I Tracked Every Dollar I Spent on AI Coding Tools for 90 Days. Here's What I Found.

Three months ago I started logging every AI tool charge that hit my credit card. The number at the end surprised me — and not in a good way. Total: $387 over 90 days. $1,548/year. That's not including my base salary. That's just the tax I'm paying to stay productive as a developer in 2026. Here's the full breakdown, what was worth it, and what I quietly cancelled. The Full Stack (What I Was Running) At peak, I was paying for: Tool Monthly Cost What I Used It For GitHub Copilot $10 Autocomplete, inline suggestions Claude Max $100 Architecture, complex refactors, debugging Cursor Pro $20 IDE integration, multi-file edits Perplexity Pro $20 Research, docs lookup v0.dev credits $20 UI prototyping Total $170/month For context: I'm a solo developer working on a mix of client projects and a side product. Not a big team with a budget. Just me. Month 1: The Honeymoon Phase I signed up for everything around the same time because my feed was full of people saying they'd 10x'd their productivity.