Every AI tool landing page wants you to believe its price is simple. It rarely is. One vendor bills per seat, another by credits, a third by tasks — and the number shown is usually the annual-billing figure, not what you pay monthly. So we did the boring work: in October 2026, we opened the official pricing page of 24 AI tools small businesses actually buy, and recorded the cheapest paid plan on each — monthly price, annual price, free plan, free trial, and billing model.
This is the LeanStack AI Tools Pricing Index. We only publish a price here if we could verify it on the vendor’s own pricing page at check time. Where a vendor renders its prices in a way our checker could not read, we mark the price as pending re-check instead of copying a number from a third-party roundup — you will see a few of those below, and we would rather show a gap than a guess. Prices are in USD and were last verified on October 20, 2026.
Key findings
- The median entry plan costs $20/month on annual billing (n=14 tools with fully verified annual prices). On monthly billing, the median rises to $29.50/month (n=10).
- Paying annually saves about 28% on average across the 10 tools where we verified both prices — from 14.5% at Jasper to 60% at Grammarly.
- 71% of tools (15 of 21 verified) offer a free plan or free tier you can start with, and 67% (12 of 18 verified) offer a free trial of a paid plan.
- Per-seat pricing still dominates: 57% of the 23 classifiable tools bill per user, 39% bill by usage (credits, tasks, minutes or characters), and only 1 — Semrush — bills a flat fee per account.
- The cheapest way in is $7/month: both ClickUp Unlimited and Gemini (via Google Workspace Business Starter) start there on annual billing. The priciest entry plan we verified is Writesonic Starter at $79/month annual.
- The big three assistants cost the same: ChatGPT Business and Claude Team both charge $20/user/month billed annually ($25 monthly), with a 2-seat minimum.
The full index: AI tool prices by category
AI writing tools
| Tool | Entry plan | Annual ($/mo) | Monthly ($/mo) | Free plan | Trial | Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jasper | Pro | $59/seat | $69/seat | No | 7 days | Per-seat |
| Writesonic | Starter | $79 | $99 | No | 7 days | Usage (articles) |
| Grammarly | Pro | $12/member | $30/member | Yes | 7 days | Per-seat |
| Copy.ai | Chat | Pending re-check | — | — | — | |
Writing is the widest price spread in the index. Grammarly Pro is the cheapest verified entry point in the category at $12/member on annual billing, while Writesonic — which has repositioned itself around AI search visibility, priced by articles and tracked prompts — is the most expensive entry plan we verified anywhere in the index. For a deeper comparison of this category, see our guide to the best AI writing tools for small business marketing teams.
SEO and content tools
| Tool | Entry plan | Annual ($/mo) | Monthly ($/mo) | Free plan | Trial | Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Frase | Starter | $39 | $49 | No | 7 days | Usage (articles/audits) |
| Surfer SEO | Discovery | $49 | Pending | No | 7 days | Usage (documents) |
| Semrush | SEO | Pending re-check | Yes (free account) | 7 days | Flat (per account) | |
SEO tools bill by work product — articles written, pages audited, documents optimized — which makes headline prices misleading in a different way: a “$39 plan” is really a quota. Frase Starter includes 10 articles and 50 audit pages per month for one seat and one site. Semrush is the index’s only flat per-account biller, and its new entry tier (simply called “SEO”) covers 5 websites and 500 tracked keywords with one user included.
Automation platforms
| Tool | Entry plan | Annual ($/mo) | Monthly ($/mo) | Free plan | Trial | Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Make | Core (10,000 credits) | Pending re-check | Yes (1,000 credits/mo) | — | Usage (credits) | |
| Zapier | Professional | From $19.99 | Pending | Yes (100 tasks/mo) | 14 days | Usage (tasks) |
Automation is where usage-based billing bites hardest, because your bill scales with how much you automate — the opposite of what most owners expect. Zapier’s free tier (100 tasks a month, two-step Zaps) runs out fast in a real business; Make’s free tier is more generous at 1,000 credits a month. We compared the two platforms head-to-head in Zapier vs Make for AI automation.
Voice and video tools
| Tool | Entry plan | Annual ($/mo) | Monthly ($/mo) | Free plan | Trial | Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ElevenLabs | Starter | Pending re-check | — | — | Usage (characters) | |
| Murf | Creator | Pending re-check | — | — | Usage (characters) | |
| Pictory | Starter | $25 | Pending | No | 14 days | Usage (video minutes) |
| Synthesia | Starter | $18 | $29 | Yes (Basic) | No | Usage (credits) |
| Descript | Hobbyist | Pending re-check | Yes (60 media min/mo) | No | Per-seat | |
Media tools price by output: characters of speech, minutes of video, credits per render. Synthesia Starter is the cheapest verified video entry at $18/month annual (about 150 minutes of video per year on its credit allowance), and its free Basic tier — 10 minutes a month — is a genuinely usable way to test avatar video. Descript’s free plan includes 60 media minutes a month, enough to trial its edit-by-transcript workflow.
