Every article about AI for small business names a dozen tools and never adds them up.
That is the whole problem. The tools are fine. The recommendations are mostly reasonable. But the total is the number that decides whether you can actually do this, and it is the one piece of information nobody puts in the article.
So this post does the addition. Prices below were read off the vendors' own pricing pages on September 2, 2026, and where I could not read one, I say so rather than repeating a figure from somewhere else.
The arithmetic nobody publishes
Here is a stack assembled from what these lists actually recommend, for one person.
| Job | Tool | Free tier | Paid, monthly | Paid, annual equivalent |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| General assistant | ChatGPT or Claude | Yes, with daily limits | $20 | $20 |
| Meeting notes | Fireflies | Yes, 400 min storage | $18 per seat | $10 per seat |
| Meeting notes | Otter | Yes, 300 min/month | $16.99 per user | $8.33 per user |
| Social scheduling | Buffer | Yes | $5 per channel | $5 per channel |
| Social scheduling | Metricool | Yes | $20 for 5 brands | lower on annual |
| Automation | Zapier | Yes, 100 tasks/month | from $19.99 | from $13.33 |
| Accounting | Xero | No | $29, $50, $75 | varies |
Pick one per job and a solo operator lands at roughly $60 to $110 a month. Not the under-$50 these articles imply, and not the enterprise numbers either.
Now add a second person. Fireflies, Otter and Xero all price per seat, so those parts double. A three-person team on the same stack is not paying $110, it is paying closer to $175, and nothing in the original recommendation warned about that.
Now add a second person
The seat arithmetic is the part that catches people out, and it is worth doing properly because it changes the decision.
Take the solo stack: assistant $20, Otter Pro $16.99, Buffer at $5 across three channels, Zapier at about $20, and Xero at $29. Add one colleague and here is what actually moves.
| Tool | Priced by | One person | Three people |
|---|---|---|---|
| Assistant | Seat | $20 | $60 |
| Otter Pro | User | $16.99 | $50.97 |
| Xero | Plan, not seat | $29 | $29 |
| Buffer | Channel, not seat | $15 | $15 |
| Zapier | Task volume, not seat | $20 | $20 or higher |
| Total | $101 | $175 or more |
The pattern is the useful bit. Tools priced per seat scale linearly with headcount and tools priced per unit of work do not. Xero, Buffer and Zapier barely move when you add people, because a company has one set of books, one set of social channels, and one set of automations regardless of how many humans touch them.
So if you are going to grow, the seat-priced tools are where your bill grows with you, and they are the ones worth being selective about. Two people sharing one assistant subscription is against most terms of service. Two people sharing a Zapier account is not, because Zapier is not charging for the person.
What each job costs, worst first
Ordered by how much time it usually eats rather than by tool popularity, because that is the order you should buy in.
Admin and repetitive handoffs. The biggest silent drain for most small businesses, and the one automation actually fixes. Zapier's free tier at 100 tasks a month genuinely covers one or two simple automations. The trap is that a single automation firing on every incoming email burns through 100 tasks in days, so build it, then watch the counter for a month before choosing a tier.
Meetings. Easy to fix and easy to not pay for. Both leaders run real free tiers, and for a handful of calls a week either holds. Pay here only when storage limits actually bite, which for Fireflies free means 400 minutes and for Otter free means 300 transcription minutes a month.
Social posting. Cheap to fix and priced by channel rather than by person, so the cost depends on how many platforms you are on, not how big you are. Metricool's free plan schedules up to 20 posts a month, which is more than a lot of small businesses actually publish, and Buffer's paid tier starts at $5 per channel.
Writing and general thinking. The category where free tiers break first, because daily limits on the big chat products are real and you will hit them doing actual work. This is the one subscription I would pay for before any other.
Accounting. The category where AI is arriving inside software you already pay for rather than as a separate purchase. Xero publishes $29, $50 and $75. I could not read QuickBooks pricing at all, so compare them yourself rather than trusting any article.
Three reasons the total surprises people
None of these is dishonest. They are just never explained together.
Most tools price per seat. The headline figure is for one person. Adding your business partner does not add a small amount, it adds another full subscription for every seat-based tool in your stack.
Some price per unit of work, not per month. Zapier charges by task volume, starting at 100 tasks a month and climbing through 750, 1,500 and 2,000. Buffer charges per social channel. Both are honest structures, and both mean your bill moves with your usage rather than sitting still. People consistently underestimate how many tasks an automation actually fires.
Annual discounts are quoted as monthly. Fireflies Pro shows $10, and that is $10 a month billed annually. Paid monthly it is $18. Otter Pro shows $8.33 the same way, and is $16.99 monthly. The number you remember from the pricing page is usually the one that requires paying for a year upfront.
Put those together and a stack you costed at $50 in your head arrives at $110 on the card.
Where the free tiers are genuinely good
This is the useful half, and it gets much less attention than the paid comparisons.
Meeting notes are the easiest category not to pay for. Fireflies free includes 400 minutes of storage and 20 AI credits. Otter free includes 300 monthly transcription minutes and three lifetime file imports. For a solo operator doing a few calls a week, either is fine for months.
Automation is free until it is busy. Zapier's free tier covers 100 tasks a month. That sounds small, and for one or two simple automations it is genuinely enough. Build there first and watch the counter.
