Every AI overlay has to buy tokens from somewhere. The question is whether you buy them, or the app buys them and resells them to you with a cap and a margin baked in.
Competitor pricing and limits below are quoted from each company’s own public pricing page, checked on 29 July 2026. Prices and caps change — check theirs before deciding.
If an app's subscription price includes the AI itself, the company is buying tokens wholesale from Anthropic, OpenAI or Google and selling them to you at a markup, because that's how they cover the API bill and stay in business. A flat monthly price attached to unmetered usage is a bet they can't make forever — someone using it eight hours a day would cost them more in tokens than the subscription brings in. So the cap shows up somewhere: a message ceiling, a credit ceiling, or a much higher price tier that assumes lighter use.
You can see the shape of it in what's public today. Interview Coder's Monthly Pro is $299/mo and still capped at 1,000 credits a month. Ofradr's tiers are metered directly by time and message count — Pro at $30/mo is 90 minutes and 100 messages per session, and only its $120/mo Ultra tier removes the limits (see our Ofradr breakdown). None of that is a company being stingy; it's the arithmetic of reselling a metered product at a flat price.
GhostNote doesn't resell AI tokens at all. You connect your own Anthropic, OpenAI or Google API key, or point it at Ollama running locally, and pick from 47 named models. Your questions go straight to that provider under your own account. GhostNote's $11.99/mo (or $250 once) pays for the app — the window, the invisibility, the hotkeys — not a token markup, which is also why there's no usage cap to hit.
The actual AI cost is smaller than people expect. At published list prices checked on 29 July 2026, for a typical exchange of roughly 2,000 tokens in and 500 out, $5 buys about 2,700 answers on Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, 1,100 on Claude Haiku 4.5, 370 on Claude Sonnet 5, or 220 on Claude Opus 5. Gemini Flash also has a genuine free tier, so a light user can run GhostNote without paying any AI provider at all. And with Ollama, nothing goes over the network in the first place — see how offline mode works.
| Bring your own key (GhostNote) | Bundled subscription (typical reseller) | |
|---|---|---|
| Who sets the AI price | The provider, directly | The app, marked up |
| Usage cap | None — provider's own rate limits only | Credits, minutes, or messages per month |
| Can run for near-$0 | Yes — free-tier models or Ollama | No, price is fixed regardless of use |
| Model choice | 47 models, named | Usually fixed by the vendor |
| Setup | One-time: paste a key or install Ollama | None — works immediately |
| Bills to track | Two: the app, and your AI provider | One |
This is not a free lunch. Bring-your-own-key means a setup step — you have to go create an API key with a provider and paste it in, which is a five-minute task but it is a task, and it's one more account to have. It also means a second bill: your AI provider will invoice you separately from GhostNote, in whatever amount your actual usage adds up to. For most people at list-price rates that lands well under a dollar a month, but it's not the single, predictable line item a bundled subscription gives you, and if you'd rather never think about a second invoice, that's a legitimate reason to prefer a bundled tool instead.
If you want the app to just work without touching a provider dashboard, and the reseller's cap is generous enough for how you actually use it, paying the markup is a reasonable trade for that simplicity. See the full comparison or check usage details for how GhostNote's own free tier works before deciding.
Free plan, no card required. 15 minutes a month, every feature working — enough to try the key setup once and see what it actually costs you.