ASU Students Are Paying $20/mo for ChatGPT. Here's How to Get 50 AI Tools for $8.

If you're an ASU student in 2026, there's a good chance you're paying for at least one AI subscription. Probably ChatGPT Plus. Maybe Claude Pro for coding. Possibly Midjourney for a design class. Each one running $20-30/mo, each one doing one thing, each one hitting you on the first of the month like clockwork.

Here's what nobody in your group chat is telling you: you're dramatically overpaying.

The $200/mo AI problem at ASU

Let's do some honest math on what ASU students are actually spending on AI tools right now.

ChatGPT Plus: $20/mo — the default. Almost everyone has this or has had it. You need GPT-5.2 for anything serious, and the free tier throttles you mid-conversation right when you need it most.

Claude Pro: $20/mo — the engineering and CS students swear by this one. Better at code, better at long documents, better at not hallucinating. But now you're at $40/mo for two chatbots that overlap 80% in what they do.

Midjourney: $30/mo — if you're in Herberger or any design-adjacent program, you've probably subscribed at least once. Maybe you're still paying for it even though you used it twice last month.

Grammarly Premium: $12/mo — half the campus has this running. The AI rewrite feature is actually good but it's another subscription on the pile.

Perplexity Pro: $20/mo — the research students love this one. Cited answers, academic papers, real sources. Worth it for research-heavy courses but that's another $20.

Add a Notion AI sub ($10/mo) and maybe a Quillbot or Jasper trial you forgot to cancel and you're looking at $100-200/mo on AI tools alone. On a college budget. While eating dining hall food.

The median ASU student is carrying 3-4 AI subscriptions simultaneously. Most of them overlap in functionality. Almost none of them are necessary at full price.

What ASU students actually need AI for

The AI tools you need depend entirely on what you're studying. Here's a realistic breakdown by ASU college:

Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering

This is where AI usage is highest on campus and where it arguably makes the most sense. Engineering students use Claude and ChatGPT for debugging code, explaining algorithms, working through problem sets, and understanding concepts their professor covered in 10 minutes that needed 40.

The key tools: a strong coding AI (Claude is currently the best at this), something for technical writing, and occasionally image generation for diagrams and presentations.

W.P. Carey School of Business

Business students live in ChatGPT. Case study analysis, financial modeling help, presentation outlines, market research summaries, email drafting for internship applications. The use cases are broad but none of them require the most expensive AI tier.

Perplexity is underrated here — for market research and competitive analysis, getting cited sources beats ChatGPT's tendency to sound confident about numbers it invented.

Walter Cronkite School of Journalism

Journalism students need research tools above all else. Perplexity's Academic mode is built for this — cited answers, real sources, verifiable information. ChatGPT is useful for brainstorming angles but dangerous for facts.

The rule of thumb in Cronkite: AI for structure, humans for truth.

Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts

Design students need visual AI tools — Midjourney for concept art, Flux and Stable Diffusion for iteration, image editors for refinement. These are expensive individually ($30/mo for Midjourney alone) and most students only use them in bursts around project deadlines.

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Research synthesis is the big one. Reading 15 papers for a literature review takes days. AI can summarize, extract key arguments, and help you find connections between sources. Claude handles long documents well. Perplexity finds sources you'd miss.

Every student, regardless of major

Study guide generation. Flashcard creation. Email drafting (to professors, to internship contacts, to that TA you need to explain why you missed section). Resume and cover letter editing. Explaining concepts in simpler terms when the textbook reads like it was written to be intentionally confusing.

The .edu discount nobody talks about

Here's where it gets interesting.

LazySusan has a student plan: $99/year. That's $8.25/mo with a valid .edu email. For that price you get access to over 50 AI models, including every single tool mentioned above.

Let that sink in. ChatGPT Plus is $20/mo for one model. LazySusan's student plan is $8.25/mo for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Midjourney, Perplexity, ElevenLabs, Sora, Runway, Grok, DeepSeek, and 40+ more.

The math:

| What you're paying now | What it costs with LazySusan | |---|---| | ChatGPT Plus: $20/mo | Student plan: $8.25/mo | | Claude Pro: $20/mo | (included) | | Midjourney: $30/mo | (included) | | Perplexity Pro: $20/mo | (included) | | Total: $90/mo ($1,080/yr) | Total: $8.25/mo ($99/yr) |

You save over $980/year. That's textbook money. That's groceries. That's a spring break trip.