Customer support, meetings and all-in-one workspaces
| Tool | Entry plan | Annual ($/mo) | Monthly ($/mo) | Free plan | Trial | Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intercom | Essential | $29/seat | $39/seat | No | 14 days | Per-seat (+ Fin $0.99/outcome) |
| HubSpot Service Hub | Starter | Pending re-check | Yes (free tools) | — | Per-seat | |
| Fireflies | Pro | $10/seat | $18/seat | Yes | 7 days | Per-seat |
| Otter.ai | Pro | Pending re-check | Yes (Basic) | — | Per-seat | |
| Notion | Plus | Pending re-check | Yes | No | Per-seat | |
| ClickUp | Unlimited | $7 | Pending | Yes (Free Forever) | No | Per-seat |
| Monday.com | Basic | $9/seat | Pending | Yes (2 seats) | 14 days (Pro) | Per-seat (min 3 seats) |
Support is the category where the seat price is not the whole bill: Intercom Essential is $29/seat on annual billing, but its Fin AI agent charges $0.99 per resolved outcome on top — heavy support volume can cost more in outcomes than in seats. Among meeting assistants, Fireflies Pro at $10/seat annual is the cheapest verified paid plan in this whole section; we dug into Otter’s offering separately in our Otter.ai review and compared the field in our roundup of the best AI meeting assistants.
AI assistants (business and team plans)
| Tool | Entry plan | Annual ($/user/mo) | Monthly ($/user/mo) | Free tier | Trial | Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Business (Standard seat) | $20 | $25 | Yes (personal) | No | Per-user (min 2 seats) |
| Claude | Team (Standard seat) | $20 | $25 | Yes (personal) | No | Per-user (min 2 seats) |
| Gemini | Workspace Business Starter | $7 | $8.40 | App free tier | 14 days | Per-user |
The assistant price war has settled — for now — at $20 per user per month. ChatGPT Business and Claude Team match each other exactly on Standard seats, including the $25 monthly-billing price. Gemini undercuts both only because it rides inside a Google Workspace subscription: $7/user gets you email, storage and a basic Gemini tier, while full Gemini-in-Docs features start at the $14 Standard tier. Choosing between them is a features question, not a price question — see our three-way comparison, ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini for small business.
Per-seat vs usage-based: the difference that decides your real bill
More than half the index (57%) bills per seat, which makes budgeting easy: cost = people × price. The catch is seat creep — every contractor, part-timer and shared inbox that needs a login adds a full seat, and both ChatGPT Business and Claude Team enforce a 2-seat minimum before you have hired anyone.
Usage-based tools (39% of the index) look cheaper at signup and punish success instead: Zapier tasks, Make credits, ElevenLabs characters and Synthesia credits all meter the work itself. The more you automate, the more you pay — sometimes mid-month, as overages. Neither model is “better”; the question is whether your usage is predictable. We break down the budgeting math for both models in per-seat vs usage-based AI pricing: how small businesses should budget.
How to use this index to build your stack
Start from the median, not the marketing. A realistic five-tool starter stack — an assistant, a writing tool, a meeting assistant, an automation platform and one specialist tool — priced at the index median of $20 per tool on annual billing lands near $100/month for a solo operator.
Take the annual discount only after a trial. The average 28% saving for paying annually is real money, but 67% of these tools offer a free trial and 71% offer a free tier. Try the sequence: free tier → trial → one month of monthly billing → annual once the tool is embedded in a workflow.
Budget the meter, not the seat, on usage-based tools. For automation and media tools, estimate your monthly volume first — tasks run, minutes recorded, characters voiced — and price the plan that covers it with headroom. The entry plan is a starting quota, not a ceiling on what you will spend.
Re-check before you renew. AI pricing is moving fast: two vendors in this index restructured their plans in the months before we checked (Writesonic toward AI visibility, Semrush to a new tier ladder), and per-seat prices for the major assistants have already converged once. We re-verify this index monthly; the date at the top of this page is the date of the last check.
FAQ
How much should a small business budget for AI tools in 2026?
Based on the verified medians in this index, a solo operator running a five-tool stack should budget around $100/month on annual billing. Small teams should budget roughly $20 per user per month for each per-seat tool, plus headroom for usage-based tools whose cost scales with volume.
Which AI tool category is the most expensive?
AI writing has the highest verified entry price in the index — Writesonic Starter at $79/month billed annually — while SEO/content tools cluster around $39–$49. Meeting assistants and all-in-one workspaces are the cheapest categories, with verified entry plans from $7–$10 per month.
Is annual billing worth it for AI tools?
On average, yes: annual billing saves about 28% across the tools where we verified both prices (n=10). But take the free trial and at least one monthly-billed month first — AI tools change plans and features quickly, and an annual contract locks you into today’s version of the product.
Why do some prices in this index say “pending re-check”?
We only publish prices verified on the vendor’s own pricing page. A few vendors render prices in a way our checker cannot read, so we mark those as pending and re-check them on the next monthly pass.
How often is this index updated?
Monthly. Prices, free tiers and plan structures are re-verified against official vendor pricing pages, and the “last updated” line below reflects the most recent check.
Last updated: October 2026 — we re-check prices monthly. Data: LeanStack AI Tools Pricing Index, prices verified on official vendor pricing pages, October 20, 2026 (n=24 tools tracked; n=14 with fully verified annual entry prices).
