Poe AI Compute Points Explained

In this article, we’ll explain how Poe Ai compute points are spent, and we’ll try out some of the various text bots in Poe.

In Poe Ai , ‘compute points’ are used to determine how much you can actually use these AI tools each day.

To try out the text-bots in Poe, we’ll give each bot the same 1-sentence prompt:

“Please write a 5-page book about how to be safe on the Australian outback“.

If you’d like to read all of the Ai’s outputs in a single place, click here to read the resulting ‘Australia Guide’ Ai articles we made in Poe Ai, and you can see their various compute-point costs.

How Compute Points Work in Poe

‘Compute Points’ are kind of like Poe’s virtual currency;  every message you send to one of Poe’s AI bots will cost compute points.

If you’re using Poe with a free account (as of December 2024), then that means you get 3,000 compute points every day.

However, free users of Poe can never have more than 3,000 points at once – compute points don’t accumulate or roll over.

The Cost of Different AI Bots

Poe’s varied Ai bots cost different amounts of compute points.

Some Ai bots are incredibly cheap, while others can use up all of your daily compute points in just one or two messages.

So, how can you maximize your compute-point budget in Poe?

As I mentioned earlier in this article, I conducted an experiment where a variety of different AI bots were asked to do the exact same task:

‘write a five-page book about how to stay safe in the Australian Outback’

I gave this identical text prompt to 12 different Large Language Models (bots) on Poe.

Click here, if you want to read all of the ‘Australia Guide’ Ai articles we made.

How to Check Compute Points Cost

In Poe, you can check how many compute points each message has cost you.

Find a message from a Poe bot and look for a circle with three small dots in it, click it and select ‘ Info’.

On the ‘Info’ screen for that Ai bot, you’ll see how many compute points it costs to send a message to it.

Low-Cost Poe Ai Compute Points Bots

On the most affordable end, you’ve got Poe bots like f1-preview and Solar Pro, which each only cost 1 compute point per message.

Using these 1-point-per-message bots on Poe, combined with the Poe’s daily allowance of compute-points, a free user of Poe could theoretically have 3,000 daily conversations!

Moving up the scale, you’ll find Ai models like GPT-3.5-Turbo-Instruct, which costs around 20 points per message, and Claude-3.5-Haiku that costs 95 points.

Medium-Range Poe Ai Compute Points Bots

In the middle range, there’s Gemini-1.5-Pro at 175 points and Mistral-Medium at 165 points. These are both highly-capable writing bots, and their articles were comparably useful and well-written.

Moving up a few rungs on the metaphorical ‘compute-points ladder’ in Poe, you get to the more expensive options for text-generation LLMs.

GPT-4o will cost you 293 points per message, Claude-3.5-Sonnet uses 344 points, and you can even talk to an outdated version of Claude 2 for 620 compute points.

High-End Poe Ai Compute Points Bots

If you’re feeling really extravagant, you can talk to an Ai called o1-mini, and doing so will set you back 1,800 points – that’s more than half your daily allowance in one go!

Claude-3-Opus tops the list as the most expensive option, with a detailed and useful article output, but it cost upward of 2,200 compute points.

A Real-World Test Case

After talking to 12 different Ai’s in Poe, I was surprised that there wasn’t a direct correlation between ‘compute points spent’ and ‘useful information provided’.

For example, I discovered that the 1-point bots in Poe (Solar Pro, f1-preview) produced content which was just as comprehensive and useful as bots which cost hundreds or thousands of compute points (o1-mini, Claude Opus 3).

For example, Solar Pro, costing just 1 compute point, gave a well-structured guide with accurate information about outback safety.

Gemini-1.5-Pro, costing 175 points per message, stood out for its narrative style and flow, but not necessarily for having more accurate or useful information.

Even o1-mini, at 1,800 compute points, didn’t necessarily provide better content than its more affordable counterparts, although the output from o1-mini was indeed the longest and most-comprehensive article of the 12 bots that I tested.

Making the Most of Your Points

The biggest takeaway of this experiment, to me, is: you don’t need to use the most expensive bots to get good results.

Here’s a table that lists the various Compute Point costs for each of the 12 bots that were tested for this article:

Bot Name	Base Rate (points/message)	Notes
f1-preview	1	Efficient, smart & low-cost for daily use
Solar-Pro	1	Useful output with minimal resources used
GPT-3.5-Turbo-Instruct	20	Basic, short-ish, and consistent responses
Google-PaLM	27	Efficient at writing for information delivery
Claude-3.5-Haiku	95	Writes shorter, structured content
Gemini-2.0-Flash	100	Performance issues in testing; it never gave an output
Mistral-Medium	165	Balanced writing capabilities overall
Gemini-1.5-Pro	175	Superior writing style and narrative flow
GPT-4o	293	Detailed responses, formatted well
Claude-3.5-Sonnet	344	Steady performance at higher compute-point cost
Claude-2	620	Basic and straightfoward; expensive compute-points cost.
o1-mini	1,800	Produced the longest text output, but high compute-point costs.
Claude-3-Opus	Variable*	Produced a thorough article, and cost the most compute points on this list

If you’re using a free account, you could spend all day chatting with f1-preview or Solar Pro and never run out of points, often getting just as good results as you would from the more expensive options.

Even if you only ever use the 1-point bots on a free Poe account, you can still have thousands of back-and-forth exchanges per day, and  you can use Poe’s Ai’s to help you think through problems, develop ideas, or work on projects.

The Real Value

Poe’s Ai tools are like having a toolbox sitting in the corner of your room – it only becomes valuable when you have a specific project, or problem, that you want to tackle.

 

Whether you’re writing, researching, or just exploring ideas, understanding how compute points work helps you make the most of this powerful Ai platform.

With Poe Ai’s compute-points system, you don’t need to spend a lot of points to get great results – sometimes the most affordable options are exactly what you need.

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