The 10 AI tools every ASU student should be using

Not all AI tools are created equal. Here's the definitive list for ASU students, ranked by usefulness:

1. ChatGPT (GPT-5.2) — Your daily driver. General Q&A, writing help, brainstorming, study guides. Everyone knows this one. It's good at everything, great at nothing specific.

2. Claude (Opus/Sonnet) — The tool Fulton engineering students are sleeping on. Best-in-class at code, long documents (it handles 200+ page PDFs), and nuanced analysis where ChatGPT tends to give you the generic answer. If you're writing anything over 2,000 words, start here.

3. Perplexity (Academic Mode) — Your research assistant. Unlike ChatGPT, every answer comes with citations to real sources. Academic mode specifically searches scholarly papers and journals. Cronkite students: this is your new best friend. Everyone writing research papers: same.

4. Gemini — Google's model integrates with real-time search, YouTube summaries, and handles massive context windows. Great for anything that needs current information. Also handles images and can analyze charts/graphs from your textbook.

5. Midjourney (V7) — Still the best image generator for artistic quality. Design students, marketing students, anyone who needs visual content for presentations. Through LazySusan you skip the Discord hassle entirely — just type a prompt.

6. ElevenLabs — Text-to-speech with 20 professional voices. Record presentation voiceovers, create audio study materials, generate voicemails for your internship applications. Sounds human, not robotic.

7. Sora & Veo 3 — Video generation. Create explainer videos, animate concepts, produce content for marketing classes. Sora (OpenAI) and Veo 3 (Google) are both included.

8. Grok — xAI's model has less guardrails than ChatGPT, which means it's more willing to engage with controversial or edgy topics for debate prep, philosophy papers, and political science assignments where you need the actual argument, not a sanitized version.

9. DeepSeek — Specialized in math and logical reasoning. If you're in a quantitative course (statistics, calculus, econometrics), this handles step-by-step mathematical proofs better than any other model.

10. Multi-Chat — Not a model but a feature. Run up to 6 AI models side by side with the same prompt. When you need to compare perspectives or find the best answer, this saves you from opening 6 tabs and copy-pasting the same question.

How to use AI without getting flagged at ASU

This matters. ASU's Academic Integrity Policy applies to AI the same way it applies to copying from a friend. Here's how to stay clean:

Use AI as a research tool, not a ghostwriter. There's a massive difference between asking Claude to explain a concept so you understand it better and asking ChatGPT to write your essay. The first one makes you smarter. The second one makes you dependent.

Always disclose when AI helped. Most ASU professors appreciate honesty. A simple note — "I used ChatGPT to brainstorm my outline and Perplexity to find sources" — goes a long way. Hiding AI use is what gets you in trouble, not the use itself.

Use citation-based tools. Perplexity Academic mode and Lazy AI both provide inline citations. This means your research has real sources attached, not AI-generated ones. Your professor can verify them. You can verify them. Nobody gets burned by a hallucinated citation.

Check your course syllabus. Every ASU course sets its own AI policy. Some ban it entirely. Some encourage it. Read the syllabus before assuming anything. When in doubt, email the professor.

Add your own thinking. The easiest way to fail an AI check isn't Turnitin — it's a professor who knows your writing. If your essay suddenly reads like a polished New York Times op-ed when your previous work was casual and full of voice, that's a red flag. Use AI for structure and research, then write in your own voice.

Keep your conversations. If you're ever questioned about AI use, having the actual AI conversation history shows exactly how you used it — as a research tool, not a paper mill. LazySusan saves all conversation history automatically across every tool.

How to set it up

• 1. Go to lazysusan.ai/signup
• 2. Select the Student plan ($99/year)
• 3. Sign up with your ASU .edu email
• 4. Start using 50+ AI tools immediately

The whole process takes about 2 minutes. Your .edu email is verified automatically.

Stop overpaying

You're at ASU to learn, not to fund OpenAI's server costs. Every dollar you spend on a redundant AI subscription is a dollar you're not spending on things that actually matter.

One subscription. Fifty-plus AI tools. $8.25/mo. The math works out no matter which college you're in.

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Ready to stop overpaying for AI? LazySusan's student plan gives ASU students 50+ AI tools for $99/year. That's $8.25/mo with your .edu email — cheaper than ChatGPT Plus alone. Get started here.