The AI market just split into three competing camps — and if you're running a small business, that split is actually good news. Prices are dropping, models are getting better, and the one thing you need to watch isn't capability. It's lock-in.
Nate B Jones published his exact monthly AI spend at three tiers: $20, $60, and $200. Meanwhile, Cursor — an AI coding tool — just got banned from a major provider, stranding customers who'd built their entire workflow inside one ecosystem.
Here's the practical framework for sizing your AI budget, and the one rule that keeps you safe no matter which camp wins.
The Three Tiers: What You Get at Each Price Point
$20/month — The Solo Operator
This covers one person who needs AI for writing, email drafting, basic research, and light automation. Think: a freelance consultant, a solo real estate agent, a one-person bookkeeping practice.
What $20 buys:
- One frontier model subscription (ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, or equivalent)
- Enough capacity for daily drafting, summarizing, and brainstorming
- No automation infrastructure — you're manually prompting
What it doesn't buy:
- Multi-step workflows that run while you sleep
- Integration with your CRM, email, or scheduling tools
- Any redundancy if your provider has an outage or changes terms
The move: Pick one provider. Use it daily. Don't customize your life around it — keep your data exportable.
$60/month — The Small Team (3–10 people)
This is where AI starts doing real work, not just assisting it. A small law firm, a dental practice, a landscaping company with a handful of office staff.
What $60 buys:
- One frontier model for judgment calls (pricing, client communication, strategy)
- One fast/cheap model for routine work (email triage, data entry, first drafts)
- A basic automation platform that can chain tasks together
- Enough headroom to experiment with one or two specialized tools
The key insight: you're running two tiers. Cheap model for the checklist, big model for the judgment call. Flash-class models handle 80% of daily tasks at a fraction of the cost. The frontier model handles the 20% where accuracy matters — pricing quotes, client-facing emails, hiring decisions.
The move: Split your work. Never send a $0.01 task to a $0.10 model. Never trust a $0.01 model with a $10,000 decision.
$200/month — The Growing Business (10–20 people)
At this level, AI is an employee — or several. A mid-size accounting firm, a property management company, a growing agency.
What $200 buys:
- Frontier model access for the whole team
- Dedicated cheap-tier processing for automated workflows
- A full automation platform with monitoring, error handling, and audit trails
- Budget for one specialized vertical tool (legal AI, medical AI, etc.)
- Redundancy: a backup provider so one outage doesn't stop work
This is also where the lock-in rule becomes critical, because you have enough infrastructure that switching hurts.
The One Rule: Never Let One Provider Hold Both Your Memory and Your Files
The Cursor situation laid this bare. When a provider bans your tool, everything built inside that ecosystem grinds to a halt. For a solo operator, that's annoying. For a 15-person business, that's a crisis.
The rule is simple:
- Your memory (conversation history, learned preferences, accumulated context) and your files (documents, data, workflow templates) must never live in the same vendor's ecosystem.
- If ChatGPT holds your conversations, your documents live in Google Drive, Notion, or a local folder — not in ChatGPT's file storage.
- If Claude is your daily driver, your business data lives somewhere you control — not in Anthropic's cloud.
Why this matters: if you ever need to switch providers, you lose either your memory OR your files, but never both. That's recoverable. Losing both simultaneously means starting from zero.
The Practical Setup at Each Tier
$20 setup:
- Subscribe to one frontier model
- Store all business documents in Google Drive or Dropbox
- Use the model's export features monthly
- Never rely on provider-specific plugins you can't replace
$60 setup:
- Frontier model subscription for judgment tasks
- Flash-class model for routine work
- Automation tool (Zapier, Make, or OpenClaw) as the orchestration layer
- All persistent data in your own storage, not in any AI tool's silo
$200 setup:
- Primary and backup frontier model subscriptions
- Dedicated cheap-tier processing for automations
- Self-hosted or vendor-neutral automation platform
- All business data in infrastructure you control
- Monthly audit: check that no single provider holds both memory and files
The Bottom Line
The provider war means better AI for less money. That's the upside. The downside is that each camp wants you locked in — your conversations, your files, your workflows, all inside their walls.
Budget for the tier that matches your team size. Split cheap and expensive models. And above all, keep your memory and your files in separate hands.
That one rule costs nothing to follow and everything to ignore.
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