Individually, AI subscriptions look cheap. Twenty dollars here, ten there. Then you audit a year later and find six of them, half unused. This is the budget conversation the marketing pages skip.
The sticker prices, side by side
| Tool | Entry paid tier |
|---|---|
| General assistant (ChatGPT, Claude) | About $20/month |
| Grammarly Pro | From about $12/month billed annually |
| Canva Pro | From about $120/year |
| Otter Pro | From about $8/month billed annually |
| Zapier | From about $20/month |
| Jasper | From about $39/month per seat |
| ElevenLabs | From about $5/month, usage-based above |
All prices are “about” and dated July 2026 on purpose: this market reprices constantly. Check before you commit; the shape of the math below changes more slowly than the numbers.
The three effects that inflate the bill
Stacking. No single tool hurts. An assistant plus Grammarly plus Canva plus Otter plus Zapier runs around $70/month, roughly $840 a year, per person, before anyone has bought a specialized tool. Each purchase was rational; the total was never decided by anyone.
Per-seat multiplication. Jasper at about $39 per seat is a very different product at one seat than at eight. Per-seat pricing turns a tool decision into a headcount decision. Always compute the team price, not the demo price.
Usage-based tails. ElevenLabs from about $5/month looks like the cheapest line here, and for heavy audio production it can become the most expensive. Character quotas, per-minute video limits, per-task automation pricing: anything metered deserves a real forecast of your volume, not a hopeful one.
The annual-billing trap and gift
Most of these prices are “billed annually”. The discount is real (often two months’ worth) and so is the commitment: an annual plan for a tool you abandon in October is the most expensive subscription you own. Rule of thumb: monthly billing for the first three months, annual only after a tool has survived a quarter of real use.
A sane budget, by profile
- Freelancer: $0 to $20/month. Free tiers plus, eventually, one paid assistant. Everything else waits until a limit bites.
- Small team (5 people): $100 to $250/month all-in. One paid assistant per heavy user, Canva Pro, and one connector; specialized tools only against a named bottleneck.
- Content or marketing team: add the specialist (Jasper, ElevenLabs, a video tool) only after computing per-seat and usage costs at your real volume, and put a calendar reminder to re-justify it in 90 days.
Our recommendation
Audit before you add. List what you already pay for, cancel what nobody opened last month, and only then evaluate the next shiny tool. The cheapest AI subscription of 2026 is the one you did not duplicate.