The short version: I added up every AI tool I was paying for and it came to £267 a month, more than I used to pay a part-time VA for ten hours a week. Most small business owners have no idea what their AI stack costs because it’s spread across a dozen small charges instead of one big invoice. Do the audit, cut the overlap, and you’ll probably save yourself £100 to £150 a month without losing anything you use.
The invoice I never added up until now
I run my business the way most solo consultants and small agency owners do now, with a pile of AI tools bolted on wherever a task felt slow. ChatGPt Plus for writing and thinking things through. Claude Pro for the same, because sometimes one gives a better draft than the other. Otter.ai for transcribing client calls. Descript for editing video. Canva’s paid tier with its AI image generation. A grammar tool. A social scheduling tool with AI captions baked in. Jasper, which I kept “for client work” and hadn’t opened in six weeks.
None of those bills felt big on their own. £19 here, £24 there, £39 somewhere else. That’s the trick. Nobody sits down once a quarter and adds a subscription list up the way they would a rent payment.
So in October I did. I went through my bank statement line by line, every recurring AI charge, and totalled it. £267 a month. £3,204 a year. For one person running a consultancy from a home office in Kent.
That number mattered because five years ago, rebuilding this business after the influencer years dried up, I paid a virtual assistant £15 an hour for ten hours a week to handle admin, calendar chasing, and basic client comms. That was £600 a month, and I remember thinking it was a stretch. My AI stack was less than half that cost and I still felt I was drowning in subscriptions.
What I was paying for, tool by tool
Here’s the real breakdown, roughly, because prices shift and everyone’s stack looks slightly different:
- ChatGPT Plus, £20/month, used daily for drafting, research, and thinking out loud
- Claude Pro, £18/month, used for longer client documents and proposals
- Otter.ai, £16.99/month, transcribing every discovery call
- Descript, £24/month, editing short video for LinkedIn and Instagram
- Canva Pro with Magic Studio, £11/month (annual), used weekly for graphics
- Jasper, £49/month, barely touched since August
- A grammar and tone tool, £11.99/month, running in the background of every email
- An AI social scheduler add-on, £15/month, generating captions I mostly rewrote anyway
Add those up and you land around £165 to £180 depending on the month, before VAT, before the odd one-off image generation credit top-up. My personal total came in higher because I’d also kept a research tool and a second transcription app running as a backup that I’d forgotten about.
The audit that took me forty minutes and saved £94 a month
This is the part worth copying, because it’s not complicated and most people never do it.
- Pull twelve months of bank and card statements and search for the word “subscription” and every AI tool name you can remember. You will find at least one you forgot about. Everyone does.
- List every tool with its monthly cost, its billing date, and the last time you opened it. Not the last time you meant to. The last time you logged in and used it for something real.
- Group them by job, not by brand. Writing, transcription, video editing, image generation, scheduling. If two tools do the same job, one of them is dead weight.
- Cancel the overlaps first. I dropped Jasper because ChatGPT and Claude between them covered every writing task Jasper was doing, and I was paying £49 for something two other tools already handled.
- Downgrade before you cancel outright. A few tools I dropped from a higher tier to the cheapest paid plan rather than losing them completely, because the free version didn’t cover client-facing work.
- Set a calendar reminder for ninety days out to run the whole thing again. Your stack will drift again. Mine already has.
That forty minute exercise took my monthly AI spend from £267 down to £173. Not because I found some secret cheap alternative, but because I was paying full price for tools doing a job another tool already did for free, sat right next to it in my browser tabs.
Here’s the bit that made me uncomfortable
The uncomfortable truth in all this isn’t the wasted £94 a month. It’s that even after cutting the fat, I was still paying £173 a month for tools that, combined, could not do what my old VA did for £600.
AI can transcribe a call faster than a human. It cannot notice that a client sounded off during that call and flag it to me before the next meeting. It can draft a follow-up email in ten seconds. It cannot decide, on its own judgement, that this particular client needs a phone call instead of an email because the last three emails went unanswered. It writes a caption for Instagram in a heartbeat but it does not know that a specific client hates being tagged in public posts because of an old dispute nobody wrote down anywhere.
Small business owners get sold the idea that AI replaces headcount. It doesn’t, not for the judgement calls. What it replaces is the boring, repetitive twenty percent of a task, the transcription, the first draft, the resize, the caption skeleton. The other eighty percent, the bit that needs a human who knows your business, still needs a human. If you’re weighing up AI tools against hiring, that’s the real comparison to make, and it’s one I go through with almost every client who asks me what an AI consultant costs versus what they think they’re saving by going tool-only.
