Why bother with more than one model
No single model is best at everything, and the gap keeps moving every few months. One writes the cleanest code, another reads a long document more carefully, a third is just fast and cheap for the boring questions. When each one lives in its own app, with its own login and its own subscription, most people give up and stick with whatever they already pay for.
That is the real cost of the one-app-per-model setup. Not the money so much as the friction. You stop reaching for the better tool because reaching is annoying.
How it works in Unium
You start a chat and pick a model. Halfway through, you can send the next message to a different one without leaving the thread. The history stays put, so the new model sees everything that came before.
So the choice of model becomes a per-message decision instead of a per-app one. Ask Claude to draft something, hand the same thread to GPT to turn it into code, then let Gemini check it over. Same conversation, same context, no copy-paste between tabs.
Asking more than one at once
For anything that actually matters, a second opinion is the fastest way to catch a bad answer. You can put the same question to a few models and read them side by side. Where they agree, you can relax a little. Where they disagree is usually the exact part worth a closer look.
We are building this out into a multi-model council that gathers several models on one question, for the times when a single answer is not enough.
One balance instead of three subscriptions
The other thing that changes is the bill. Instead of holding a monthly plan for every provider you occasionally use, you draw from one prepaid balance and pay for what you actually run. If you mostly use one model and dip into the others now and then, you are not paying full price for three seats to do it. See how pay-as-you-go pricing works.

