What it costs — and what it hangs on
Everyone talks about speed. Almost nobody talks about the invoice and the dependency, and those decide whether this still holds in three years.
The price is known today, not tomorrow
I pay around 200 euros a month for the subscription I work with. For me that pays off easily. But I have no contract saying it will still do so next year: prices rise, plans get restructured, quotas get cut. Anyone basing their costing on it is costing on somebody else's ground.
The model under you gets swapped
What works reliably today can behave differently after a model change. That is why my knowledge lives in a system rather than in a chat history — a system survives the swap, a conversation does not. It is also the answer to "which AI should I use": the less that answer matters, the better off you are.
And it hangs on your machine
Tools, credentials and configuration sit locally. If the disk dies, it is all gone for a while. So: backups — and not only of the website, but of what you built yourself. Precisely the part nobody thinks of, because it looks like tooling rather than work.
Without guardrails an AI takes a site apart
Write access plus one misread instruction is a deleted post type. Test system, its own user, few permissions, a backup first. That is not distrust — it is the same reflex as before a big plugin update.