The short version: Out of the dozens of content tools I’ve paid for since I started rebuilding my business in public, maybe six earn their keep every single month. The rest were bought on a Black Friday high, used twice, and cancelled quietly when the renewal email landed. Pay for the tools that save you time on the boring bits and skip anything that promises to do your thinking for you.
The six I pay for, every month, without fail
I test a lot of tools. It’s part of the job when clients ask me what to buy, and I refuse to recommend anything I haven’t used myself. So here’s what’s still in my card statement after everything else got cut.
ChatGPT Team, £22.50 per user a month
Not the free version, not even the £20 Plus plan on its own. I moved my team to the Team tier because it lets me build shared custom GPTs with my tone of voice baked in, so my assistant and I aren’t starting from a blank prompt every time. I use it for first drafts, headline testing, and turning a messy voice note into something structured. If you want the exact prompts and setup I use day to day, I wrote a full walkthrough on how to use ChatGPT for content creation without it sounding like every other LinkedIn post.
Descript, £22 a month on the Creator plan
This is the one tool I’d keep if I had to cancel everything else. It edits video and audio by editing text, so cutting an “um” or a dead five minutes out of a webinar takes seconds instead of an hour in Premiere. I record one long conversation, usually a podcast interview or a client training session, and Descript is the tool that turns it into clips, a transcript, and quote graphics without me touching three separate apps. This is the backbone of what I call my content repurposing workflow, one recording turned into seven usable assets before lunch.
Canva Pro, £109 a year
Boring, cheap, and I use it every single day. Brand kit, resize magic for turning one graphic into an Instagram post, a LinkedIn banner, and a YouTube thumbnail without redesigning three times. I don’t use the AI image generator inside it much, the outputs are still patchy, but the core product does the job it was built for.
Grammarly Premium, £10.68 a month
Not for grammar, honestly. For catching the sentence I’ve read so many times I can’t see it’s broken anymore. Ten minutes before I hit publish, it flags the clunky bit my own eyes have gone blind to.
Buffer, £5 a month per channel
I’ve used Hootsuite, Sprout, and a handful of others over the years. Buffer wins for me because it’s simple and it doesn’t try to be a whole marketing suite. Schedule, post, done. I don’t need a command centre, I need something that publishes on time while I’m doing client work.
Opus Clip, £19 a month
This one earns its place purely on speed. Feed it a long video, it finds the moments worth clipping and adds captions automatically. It gets maybe seven out of ten clip choices right, which sounds average until you realise it’s saved me three hours of scrubbing through footage myself.
The ones I tried and cancelled
Here’s a proper story, because this is where most posts on this topic go vague. In late 2023 I bought a lifetime deal on AppSumo for a tool that promised to turn one blog post into “50 pieces of content” using AI. It cost £297, one payment, forever. I used it four times. The output was the same three sentences rearranged with synonyms swapped in, over and over, and every single piece needed more editing than if I’d just written it fresh myself. I never asked for a refund because the deal was final sale, which is its own lesson: read the refund terms before you buy anything marked “lifetime,” because that word is doing a lot of work to make you skip that line.
Beyond that specific tool, here’s the pattern of what I keep cancelling and why:
- AI “full blog post in one click” writers. Jasper, Copy.ai, and the dozen clones of them. The drafts read like they were written by someone paraphrasing Wikipedia, because in a lot of cases that’s close to what’s happening. ChatGPT with a decent custom instruction does the same job better and costs less.
- Standalone SEO content tools that charge £99 plus a month. Surfer, Frase, and similar. Useful if you’re producing fifty articles a month for an agency. For a solo business owner or a small team, you’re paying enterprise pricing for a feature set you’ll use twice a month.
- AI voice cloning tools bought “just in case.” I paid for one for six months, used it once for a client demo, and let it lapse. If you don’t have a weekly use case for it on day one, you won’t develop one later.
- Any tool with a pricing page that hides the actual monthly cost behind “book a demo.” That’s not a coincidence. If a company won’t show you the number, it’s because the number would put you off.
The bit nobody wants to say out loud
Here’s the uncomfortable part. Most of the content tools people buy aren’t bought to save time, they’re bought to avoid sitting down and doing the actual thinking. I’ve done it myself. There’s a specific feeling, usually around 9pm when you should be writing a newsletter and instead you’re scrolling a tool comparison page, that’s not research, it’s procrastination wearing a business hat. The tool becomes a way to feel productive without producing anything. I’ve watched this happen with clients who spend three weeks “evaluating platforms” for content that could have been written, badly, in a first draft, in forty minutes.
