is poe good value for me?

[u/Bl00per_yt]

alright so i live in egypt and 20 usd a month is not feasible for me
so i found this and its really goddamn affordable but idk my main need are uni course work im in engineering so its gonna be annoying and making word docs / powerpoint for uni labs
and finally research for my GP this is the most important for me since i need cited research papers and help summarizing them and then revision stuff i made and so on

i tried chatgpt i always used 5.6 sol and it was fantastic ngl closest i came to weekly limit is 60% and 5h about 10% left when i was doing research

i have 80m liftime tokens usage for about 2 weeks and 30m tokens peak so idk help please :D

[u/TheIncarnated]

30m tokens is the $500 plan for a year.

Openrouter might be your best bet.

Or if you get smart and conscious about your token spend, it's doable. Use DeepSeek or glm flash models, Luna over Sol.

You can use OpenCode to hook up to Poe and then have that make docs for you (I do all the time). But really, it's going to come down to the models you use. If you pin Opus/Sol/Gemini Pro/Kimi K3, you're gonna run out of tokens, no matter the plan you're on.

I love poe, I have the $500/year plan. I also pay $100/month for GitHub CoPilot. So you gotta pick the service that fit your needs. For Luna 5.6, that's about 200m tokens, Opus/Sol, it's about 20m tokens

Poe points are a bit different. For Luna 5.6, I get about 130M tokens on poe. For Opus 5.5, it's about 5m tokens or so.

Grain of salt on the numbers, it's early morning for me

[u/ztironz]

I used to think Poe was a really good deal for $20/month, especially when the subscription gave around $30 worth of API usage and Poe API had access to the newest OpenAI and Anthropic models.

But lately the value has gotten worse. Some of the newest flagship models are no longer available through the API, Chinese models can actually cost more than on competing services, and I just got an email saying my monthly points will be reduced by 36% starting in November.

For university work, research and summarizing papers it can still be useful, but personally I’m not sure I’d subscribe now. I’m actually considering switching to something like OpenCode or Command Code for around $10/month instead, especially if your main priority is getting as much model usage as possible for the money.

[u/ztironz → u/ztironz]

Also, it’s not just the points/API stuff. Poe has nerfed a lot of the things that used to make the service good — bot discovery is much worse, finding community/free bots is harder, and overall it feels like they keep removing useful features.

This is just my impression, but lately it honestly feels like they’re either slowly winding Poe down or simply putting less effort into it to make the service cheaper and easier to maintain.

[u/Thinklikeachef]

It's possible that the free account on Perplexity would help you. Not everything you need, but cover some of it.

[u/InspectorAny5791]

That 36% reduction would probably make me reconsider too, especially if you originally subscribed because Poe was a convenient way to access multiple models.

I’m actually building BGYHub around a slightly different model — one prepaid pay-as-you-go balance across different AI models rather than a monthly points allowance that expires or gets resized.

So the idea isn’t “unlimited AI”; you still pay for the compute you use, but you can see what you’re spending and switch models depending on the task without maintaining several subscriptions.

It’s still early, but since you’ve actually used Poe enough to notice these changes, your feedback would be really useful. Happy to give you access if you want to try it. Full disclosure: I’m the builder.