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Poe, the best AI chatbot portal

Preview:

At the end of an article last month, I recommended 11 bots I like. Each has a free tier that allows you to use some of their less advanced features. Most require an account. All of these bots combine web search and AI into a package along with some thinking. These are limited versions of what you could get with their paid accounts. In general, they examine your question and determine which model they should use to most expediently answer your question. They are all useful.

A different way

But, more and more, I've been using the free version of Poe instead of those other models. Poe is not really a model. It is a portal to over a thousand models. Poe offers a generous free plan of 3,000 points a day. I've been able to live with that, but I recently subscribed.

Poe is a gateway to Claude, ChatGPT, Mistral, Gemini, and others, all within a single interface. It’s user-friendly and makes it easy to compare responses and capabilities. Its bots are categorized into about 20 groups like Image generation, Audio generation, Popular, New, Learning, Search, Programming and many more.

Here's their home screen.

There are more categories, but you get the idea.

Over 70 of its bots are official. Official bots are:

1. Operated by Poe
2. Access major models by major tech companies
3. Passed Poe evaluation.

It also offers user-created bots. There are over a thousand user-created bots that access major platforms to produce some kinds of restricted results, like History, or Funny, or Therapy. The users who created those bots get a small fee when they are accessed.

They provide an App-creator tool to walk you through app creation by just filling out a form. So, if you had a particular type of research you wanted to engage in, you could tailor a bot for that specific purpose and not need to continually re-create it. This is a popular app for them. For example, I sometimes use a less expensive version of Gemini and have it think and reason more and search the web for newer information. This gives me more in-depth answers for fewer points than if I used a newer version of Gemini. I can save this configuration as my own bot.

If you get lost in the maze, then clicking on the word Poe in the upper left, will return you to the main home dashboard.

Poe offers apps for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android as well as web access. All of these are linked, so queries on your phone will appear for follow-up on your computer.

The advantages of a portal over a single platform

You can choose from many models

Poe offers 4-8 different models of every major AI engine. They also offer others you might not know about.

You can compare answers

After you get an answer, you can try another bot and compare their answers. After answering, Poe usually offers follow-up questions and also alternate bots that could provide another slant on the answer. This is particularly useful if your bot can't answer the question or provides a dubious or biased answer.

You can feed the response into another category of bot

After getting a text answer, you can feed that answer directly into a text to speech bot to read the answer to you. Or, if you create an image you like, you could feed that directly into an animation bot.

Having so many different bots in one place and having full access to all the features of each is amazing. If you had it edit some text you wrote, you could feed that text into another bot to create images for it.

Understanding the basics

All the major chatbots, like Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Le Chat, Grok and Gemini, have multiple sub-models. They have this year's newest and greatest and last year's not so great, but still good. They can think harder or less hard. They can scour the web or rely on their previous training. It is cheaper to just use their already developed knowledge base without searching the web and reading numerous new web pages. If you don't need current information, their enormous knowledge base will bring up an answer quicker and cheaper.

Furthermore, different models are designed to be quick and give short answers, or slower and more thorough answers. They can also be tweaked to be better at images or video. Essentially, each major AI version comes with a built-in configuration file to adjust how much it reasons, how fast, how deeply to search the web, if at all, and others.

Poe offers many official variations of all major bot engines. Using ChatGPT as an example, it is possible that ChatGPT could charge 1,000 times as much to process a complex query with their most advanced engine as they'd charge for their least advanced engine. In fact, they could charge 100 times as much for the same model configured differently, to think and reason more deeply and take more time. They often give the quicker models descriptive names like "Turbo” or "Flash”. These are the same version, but configured differently.

This is why the AI portals offer points or credits, which you use with your choice of engines. They cannot offer unlimited access. They'd go broke or have to charge so much no one would subscribe.

Poe's pricing plans

Poe and the other AI Portals have you use points or credits, which you can use for any bot you like. Older quick models will give you answers for very few points, while bigger, newer models can be very expensive. Essentially, it is like buying gas. If you are driving a big SUV and hauling your yacht, it costs more for gas than if you drive a minibike. Most of the free plans offer you the minibike version of their AI. It is quick, and useful, but more prone to error and not particularly deep.