The tools that help are the ones that speed up a process you already do well, not the ones that promise to do the process for you. Descript doesn’t write my content. Canva doesn’t design my brand. ChatGPT doesn’t decide my angle. They all sit downstream of a decision I’ve already made. If you’re buying a tool hoping it will make the decision for you, that’s the tool that ends up cancelled by month three.
A simple test before you pay for anything
Before I add a new tool to the stack now, I run it through three questions. It’s saved me a few hundred pounds a year and a lot of cancelled subscriptions.
- Would I use this in the next seven days, not “eventually”? If the honest answer is “when I get to it,” skip it.
- Does the free trial output something I’d publish? Not “with more editing,” but close to ready. If every output needs a full rewrite, the tool isn’t saving time, it’s adding a step.
- Would I miss it if it disappeared tomorrow? This is the real test. Half the tools I’ve cancelled, I never noticed were gone until the renewal charge stopped appearing.
Matching the tool to where it sits in your funnel helps too. A tool that’s brilliant for top of funnel awareness content, like a fast video clipper, is often the wrong tool for bottom of funnel sales content, which needs more care and fewer generic outputs. If you haven’t mapped that out for your own business, it’s worth reading through what the content marketing funnel stages look like for a small business before you buy anything else, because half the wasted spend I see in client accounts is tools bought for a stage of the funnel that business doesn’t even have yet.
What to use before you pay for anything
There’s a genuine case for staying on free tools longer than feels comfortable, especially in the first year of a business. ChatGPT’s free tier, Canva’s free tier, and CapCut’s free version will get a new business further than most people admit. I put together a full list of free AI tools that are really free, no trial that quietly turns into a card charge, no catch buried in the terms. Start there. Upgrade only when the free version is the thing slowing you down, not before.
And if you’re weighing up whether “free content” is even worth the effort compared to paid promotion, that’s a separate question worth answering honestly, because the maths on it isn’t what most marketing textbooks tell you. I wrote about that directly in what free content really is, beyond the textbook definition.
A stack for three different budgets
People ask me for a number, so here’s an honest range based on what I’ve built for myself and for clients.
- £0 a month: ChatGPT free, Canva free, CapCut free, Buffer’s free plan for three channels. This covers a solo business owner posting consistently for a year.
- Around £60 a month: ChatGPT Plus (£20), Canva Pro (£9), Buffer for two channels (£10), Grammarly (£11). Add Descript once you’re producing weekly video or audio, which pushes this to around £80.
- Over £150 a month: Add ChatGPT Team seats, Opus Clip, and a proper scheduling tool with analytics like Sprout Social. This is the point where a business is producing enough content that the time saved outweighs the spend, usually once you’re publishing daily across three or more platforms.
None of this replaces having someone who knows how these tools fit together and can build the actual system for you, rather than just handing you a list of subscriptions. That’s a different kind of help, and if you’re at the stage where you need someone to set the whole thing up rather than pick the apps, that’s when working with an AI consultant for a small business starts to make financial sense rather than being another subscription you’ll cancel.
The pattern I keep seeing, across five years of watching this space shift from month to month, is that the tools worth paying for barely change. They just get quietly better. The tools worth skipping change constantly, because they’re chasing a trend rather than solving a problem. If a tool’s whole pitch is built around a word like “revolutionary” or “game-changing,” that’s usually the tool to leave alone for six months and see if it’s still around.
Frequently asked questions
How many content tools should a solo business owner be paying for?
Realistically, three to five. One for writing or ideas, one for design, one for scheduling, and one for editing video or audio if that’s part of your content mix. Anything beyond five is usually overlap, not extra capability.
Is it worth buying lifetime deals for content tools?
Rarely. Lifetime deals are often for tools built by small teams who need cash quickly, which means support and updates can dry up once they’ve sold enough licenses. Read the refund terms before you buy, and treat any “lifetime” price as final unless stated otherwise.
What’s the single biggest waste of money in content tools right now?
AI writing tools that promise a finished blog post in one click. The output almost always needs a full rewrite, which means you’ve paid for a tool that adds a step instead of removing one. A well-built prompt in a general tool like ChatGPT outperforms most of these dedicated writers.
Should I cancel a tool I’ve barely used, or keep it in case I need it later?
Cancel it. If you haven’t used it in the last thirty days, “later” rarely arrives, and most tools let you resubscribe in under a minute when you need them again.
Related reading: How to Plan a Month of Social Content Without a Big Team and Why Your LinkedIn Account Got Restricted (and How to Fix It).
I go much deeper on this in the content marketing guide.
Before you buy anything, it is worth skimming content creation tools that actually help to see what earns its place and what quietly does not.
