What this actually costs

This is the question everybody asks second and nobody answers straight. Here is the straight version, along with the costs that never appear on a pricing page.

There are only three tiers, and most businesses need the middle one

Every offer you will be shown falls into one of three shapes. Knowing which shape you are looking at tells you most of what you need.

Tier one: free

Every major assistant has a free tier. It is genuinely usable, it is where you should start, and for a one-person business it is sometimes where you should stay. The limits are usually on how much you can do in a day and on access to the newest model. Neither of those matters while you are working out whether this is useful at all.

The trap in tier one is not the tool. It is that free accounts are the ones people sign up for with a personal email and no thought about what they are pasting in. See what not to paste into a chatbot.

Tier two: a subscription, per person, per month

This is where almost every small business that gets value ends up. You pay monthly for each person who uses it. Two details are worth knowing before you compare anything:

• Paying annually is usually cheaper per month, but it commits you for a year, which is the wrong trade while you are still finding out whether anyone will use it.
• Business and team plans cost more per seat than individual plans, and what you are buying for the difference is usually administrative: central billing, the ability to remove someone's access when they leave, and a commitment about what happens to your data. For a business with employees, that last one is the reason to pay it.

As a concrete example, verified on the vendor's own pricing page in September 2026: Claude publishes individual Pro and Team plans on their site. Check the current figures here. These move, and we would rather you saw the real page than trusted a number on ours.

The other major assistants sit in broadly the same territory for the equivalent tiers. Rather than reprint numbers that go stale, open each vendor's pricing page yourself before you decide; they are all one click and none of them hide it.

Tier three: a project with a price tag

This is when something needs building: connecting two systems that do not talk, moving your data somewhere it can be used, putting a tool in front of customers. It is quoted as a project, it is not a subscription, and it is the tier where small businesses lose money.

The rule here is simple and it has saved people a great deal: do not buy tier three until tier two has visibly failed to solve the problem. An enormous number of jobs that get quoted as integration projects turn out to be solvable by a person with a good subscription and a written procedure.

The costs that are not on the pricing page

These are the ones that decide whether the thing was worth it, and none of them appear in any comparison table.

• Somebody's learning time. Realistically a few hours across the first month, per person, before it stops being awkward. If nobody has those hours, you are buying a subscription nobody will use.
• Checking the output. In the early weeks, everything gets read before it goes anywhere. That is a real cost and it is temporary, but budget for it honestly rather than pretending it is zero.
• The owner problem. If no single person is responsible for the tool, it gets abandoned in about six weeks and you carry on paying for it. This is the most expensive line item on the list and it does not cost money. It costs attention.
• Cleaning up your own information. If your prices live in three spreadsheets that disagree, some poor person has to reconcile them before anything automated can use them. Sometimes that work is the whole project.

The only arithmetic that matters

Forget return-on-investment calculators. There is one sum, it takes a minute, and you can do it on the back of an envelope.

Four rules for not wasting money

• Start monthly, never annual. The discount is real and it is not worth locking yourself in before you know whether anyone will use it. Switch to annual in month four, once it has proven itself.
• One seat before ten. Buy one licence, give it to the person most likely to run with it, and watch for a month.
• Put every subscription on one calendar reminder. One note, once a quarter, listing what you pay for and who uses it. This one habit pays for itself repeatedly.
• Check the vendor's page, not an article. Including this one. Prices change, tiers get renamed, and the only source worth trusting is the company taking the money.