What AI tools actually cost per month

A one-person business running on AI costs about €21 a month at the floor and about €120 once you publish video. The expensive part is almost never the tool people warn you about. It is the three subscriptions you stacked without noticing, each solving a problem the last one already solved.

Below is every line with its price, where the free tiers genuinely hold, and which ones to skip.

A note on the numbers: I list what each vendor charges, in the currency they charge it in. Some are dollars and some are euros, and I have not converted them, because the spread inside these prices is wider than the exchange rate. Treat them as planning figures, and treat the totals as ranges rather than quotes. Everything here was checked in September 2026.

What does the cheapest setup that actually works cost?

Two lines. That is the whole floor.

That is not a stripped-down version of a real setup. It is what this site runs on. The free tiers on Vercel and Supabase are generous enough that a one-person business does not hit them until it has real traffic — and by the time you do, the traffic is paying for the upgrade.

The one thing worth knowing: Vercel's free plan is not licensed for commercial use. If the site is making money, you are expected to be on a paid plan. That is a real cost waiting for you, not a free lunch, and it is the honest reason to plan for it rather than discover it.

What do you pay once you publish video?

This is where the number moves, because video is the one category where free tiers run out quickly.

Push it further — stock generation, a video model, a dedicated transcription subscription — and you land somewhere around €120. Above that you are no longer running a one-person business on AI; you are running a small studio, and the arithmetic changes.

Which subscriptions are people actually wasting money on?

Three overlaps account for most of it. I have made all three.

Two general chat subscriptions. ChatGPT and Claude, roughly €20 each. Almost nobody acts on the second opinion often enough to justify it. If you truly need several models, one aggregator subscription — GlobalGPT or Lorka at around $30 — is cheaper than two direct ones. But it only saves money if it replaces them. Stacked on top, you have just spent €70 a month on the same sentence three times.

An app builder you stopped opening. Lovable, Bolt, v0 and Replit all sit around $20–25 a month and all have free tiers. The free tier is enough to find out whether the tool fits how you work. Most people subscribe in week one and stop opening it in week three, because they discovered they wanted a coding agent instead.

Automation you are not running yet. Zapier starts around $20 a month once you pass the free tier. n8n is free if you host it yourself and around €20 if you do not. Until you have a process that runs weekly without you, this line is a subscription to an intention.

The test for all three is the same and it is uncomfortable: open your bank statement, find every subscription, and for each one name the last thing it produced. Anything you cannot answer in one sentence goes.

What is free that you are probably paying for?

Twelve of the 68 tools on this list are free outright — not a trial, not a limited tier that expires.

Vercel · Supabase · Stripe · GitHub · Resend · Cloudflare · n8n · Make · OBS Studio · Canva · Figma · Umami

Four of those are what this site runs on, and none of them pay me anything. That is worth saying plainly: the tools I recommend most often are the ones I earn nothing from, and you can check that on any page of the list.

Another 28 tools have a free tier that is enough to decide with. Which means 40 of 68 are usable without paying, and the honest advice for almost everyone is to spend a month there before spending anything.

Where do the costs move when you start selling?

The pattern inverts. Monthly subscriptions stop being the main cost and per-transaction fees take over.

Stripe costs nothing per month and takes a percentage plus a fixed amount from each sale. The percentage is the part everyone looks at; the fixed amount is the part that decides your pricing. On a €50 sale it disappears into the noise. On a €5 sale it is a meaningful slice of your margin — which is why digital products cluster at €9 and €20 rather than €3.

Check your own rate in your Stripe dashboard rather than trusting a figure in an article, including this one: it varies by card type, by country and by how your account is set up.

Two other costs arrive with your first sale, and both are easy to forget:

• VAT. If you are selling to consumers, your prices include it, and it is not yours. A €20 sale at 21% is €16.53 of revenue.
• Hosting that is now commercial. See the Vercel note above.

How do these prices change?

Faster than any article can keep up with, which is why every page on this site carries the date it was last checked rather than "updated for 2026".

The direction of travel over the past two years has been consistent: the capable tools get cheaper per unit of work, and the number of tools goes up. That combination is what produces the stacking problem. Each new subscription is individually defensible and the total is not.

Two habits are worth more than any price comparison:

1. Review the whole list every quarter, not each tool as it renews. Renewals arrive one at a time, which is exactly why they never feel like a decision.
2. Cancel first, resubscribe if you miss it. You will miss roughly one in four. That ratio is the actual measurement of how much you needed them.

Questions people ask

The short answers are in the box below the article. If you want the longer version of how these tools fit together in an actual working week — which to learn first, which to ignore until later — that is what the playbooks are for.