Where the money is well spent
I’m not saying cancel everything and go back to doing it all by hand. Some of this spend earns its keep completely.
Otter.ai transcribing client calls means I have a searchable record of every promise I’ve made to a client for the last two years. That has settled at least three “did we agree to that” disputes in my favour, purely because I could search a transcript instead of relying on memory.
Descript cutting my video editing time from two hours to twenty minutes per clip means I post video now, which I didn’t for years because editing felt like a part-time job on top of my actual job. Brands like GoPro built an entire audience strategy around making content creation feel achievable for ordinary people, and there’s a lesson in that for small business owners too, the tool that removes friction is the one that gets used. If you want to see how that plays out at scale, the GoPro marketing strategy breakdown is worth a read.
The grammar and tone tool catches things I’d have sent by mistake, wrong client name pasted from a template, a sentence that reads harsher than intended after three coffees and no sleep. That’s worth £11.99 a month on its own, easily.
What this means for your content and marketing spend specifically
If you’re running AI tools for marketing content rather than admin, the same audit applies but the waste tends to be worse, because marketing tools multiply fast. You get an AI caption generator bundled into your scheduler, an AI subject line tool bundled into your email platform, and a separate AI writing tool you pay for on top, all doing versions of the same job.
Mailchimp, for one, has built AI subject line and content suggestions directly into its paid tiers, which means if you’re also paying separately for a subject line optimiser, you’re double paying for something already sitting inside a tool you use anyway. Worth checking the Mailchimp marketing strategy breakdown if email is a big part of your funnel, because a lot of the AI features people pay extra for elsewhere are already included there.
Same goes for design. Figma’s AI features are increasingly built into the base product rather than sold as an add-on, which is worth knowing before you buy a separate AI design tool for a job Figma already does. The Figma marketing strategy piece covers how they’ve made that shift part of their whole product story.
And if your AI-generated content strategy has no actual strategy behind it, no clear content pillars, no sense of who you’re writing for, the AI tool isn’t your problem. I’d point anyone in that position toward what Joe Pulizzi has spent two decades teaching about content built around an audience rather than a tool, in the business lessons from Joe Pulizzi post. AI can execute a content plan faster. It cannot make you one.
A cheap way to make AI earn more than it costs
One thing that changed the maths for me was building small interactive tools rather than just generating static content. A quiz, a calculator, a quick assessment on your site does more with the same AI writing budget than another blog post ever will, because it captures a lead and gives you a reason to follow up. I wrote about exactly this approach in how to engage and convert more visitors with interactive calculators, and it’s a much better use of an AI subscription than another round of generic social captions nobody engages with. Even Instagram’s biggest brand accounts have shifted this way, leaning on interactive formats over static posts, which the Instagram marketing strategy breakdown covers well.
The version of this I’d recommend
Run the forty minute audit this week, not next month. Cancel the overlaps. Keep the two or three tools that save you real hours you can point to, not tools you feel guilty cancelling because you paid for a year upfront. Then be honest with yourself about the eighty percent of your work that still needs a person, whether that’s a VA, a part-time hire, or someone like me coming in to build the strategy the tools are meant to be executing. AI is not expensive. Buying six tools that all do the same three things is expensive. That’s a subscription problem, not an AI problem, and it’s fixable in an afternoon.
Free resource: 47-Point AI Lead-Gen Audit Checklist.
Frequently asked questions
How much should a small business realistically spend on AI tools per month?
Most solo operators and small teams can cover the essentials, writing, transcription, basic design, and scheduling, for £60 to £120 a month once overlap is cut. Anything over £200 a month for a single-person business usually means duplicate tools doing the same job under different brand names.
Is it cheaper to hire a VA or pay for AI tools?
AI tools handle repetitive, low-judgement tasks cheaply, transcribing, drafting, resizing images. A VA or part-time hire still wins for anything needing judgement, relationship knowledge, or follow-through on decisions. Most small businesses need both, not one instead of the other.
How often should I audit my AI subscriptions?
Every ninety days. Stacks drift fast because new AI features get bundled into tools you already pay for, which quietly makes a separate subscription redundant without you noticing.
What’s the biggest mistake small businesses make with AI spending?
Paying for a standalone AI tool to do something already built into a platform they already use, like a separate subject line tool when their email provider already includes one, or a separate design AI when their existing design tool has added the same feature for free.
I go much deeper on this in the AI marketing guide.
Related reading: I Tracked Every Minute AI Saved My Business for 30 Days. The Real Number Surprised Me. and The AI Notetaker Problem: What Happens When You Record Every Client Call.
Related: ai invoice chasing emails small business.
