I pay for all three. Here's when each one actually earns its subscription.
Claude
Best at: Complex reasoning, long refactors, architecture decisions, debugging multi-file issues
Worst at: Quick questions (overkill), being available when you need it most (rate limits)
When I reach for it: When the problem requires actual thinking. If I need to reason through a system design or understand why a race condition is happening, Claude is significantly better than the others.
Real example: Refactoring a 2000-line React component into a clean service layer. Claude held the full context and made correct decisions about what to extract. ChatGPT lost the thread after 3 messages.
ChatGPT
Best at: Speed, breadth of knowledge, quick lookups, brainstorming
Worst at: Deep reasoning on complex code, maintaining context over long conversations
When I reach for it: Quick questions. 'What's the syntax for X?' 'Draft me a commit message.' Anything where speed matters more than depth.
Gemini
Best at: Massive context windows, processing long documents, fallback when others are limited
Worst at: Precision on complex coding tasks
When I reach for it: When I need to analyze an entire codebase at once, or when Claude and ChatGPT are both rate-limited.
The Actual Problem
Using three AI tools means managing three sets of rate limits. The cognitive overhead is real.
The biggest issue: knowing which tool has capacity at any given moment. I've lost count of how many times I opened Claude for a complex task only to find I'd burned through my limit earlier.
I use TokenBar to track this. It shows real-time usage across all three (plus Cursor, Copilot, and 15+ others) in my macOS menu bar. $4.99 one-time, runs locally. The pace intelligence tells me if I should switch tools before I actually hit the wall.
My Recommendation
If you can only afford one: Claude. The reasoning gap is real.
If you can afford two: Claude + ChatGPT. Covers depth and speed.
If you can afford all three: Get all three + TokenBar to manage them.
Which AI tools are in your daily rotation?
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