Poe, simply gives you the choice of models. You even get to stipulate favorites. In addition to over 70 models available on the free plan, there are even more models in the paid plans.

Poe offers several pricing plans, including massive ones for corporations. Here are the ones that could be of interest to my readers. However, the free plan is very generous and will work for most of my clients.

Here is an example of how varied your resource demands can be. Using Poe's Assistant, a small query might be 5 or 10 points. However, today I used Poe's assistant for three complex queries. For each query, I had it read my article and write a meta description and meta keywords to be used for Google Search. Then write my preview of the article. So, I input each of my articles and requested very specific results. Its previews were better than the ones I write. I hope you like them. Because of the size of the information I gave it (entire articles) and the complexity of the three tasks I required for each article, those used about 270 points each, not 5 for a simple question like, "Give me three simple ways to cook a 6 ounce marinated pork loin chop.”

Whatever plan you choose, you can always check your available points by hitting Settings on the left panel. Then look in the section on Points. To see what each query cost, under Points, click View points history.

Free plan

The free plan offers 3,000 points per day. Around 5pm, it resets to 3,000. Points don't carry over to the next day. What can you do for 3,000 points? Poe has a nice Assistant model and a Web Search model as well. These two are like the free versions of Claude, ChatGPT, etc. They are quick and work well for most usage. They are so cheap, you could use them all day and never need to pay for anything if your queries are fairly simple.

Here's what you can expect from other models within their free plan. This is per day for your 3,000 points.

• 250 standard-size queries to Gemini-2.0-Flash,
• 15 to Claude-Sonnet-3.5,
• 7 to GPT-5 or
• 4 to DeepSeek-R1.

As you can see, newer models that use more resources and search more websites and reason more deeply cost a lot more than older models that think less.

$4.99/month or $49.99/year

The first step-up is their $5/month plan. This offers 10,000 points per day. The points do not roll over. So figure:

• 830 standard-size queries to Gemini-2.0-Flash,
• 51 to Claude-Sonnet-3.5,
• 27 to GPT-5 or
• 16 to DeepSeek-R1.

I think this is an incredible bargain. This could be useful if you occasionally needed more advanced models, wanted to compare models, or generate many images.

$19.99/month or $200/year

For $20/month or $200/year, you get 1 million points per month. Wow. If you require it, this is fantastic. This is the plan I purchased. Essentially, its 1 million points is about equal to what $30 would buy you if you were to buy them directly from the individual product makers.

A Personal Note

I do nearly all my AI queries now using either the Poe Assistant model or the Poe Web Search model. They give me the answers I require quickly and for a tiny number of points. For example, today I had questions back and forth regarding Roth IRAs and also about xAI's new AI-5 chip. Each topic required about 4 queries as I kept asking more and more in-depth questions. Both of these were answered wonderfully, and the total cost for all 8 interactions was about 60 points. Given that you get 3,000 each day for free, I wouldn't need to pay anything. But, I like the ability to use other models if I really need deep research or to use different models for making images for this newsletter, all in one place.

Alternatives

There are two other portals I've used that are worth a look and that you might prefer. Just because I prefer Poe doesn't necessarily mean you will.

• ChatHub: I like this, and they will split the screen and simultaneously use multiple AI models. The problem with it is that you will quickly run out of advanced queries with their free plan, and unlike Poe, which replenishes your points daily, they do it monthly. So, in one session, I can run out of my free credits in a single back and forth query and follow-up. Remember, if you query 3 bots simultaneously, you'll pay for 3 queries, not one. One follow-up query, can max out the free version for the rest of the month. Their least expensive plan is $19 per month. They offer over 30 AI models. I didn't give this one a fair shot because of the limitations of the free version.
• 1Min: This is just personal, but I find the interface confusing and the points run out quickly. I can easily use over 1 million of their points in a couple of weeks. They offer a decent free plan, and the first paid plan is $8 per month. Their credits do roll over. I find it harder to switch between my favorite bots because I haven't found a favorites place to store the ones I actually use. However, you can sometimes find super deals for 1Min. I got a lifetime pro plan for $30. But, I bought Poe anyway.