-assisted copy so identifiable. For journalists, marketers, solo founders and developers, that alone justifies the sub.
On the coding side, Claude’s newer models handle refactors, debugging and architecture discussions extremely well. Code is just another structured language, and Claude treats it like one.
The higher-tier Max plans exist at $100 to $200 a month for people who are genuinely living inside the thing all day. For most people, Pro is enough.
Worth it for: Writers, editors, coders, anyone producing long-form content regularly.
ChatGPT: Still the Sensible Default
ChatGPT Plus at around €23 a month is still the right answer to “what AI should I try first?” The free tier is already capable, but paying unlocks higher message limits, priority access during busy periods and OpenAI’s stronger reasoning models.
Where it shines is breadth. A bit of writing, a bit of coding, some brainstorming, a spreadsheet formula you cannot remember. It is the Swiss army knife of AI tools and its ecosystem integrations are the widest of any platform because it became the default integration target before most others got going. I can’t say I ever felt it excelled in writing or anything, but is a fantastic all-rounder. It can not only build your coding project, but project manage it too.
The honest caveat is that OpenAI still has to make its consumer products properly profitable. The obvious levers are higher prices, more aggressive upsells and, possibly, sponsored answers somewhere down the line. None of that is confirmed policy, but it is a real consideration if you are thinking about what to build a workflow around long-term.
Worth it for: Anyone who wants one do-everything assistant and does not have a specific heavy use case in writing or research.
Perplexity: The Research Brain
Perplexity does not really want to be a chatbot. It wants to be a better kind of search, and for research-heavy use it largely succeeds.
The free tier already behaves like a research assistant, citing sources aggressively and refusing to just confabulate an answer when it does not have one. Perplexity Pro, at around €22 a month or €229 a year bought direct, adds hundreds of Pro searches per day and access to premium models including GPT-4 and Claude under one roof.
The Ireland-specific angle worth knowing: Revolut Premium, Metal and Ultra plans now bundle a complimentary Perplexity Pro subscription. Premium users get it for up to 12 months, Metal and Ultra users for as long as the plan is active. A lot of Irish users are already sitting on this without fully realising it.
Use cases where it earns its keep including deep dives on unfamiliar topics, cross-checking facts from other AI tools, and any query touching medical, legal or financial territory where hallucinated nonsense has real consequences.
I often imagine what life could have been like for me if I have Perplexity in college, in a Bernards Watch style world where noone else knew I had this superpower.
Worth it for: Anyone doing regular research, fact-checking or due diligence. Especially compelling if Revolut is already covering the cost.
Gemini: Underwhelming to Talk To, Terrifying for Visuals
Gemini is a strange product to recommend because the gap between its conversational experience and its media generation capabilities is enormous.
As a chat assistant, it still feels like Google chasing the market rather than setting the pace. Responses can be stilted, the interface is cluttered, and it does not match Claude or ChatGPT for the kind of back-and-forth that makes AI assistants genuinely useful day-to-day.
That said, Google AI Pro at around €21.99 a month in the EU buys you a lot more than a chatbot. You get Gemini 2.5 Pro, Deep Research, 2 TB of Google One storage, and a credit allowance for image and video tools including Flow, Whisk and Veo 3. The video generation in particular is producing broadcast-usable B-roll that publishers are already using in articles and social content as a matter of course.
If you live inside Google’s ecosystem and were already paying for Google One storage, the Pro tier effectively bundles several things you were paying for separately.
Google AI Ultra jumps to around €274.99 a month (with promotional pricing around €139.99 for early months in some regions) and adds Veo 3 video generation at higher quality and Deep Think reasoning. That is a specialist tier for people making money from AI-generated media, not a general recommendation.
Worth it for: Content creators, social media teams and designers who need image and video generation. Not worth it if you just want a better chatbot.
Copilot: No…just no.
Microsoft has bundled Copilot into Microsoft 365, pushing Personal to €99 a year and Family to €129, with a limited monthly pool of AI credits included. In enterprise, Copilot Chat is rolling out at no extra fee in eligible tenants, while the full add-on with proper Word, Excel and PowerPoint integration sits at around €28 to €30 per user per month.
The honest summary: for individuals who can choose any tool, Copilot is almost never the best option for any given task. It is just the one that appears in Word and Edge without you having to do anything.
For companies, it is a different calculation. Procurement buys one thing from Microsoft, plugs it into existing infrastructure, and management feels like they are doing AI without the compliance department having a breakdown about connecting third-party bots to SharePoint.
Worth it for: Companies that need AI inside existing Microsoft 365 workflows without a procurement headache. For consumers, it is an afterthought.
Grok: Hard Pass
Even before the recent reports, Grok’s brand positioning, built around being edgy and deliberately provocative, was not exactly a strong foundation for a tool you would trust with your workflow.
In late 2025 and into early 2026, things moved well beyond “edgy branding” into genuinely alarming territory. Multiple reports and child safety organisations flagged that Grok’s image generation tools had produced sexualised images of minors, with apparent AI-generated CSAM linked to Grok prompts and subsequent dark-web distribution. In a surreal development, Grok itself posted what read as an apology on X, acknowledging a failure in safeguards. xAI and Musk were largely silent. Regulators and safety bodies are now involved.
For a site like Goosed, which already made the decision to step back from X, this is not a close call. There are too many better, safer, more responsibly run options available right now to justify even experimenting with it.
Worth it for: Nothing in a consumer context. Avoid.
Specialist Tools Worth Knowing About
A few subscriptions sit outside the “daily assistant” category but are worth paying for in specific niches.
- Midjourney remains the benchmark for aesthetics and stylistic control in AI image generation, used heavily in design and concept art
- Runway and Pika are video-first tools for creators who need stylised clips and short-form content beyond what Veo 3 offers
- GitHub Copilot (separate from Microsoft 365 Copilot) stays popular with developers even as generalist models get better at code
These are creative software subscriptions rather than general assistants. Worth it if you make money from images or video. Not mandatory for everyone.
The Practical Playbook for Irish Users
If you are trying to make one or two smart choices rather than subscribe to everything, the logic is fairly straightforward.
- Write or code a lot: Start with Claude Pro. Use it as a collaborator trained on your own samples and tone.
- Research a lot: Get Perplexity Pro, ideally via Revolut if you are already on Premium, Metal or Ultra.
- Want one generalist tool: ChatGPT Plus is still the safest single subscription, with the widest ecosystem and solid performance across nearly everything.
- Need images or video for your work: Consider Google AI Pro for the bundled media tools, with Midjourney or Runway if you need more specialist control.
Copilot is there so your employer can sleep at night. Grok is there so regulators lose sleep at night. The ones worth paying for are the ones that quietly shave hours off your week without making you feel uneasy about where the product is heading.
Tl;dr – go with either Claude or ChatGPT.
