The $200 Creativity Test: If You Can't Generate Value, You're Failing

Last weekend, someone in the AI Junto—a community of elite AI practitioners I'd put in the top 1% of users globally—asked a question that stopped me cold:

"Is the $200/month pro subscription really worth it?"

I had to read it twice. Here's someone who's been experimenting with AI for over a year, someone who regularly shares brilliant use cases, someone who should know better—and they're questioning whether frontier AI capabilities are worth $200.

That's when it hit me: if our most advanced users are hesitating over $200, we've got a creativity problem, not a cost problem.

The Subscription Psychology Trap

Here's what's happening: most people have exactly two categories of recurring expenses. Either we pay $10-20 for Netflix or ChatGPT, or we pay hundreds for a car payment or thousands for rent. There's literally nothing else in that $200 range.

So when someone sees that price tag, they immediately anchor to other subscriptions. "Wow, I would never spend $200 on coffee, so I can't do this." But it's not a coffee subscription. It's not even a ChatGPT subscription.

It's cognitive augmentation.

The real calculation isn't "$200 vs. Netflix." It's "$200 vs. your monthly rate" or "$200 vs. the monthly rate of the next best available human." When you frame it correctly, it becomes absurd NOT to subscribe.

My Own Confession

I can relate to the hesitation because I made the same mistake. I actually didn't subscribe to Pro for months because I didn't think it was relevant to me. It was only after hearing a founder I admire talk about the "no-brainer" math that I started thinking in terms of capping my downside.

At worst, I thought, I'd lose $200—not nothing, but not an insurmountable loss either. Even if I decided it wasn't worth it, I'd gain invaluable experience with capabilities that weren't available to me before.

Here's what happened in my first week: I found myself shoulder-to-shoulder with the CEO of a multi-billion dollar private business, tasked with evaluating international expansion. We needed a comprehensive marketing and competitive analysis strategy briefing for the potential new market entry.

What would have taken me three days to compile—even with a paid ChatGPT Plus account—we assembled in 30 minutes with Pro's reasoning capabilities. Thirty minutes. We're talking market sizing, competitive landscape mapping, go-to-market strategy options, risk assessment—the works.

When I presented the analysis, the CEO's mind was blown. Not just by the speed, but by the comprehensiveness and strategic depth we'd achieved in half an hour.

The boost to that relationship alone paid for the subscription for the year ahead.

The $200 Creativity Test

Which brings me to my new favorite diagnostic: if you cannot find ways to generate more than $200 of value from frontier AI over the course of an entire month, you're failing a basic creativity test.

This isn't about AI's limitations—it's about yours.

This isn't about optimizing your workflow anymore. People who can't generate $200 of AI value will be unemployable within 18 months.

We're already seeing the early signals. Wade Foster, the CEO of Zapier, just posted that AI fluency is now a recruiting standard for new employees. They're at the leading edge, but this is a sign of things to come. The companies that survive the next few years will be the ones whose people can demonstrate tangible AI-powered value creation.

I would honestly treat this as an employment standard right now. If someone cannot generate demonstrable value from the most powerful cognitive tool ever created, what does that say about their strategic thinking capacity? What about their creativity?

Here's a simple way to find your $200 of value right now:

Copy this prompt into your favorite frontier model (reminder: you should be using a paid account for the best reasoning capabilities. Even for this prompt, friends don’t let friends use free AI…):

"You're an AI workflow optimization expert. I want you to interview me about my current work processes, daily responsibilities, and biggest time drains. Ask me 5-7 questions, one at a time, to understand my role and workflows. After you have enough context, recommend the 3 highest-value ways I could use AI to augment my work, with specific prompts and implementation steps for each recommendation."

Let the AI interview you. Answer honestly. I guarantee you'll find multiple pathways to $200+ in monthly value within 15 minutes.

The Win-Win Reality

Here's the beautiful thing about this challenge: you literally cannot lose.

Either:

• You create demonstrable value at work such that you get reimbursed (and likely promoted), or

• You work at an organization that doesn't value your professional expansion enough to reward it, so you recoup the gains personally by going home earlier and working less effectively with better tools.

Either way, easily worth $200. Your downside is capped at the subscription cost and the time you dedicate to experimentation. Your upside is nearly incalculable.

The Organizational Absurdity

Want to see how backwards our thinking has become? I recently watched an organization spend eight months—eight months—trying to decide whether to roll out enterprise AI subscriptions. Not even pro accounts. Basic enterprise licenses.

I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation of their cost of AI inaction at roughly $20 million per month. (You can read more about the original inspiration behind the calculation here.) That's like losing three major clients every month because your expense policy isn't clear. (24 clients and counting...)

So they're being extremely careful about $20/month licenses while hemorrhaging $20 million monthly in unrealized productivity gains, competitive advantage, and innovation capacity.

It's penny-wise, pound-foolish thinking taken to its logical extreme.

Your Next Move

Stop treating AI subscriptions like entertainment expenses. Start treating them like the professional tools they are.

Right now:

1. Run the interview prompt above with a frontier model

2. Calculate your hourly rate and multiply by the hours AI could save you monthly

3. If the math works (spoiler: it will), upgrade today

4. Set a 30-day creativity challenge for yourself: document every dollar of value you generate

If you're an organizational leader still "evaluating options," ask yourself: what's the cost of your evaluation process? How much value are you forgoing while you deliberate?

The $200 creativity test isn't really about the money. It's about whether you have the imagination to see what's possible and the initiative to act on it.

If you can't generate $200 of value from the most powerful cognitive tool in human history, the problem isn't the tool.

Related: Join the AI Junto
Related: Don’t Keep the AI Expert Waiting

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