Why do you pay OpenAI $20 when LLM aggregators offer more for less?
Hey everyone,
On paper, third-party LLM aggregators (or "wrappers") seem like an obvious win for users. You get access to multiple top-tier models—like GPT-4, Claude 4.1, and Gemini 2.5 Pro—all under one subscription, often for the same $20/month as ChatGPT, or even less.
And yet, from what I've seen, most power users I know (myself included, until recently) stick to their native subscriptions. We pay OpenAI or Anthropic directly and don't make the switch.
I have a few theories why:
Fear of missing out on new features
Trust & Speed
Inertia - We're just used to the workflow
But I'm curious if I'm missing the bigger picture.
I'm trying to understand what would actually move the needle.
Is it a suite of powerful productivity features that native apps simply don't have (e.g., better organization, visualization tools, workflow automation)?
Is it a radically better, faster, or more customizable UX that makes the native apps feel clumsy?
Is it enterprise-grade security and privacy guarantees that are demonstrably better than the originals?
Or is it something else entirely?
Just genuinely curious to hear how this community sees the landscape. What's your take?
Cheers!
Replies
I heard about them and actually that's something to consider. Could you share more of your own experience in using aggregators and how did it work for you, also, after reading Philip's comment, do you know how often they post those updates?
Mnemosphere AI
@viktorgems
Hey Victor, great question. Happy to share my experience.
To your last point on updates—it's become much less of an issue. Most new models and features are released on their APIs the same day, so good aggregators are usually updated within a few hours. The risk of missing out has really gone down.
Personally, I was a huge fan of aggregators. I use ChatGPT mostly, but found Claude Sonnet's writing quality to be fantastic and Gemini better for other tasks, but I couldn't justify subscribing to all of them. Aggregators gave me the best of all worlds for a single price.
That said, my main frustration was that they were still just a simple chat interface. I wanted to compare models side-by-side in one thread, branch conversations, and take notes as I went.
That's actually why I built Mnemosphere. It adds that suite of productivity tools on top of access to 7+ models. We were on the leaderboard yesterday, so the community seems to be finding it useful. Feel free to give it a look!