Social scheduling has real free plans at both Buffer and Metricool. Metricool's free plan schedules up to 20 posts a month, which is more than many small businesses actually publish.
Where free reliably breaks is seats. Free tiers are almost always single user, so the second person does not double your cost, it introduces it.
Fireflies against Otter, since you will pick one
These two come up in every list and the lists rarely separate them, so here are the numbers side by side as read today.
| Fireflies | Otter | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 400 minutes of storage, 20 AI credits | 300 transcription minutes a month, 3 lifetime file imports |
| Paid monthly | $18 per seat | $16.99 per user |
| Paid annually | $10 per seat | $8.33 per user |
| Next tier up | Business $29, or $19 annually | Business $30, or $19.99 annually |
They are close enough on price that cost should not decide it. What should decide it is the shape of the free tier, and they differ in a way that matters.
Fireflies gives you storage. Otter gives you monthly minutes. If you record a lot but revisit little, Otter's monthly reset suits you. If you record less but want to search back through months of calls, Fireflies holding 400 minutes of storage is the better shape. That distinction is worth more than the two dollar gap between them.
One caution on both: the annual figure is the one they advertise. Fireflies Pro is $10 on the page and $18 if you pay monthly. Otter Pro is $8.33 on the page and $16.99 monthly. That is a real doubling, not a rounding, and it is the single most common way people misjudge these costs.
Why these lists get it wrong
Two of the top searches in this category end in the word reddit. That is people going looking for someone who has actually paid for these things, which tells you what they think of the articles.
The articles are not usually lying. They are doing something more boring: listing tools without pricing the combination, because the combination is the hard part and the individual entries are the easy part. A list of twelve tools with twelve accurate prices can still leave you with no idea what your month costs.
The other reason is that most of these posts are written once and never rechecked. I found this on my own site three weeks ago, where a freelancer FAQ recommended five tools and priced the stack at $30 to $50 when the tools named came to about $90. Nobody had lied. Nobody had added up either.
So the useful test for any article like this, including this one: does it tell you the total, does it tell you what happens when you add a second person, and does it say when the prices were checked. If it does none of those, it is a list of names rather than advice.
What I could not check, and will not guess
Being specific about this matters more in a costs article than anywhere else.
QuickBooks. Intuit rate-limits automated requests. The domain resolves and the connection fails on both HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1, while intuit.com returns a 429. That is blocking, not a dead product, and I am not quoting a price I could not read. Check it yourself.
Canva. Returns a 403 to automated requests, as it has every time this site has tried across several months.
Mailchimp and Tidio. Both render their pricing in JavaScript, so the static page gives nothing reliable.
That is four tools in categories small businesses ask about constantly, and I would rather have a gap in this table than a number I cannot stand behind. My status tracker explains the checking method and which vendors block it.
Pick jobs before tools
The failure I see repeatedly is not choosing the wrong tool. It is subscribing to five, using two, and cancelling none.
Write down what actually costs you time this month. Not what a list says you should automate, what genuinely eats your week. Then pick one tool for the biggest one and leave everything else alone.
If meetings are the drain, start with a free meeting tool. If you are losing evenings to social posts, start with a free scheduler. If it is admin sprawl, start with Zapier's free tier and one automation.
Then wait a month before adding anything. The tool you did not miss is the subscription you should not have.
What I would actually pay for
One thing, if you are solo: the general assistant, at $20.
Everything else on this list has a free tier good enough to start with, and the assistant is the one where free tiers hit daily limits fastest if you are using it for real work. That is the subscription that earns its money soonest for most people.
Beyond that, pay per job as each job actually starts hurting, and always check whether the annual price is worth committing to before you take the discount. A year of a tool you stop using in March is not a saving.
For the wider picture of how AI pricing moved this year, what AI pricing did in 2026 is the dated record. If you are working solo rather than running a team, AI tools for freelancers covers the same arithmetic for a smaller stack, and best AI tools under $20 is the budget end.
A first month that does not waste money
If you are starting from nothing, this sequence costs almost nothing and tells you what you actually need.
Week one, sign up for free tiers only. Meeting notes, automation, social scheduling. No cards, no trials with expiry dates you will forget.
Week two, use them on real work rather than testing them. The difference matters. A tool that feels impressive on a test prompt often turns out irrelevant to what you actually do all day.
Week three, look at which one you have opened most. That is the job worth paying to remove, and it is frequently not the one you expected.
Week four, pay for exactly that one. Take the monthly price first, not the annual discount, because a year of a tool you stop using in March is not a saving no matter what the pricing page says about it.
Then stop. Add the next one only when a specific limit actually blocks you doing something, rather than when an article suggests you might benefit. The goal is a stack you can name every line of, not a card statement you have stopped reading.
Sourcing
Read directly from vendor pricing pages on September 2, 2026: Fireflies free tier, Pro at $18 monthly and $10 annually, Business at $29 and $19. Otter free tier, Pro at $16.99 monthly and $8.33 annually, Business at $30 monthly and $19.99 annually. Zapier's free tier at 100 tasks a month and its task-volume ladder. Xero at $29, $50 and $75. Buffer at $5 per channel and Metricool at $20 for five brands were read on August 27, 2026.
Not verified, and deliberately not quoted: QuickBooks, where Intuit rate-limits automated requests, Canva, which returns a 403, and Mailchimp and Tidio, which render pricing in JavaScript. Where I could not read a number, there is no number in this post.
