Tutorials · the training desk
25 free courses, 140 lessons. Each one starts with what the model is, ends with the cheapest way to use it, and links straight to the comparisons and calculators on this site.
Start here
No vendor to choose yet. Learn what AI can do for you, how to ask, when not to trust it, and which tool fits your job. Every lesson has something to try and ends with whether you need to pay.
6 courses · 33 lessons
Six short lessons and no account needed to try the examples. Finish one real task with AI today, learn when not to trust it, and find out whether you need to pay for anything at all.
Six needs, not six brands. For each one: two or three candidate tools, a prompt you can run to feel the difference, and a plain verdict on where to start and when to move.
One three-part habit, five short lessons, no vocabulary to memorise. Get a usable answer on the first try more often, and know exactly what to say when you do not.
Ten small, useful jobs — an email, a summary, a plan, a spreadsheet question — each one done in two minutes with a prompt you can paste, and a note on which ones a free account handles.
A fluent answer is not a checked answer. Six short lessons that teach you why a chat model can be confidently wrong, how to spot it, and the one thirty-second check that works every time.
Upload a document, ask it questions, summarise it to the length you want, pull out the action items, compare two versions, and know exactly where a free plan stops being enough.
One product, in depth
Eight lessons each: what it is, the models, pricing and plans, the first 15 minutes, prompting, workflows, the API and cost control.
8 courses · 62 lessons
Six lessons, six things you actually make. Start with one API call costing a fraction of a cent, finish with a working tool and a routing rule that keeps your bill boring.
Everything Anthropic's own Claude 101 teaches — plus what each plan and model actually costs, and the cheapest way to get the same result.
Learn ChatGPT from zero, and learn exactly what each plan and model costs before you pay for one.
Learn what Gemini is, which model to pick, and what each plan and API call really costs before you pay Google a cent.
Learn the free chat app, the open-weight model family and the OpenAI-compatible API — and what each one actually costs.
Le Chat, the Mistral model families, open weights, and what each one actually costs.
Open-weight models you can rent by the token or run yourself. Learn what that actually costs.
Learn what Grok is, which model to pick, what it really costs, and how to keep the bill small.
AI agents
Short courses on the newest agent products — what they actually do, which plan or tier includes them, and how to write a task worth the run without wasting a subscription.
5 courses · 15 lessons
Grok Bot is xAI's answer to "an agent that works while you don't watch it." Three lessons on what it does, which SuperGrok tier it needs, and how to write it a task worth the run.
OpenClaw is a free, open-source bridge between Discord/Slack/Telegram and an LLM agent. Three lessons on what it is, what it actually costs once it's running, and setting up your first bot.
"Hermes" from Nous Research names three different products with three different price stories. Three lessons on telling them apart, pricing the model, and running the free agent.
Copilot's paid plans now include a monthly "AI Credits" allowance instead of an unlimited chat tier. Three lessons on what a credit costs, which plan gets you the best rate, and what still doesn't touch your balance.
Claude Code's plans are simple on paper — Pro, Max 5x, Max 20x. What trips people up is a single setting that quietly swaps your plan capacity for a separate, metered API bill.
Skills and decisions
Cross-vendor courses on free tiers, the $20 question, reading the playground, agents without code, and spotting an overpay.
6 courses · 30 lessons
Five short lessons on getting real work out of the free tiers of ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, the free API models, and the exact moment $20 a month stops being a waste.
The $20 tier is a category, not a product. Five lessons to pick the right one for your job, see what the same money buys on the API, and leave the moment it stops earning its keep.
One prompt, a whole model family, real costs. Five lessons on reading a leaderboard, running your own test, and knowing when the cheap model is enough.
Pick the lesson that matches your job. Two real tasks, prompts you can run right here, and a straight answer on which free or $20 tool does it well.
An agent is a chatbot in a loop with permission to act. Five lessons on what that loop does, why every turn of it costs more than the last, and how to keep the bill boring.
Ten people, ten bills, ten verdicts. Each one is a real shape of AI spending; you pick the cheapest option that still does the job, then see the arithmetic.
Yes. Every 101 course on OverpayingForAI is free, has no sign-up, and works on any device. Progress is saved in your browser.
Start with the one you already have access to. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini all have free tiers that cover the basics in these courses. The pricing lessons in each course show when paying is actually worth it.
The price figures are drawn from the same catalogue that powers the site's pricing tracker, so they redraw whenever the catalogue updates. Prose figures are marked as 'at the time of writing'.
About an hour of reading per course, split into eight lessons of six to twelve minutes. Each lesson stands alone, so you can jump straight to pricing, prompting or the API quickstart.
If our calculators helped you cut down on hidden AI wallet leaks, thanks for using them. A tiny fraction of your savings is what keeps our pricing indexes updated daily.
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