Curiosity and bad financial decisions led me to run an experiment. Same prompt (social sciences, qualitative methods), 5 different companies, 5 price points. The Results:
- $200: Unusable. Clearly copy-pasted from a free online repository. Random citations that didn't exist. 0/10.
- $500: Decent English, terrible content. No understanding of my methodology. Basically a blog post.
- $900: Actually okay? Writer asked clarifying questions. Citations were real. Needed structural edits but the core was there.
- $1,500: Slightly better than the $900 version. Marginal gains. Not worth the extra $600.
- $2,000: Almost indistinguishable from the $1,500 version. Diminishing returns hit hard.