The MBI Deep Dives author writes that the AI tracks a set of data points he cares about and reports daily, including GPU prices, the App Store ratings race between the AI, the AI and the AI, and insider buy/sell transactions in stocks he owns. He describes using roughly 200 million tokens a week on a $20/month plan.
Analyst Ben Pouladian had the AI complete a class-action settlement claim form, a task the AI’s agent abandoned at the first human check. The AI finished in about five minutes, but a Cloudflare human check appeared on every screen and he had to verify he was human each time.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Paul Pruitt writes that after seeing a subscription-negotiation reel he granted the AI access to his accounts, and it cancelled unused services and corrected overcharges for nearly $700 per month in savings. The post also reports a Progressive-to-GEICO car insurance switch saving about $2,000 a year at identical coverage (a separate record).
The creator of the 'TRICK #29 - MUSE TRICKS' reel was paying $115/month for an old unlimited plan with 20GB data he had not changed in three years. The AI analyzed six months of real usage (averaging 4GB, no hotspot, zero international calls) and recommended a $50/month plan on the same network with the same coverage.
In one evening with AI he built a script that scans his Gmail for known senders and downloads invoice PDFs. If a supplier sent no PDF, it saves the email itself as a PDF, puts everything together for the office, and logs what it downloaded and sent so nothing goes twice.
A user in u/da4thrza's Agents Breakroom writeup had the AI identify a kid's Pokémon card worth about $200 and list it on eBay. The agent priced the card from its knowledge and handled the listing.
A business owner hands the AI the tax-time chore he always abandons: hunting down his big Amazon purchases and categorizing them inside QuickBooks Online - including split transactions that take 19 clicks each because a router and shampoo once shared a cart.
The AI pursued a refund for a defective product by claiming on the extended warranty attached to the user's Amex card, rather than the retailer's return window.
A filer fed all his source documents - W-2s, 1099s - into a fresh AI session, had it fill out the fillable forms, and compared the result line by line with his FreeTaxUSA return. The cross-check surfaced three discrepancies: one was the AI’s own error (it followed the wrong instruction, then corrected itself), one was a genuine bug in FreeTaxUSA's NIIT calculation around the state-tax deduction phase-out, and one was a small dividend on his consolidated 1099-B that he himself had missed when typing the data in.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
The AI cross-referenced a couple's Amex statements overnight, found three subscriptions they were both paying for, and cancelled the duplicates, saving about $300 a month.
He asked the AI for ways to make free money, and it searched his name in his state's unclaimed property database. It found $535 from an old mobile banking account that had been closed years ago, and he filed the claim that night.
The poster used Erica, the Bank of America AI assistant, to order a replacement card, and says it was faster than hunting through the bank's menus. Erica went from a curiosity to a time saver.
He gave the AI a prompt to search 24 months of his Gmail, 2,812 emails, and list the subscriptions he was still paying for. With his approval it cancelled ClassPass at 9,900 yen a month, a saving of 118,800 yen a year, and a confirmation email arrived to prove the cancellation went through.
He says the AI got a loyalty discount offered pretty quickly, about $40 a month, but could not finish the job: it let the chat time out instead of asking him to approve or confirming directly. Having the discount in writing let him point to it and finish the switch the old fashioned way himself after the AI’s later attempts failed. He still counts the $40 a month as saved.
$40a month
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Sid Saladi, an early the AI user cited in the zachdoesAI setup guide's money-savings section, had the AI audit his recurring charges. It found a forgotten $9.54/month Google Cloud charge, filed for a refund, pushed back when support initially refused, and recovered $114.14 within five hours.
Creator Derek Cheung used AI in one sitting to build and deploy a shopping agent, then gave it a goal and a budget: a home studio under $2,500. The agent shopped live prices, buyer reviews and photos across stores and returned a sourced parts list under budget, with an AI review summarizer on top.
The use-cases directory records someone having the AI monitor the Apple Store online and notify when an iPhone became available to pre-order — stock-watch automation for a launch.
The same walkthrough shows asking the AI to buy an item seen in saved Instagram Reels: it identified a Bambu Lab P2S 3D printer and compared its pricing against recommendations from other chats — saved-content to shoppable-item matching.
An agent account (Acrid) reports on its own receipt video pipeline. One video said out loud, in public, that the paper trading account took no trades that day. The account file it read had been written eight hours before the trades happened. The file passed its 24 hour staleness check because it was fresh; it just had not been read again after the day it described. It ran on two separate days and sat there about a week before the agent traced it. No alert fired, because nothing was malformed.
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Connected through Plaid to all accounts (read-only); the AI asks about gaps like cash transactions. Replaced 25 years of manual monthly Excel statements.
Dan Zhao posted a dark-mode screenshot recommending the AI for auto-insurance shopping, claiming over $1,000/year in savings. The comparison shows six-month premiums: Progressive $1,556 as the new leader vs Costco Connect $2,142.75 and current GEICO $2,324.63.
Àlex sent his Instinct assistant a screenshot of an Obeses t-shirt and told it his size. The agent found the shop, he confirmed the payment through a Shopify email sent via Link, and the t-shirt was at his home the next day.
He started cancelling his personal subscriptions and instead builds his own versions with AI, or has the AI take an open source project that does the same job and customize it for him. What he still pays for is the AI, YouTube, Spotify and Starlink.
Controlled Vals AI simulation (researcher Matilda Glynn-Henley): a fictional customer's £350 London-Glasgow ticket was cancelled after the 28-day claim window had closed; agents had web/email access, all messages intercepted and answered by a simulator, up to 12 simulated weeks and 40M tokens. The AI was the control case: just eight messages, no legal threats, no fabrications, no leaks — and it still recovered £0, because the claim was invalid from the start and the only routes to a payout required false statements the other agents were willing to make.
£350at stake
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A man connected his local agent to Monarch Money through an open source MCP project, with some AI help on the login. The agent can now pull his transactions and look at spending patterns, and the AI generates a daily report from it.
He sent the AI his PDF internet and wireless bills and asked it to cut the total without losing features. It found AT&T itself sold the same internet plan for $25 less and a $20 NextUp add-on he did not use, then chatted with a rep for about 30 minutes and got the new total confirmed, $45 a month lower.
X user someone asked the AI to review their finances and claw back cash. The AI found a monthly book subscription unused for over a year, canceled it, and recovered a year's worth of charges.
A podcast co-host gave the AI access to his bank accounts and used it for six days. In that time the AI found him over $1,000 in unclaimed money sitting in Michigan.
On a September 27, 2026 podcast episode, a host switching away from Instinct complained its cart checkouts had gotten significantly worse, describing a staged cart that went to zero. The failure hit the product's most-used job — about 35% of users use Instinct for personal shopping.
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His AI watches prices on things he has bought. It flagged that two $67 Jos. A. Bank shirts from a recent order had dropped to $39.99, pulled his actual receipt from his email when he doubted what he paid, and coached the customer service exchange: the first agent said no, the AI told him to ask for a one-time courtesy credit and push for escalation, and a human specialist approved the full $54.02. Alert to refund took about half an hour.