Get on a frontier model

What a frontier model is

• A frontier model is the newest, most capable model a lab has released. The front of the line.
• Every lab ships a range: small and fast and cheap, up to large and slower and smartest. The frontier one is the smartest.
• "Frontier" keeps moving. Today's frontier model is next year's baseline. The names change every few months. The idea doesn't.

Why the tier matters

• Free models are usually outdated: an older or smaller version, a step or two behind the current frontier.
• An outdated model is bland, shallow, and more likely to be wrong. A lot of AI underwhelm starts right here.
• The gap from a free model to a frontier model is not a small upgrade. It's the difference between a clever intern and a sharp senior operator.
• Going paid is well worth it. You can't judge what AI can really do until you've seen it run on a frontier model.

It's not just the model

Free costs you more than quality. It also locks out the things that make AI actually useful downstream:

• Connections to your tools. Paid tiers let the AI plug into what you already use: email, calendar, Drive, Slack, Notion. That's where it stops being a chat box and starts doing real work. Most of these are gated behind paid.
• Plugins and skills. The add-ons that extend what the AI can do, and the ability to build your own, are largely paid-only.
• Bigger inputs and web access. Uploading large files, working across long documents, and live web search are limited or off on free.
• You get cut off. Free plans cap how much you can do. Hit the limit and you're locked out, waiting for it to reset, usually right in the middle of something. The technical term is "running out of tokens." In practice, the chat just stops and you wait.

The paid tier is the price of admission

• Frontier models sit behind the paid tier. The free tier is most of the reason you were underwhelmed.
• This is the one place we tell you to spend before you start. Everything else in the program assumes you're on it.

The landscape

The program teaches on Claude. Everything we teach has an equivalent in the other major tools, so if you're committed to one of them, you can follow along. Get on the paid tier of whichever you choose.

Current flagships, mid-2026: Claude Opus, OpenAI's GPT-5.5, Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro. There are also heavy-use tiers ($100 to $200 a month, like Claude Max and ChatGPT Pro). You don't need those to start. The standard ~$20 plan is the right call.