🛠️Simon Willison: 'The Solution Might Be Cancelling My AI Sub'
TL;DR
Simon Willison's May 31 post questions whether ChatGPT and Claude subscriptions still earn their keep as local open-weights models close the gap. He treats it as a useful prompt for any AI buyer: when is paying for the frontier still rational?
Simon Willison's May 31 post questions whether ChatGPT and Claude subscriptions still earn their keep as local open-weights models close the gap. He treats it as a useful prompt for any AI buyer: when is paying for the frontier still rational?
Key Points
Posted May 31, 2026 on simonwillison.net
Willison is author of the llm CLI and Datasette, and co-creator of Django
Compares paying $20/mo for hosted chat vs running open-weights models locally
Argues open-weight quality has crossed a usefulness threshold for many everyday tasks
Frames the decision as a periodic re-evaluation, not a one-time switch
Why It Matters
When one of the most prolific AI tinkerers is publicly questioning whether to keep paying OpenAI, that is a data point for every product team selling AI by the seat.
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