Student on a $15–30/month budget: which AI tools are worth it?
A student with a $15–30/month budget asks which AI tools to pay for; agentic coding burned 40% of their Codex quota in 2–3 days. The key lesson: agentic coding burns tokens ~10x faster than chat, so no $20 tier fixes a usage-pattern problem — run a local model on the MacBook for grunt work and save paid tiers for when local models fail.