A typical AI coding stack costs $840/yr (Cursor Pro ~$240/yr plus Claude and Copilot subscriptions); power users paying Claude Max hit $2,040–$3,240/yr. DevboardAI is $74 once — no subscription, lifetime access — and breaks even against Cursor Pro alone in roughly 3.7 months.
The stacks I actually see
Pull up your receipts for the last 12 months and find the AI-coding subscriptions. Most developers I talk to have one of three shapes:
The typical stack — $70/mo ($840/yr)
- Cursor Pro — $20/mo
- Claude Pro — $20/mo
- ChatGPT Plus — $20/mo
- GitHub Copilot — $10/mo
The power-user stack — $170–270/mo ($2,040–3,240/yr)
- Claude Max — $100–200/mo
- Cursor Pro+ — $60/mo
- GitHub Copilot — $10/mo
The minimalist stack — $20/mo ($240/yr)
- Just Cursor Pro — $20/mo
None of those are wrong. Each tool does something the others don't. The problem is that once you have all of them, you rarely audit whether all of them are still earning their seat.
If you opened a tool fewer than 5 times last month, you're paying it to exist — not to work.
Why the math is hard to feel
$20/month is rounding error on one card. Four of them, on four different cards, billed at four different times of the month, spread across three email addresses — that's most developers' actual setup. Your brain never sees $840 at once.
It gets worse when credits enter the picture. Cursor switched to credit-based pricing in 2025 and spent months apologizing for it publicly. The pattern is the same across most AI tools now: a base subscription that buys you a credit pool, and a second layer of cost when the pool runs dry. You can't predict that cost without knowing the month's usage, which you can't know until you're through it.
Payback math for a one-time tool
DevboardAI is $74 once. Here's how long that takes to pay back across the common stacks:
Worth naming clearly: DevboardAI doesn't replace Claude Code, Codex, or Kimi. It runs on top of them. So the fair comparison isn't “DevboardAI vs Cursor” at the provider level — it's “DevboardAI + one agent CLI” vs “a full subscription stack.” The payback math still works because the agent CLI tier is usually the cheapest part of the stack.
The audit worth running this weekend
1. Open your last credit-card statement and highlight every AI tool charge.
2. For each one, count how many times you actually opened it in the last 30 days.
3. Anything you used fewer than 5 times — cancel, and try again in three months if you miss it.
4. Anything left is your actual stack. Now you know what it costs.