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How much does AI cost a small business?

For a small business of five people, the published software cost of AI is roughly $155 a month. Three things about that figure matter more than the number: it's in dollars, it excludes VAT, and it's usually the smallest part of what you'll spend.

Every price below comes from the provider's own pricing or help pages, read on 8 October 2026. Comparison articles on this subject go out of date quickly, so follow the links rather than relying on this page, and assume at least one figure has changed since we checked.

The subscriptions, at list price

Claude Pro is $20 a month billed monthly, or $17 a month if you pay $200 up front for the year (Anthropic pricing). ChatGPT Plus is $20 a month, monthly only. OpenAI's help centre is explicit: "we do not support annual billing or the option to pay for multiple months in advance for ChatGPT Plus subscriptions."

Those are personal plans. The business plans are the ones a business should be pricing up. Both are sold by the seat, which simply means one paid login per person.

  • Claude Team, standard seat: $25 per seat per month billed monthly, or $20 per seat per month billed annually. Between 2 and 150 seats.
  • ChatGPT Business, standard seat: $25 per user per month billed monthly, or $20 billed annually. OpenAI says "A Business workspace requires at least 2 Standard or Premium seats in total."

Both also sell a heavier seat at the same price as each other, $125 per seat per month or $100 annually, for people running coding tools and long jobs. Most small businesses don't need one.

Five standard seats cost $125 a month, or $100 a month if you commit to a year.

What the extra $5 a seat buys

Moving from a personal plan to a business seat costs 25% more per person. In the main, it doesn't buy you a cleverer AI. It buys admin control, and it buys the right default on training, meaning whether your conversations can be used to improve the provider's AI.

Anthropic, on its commercial products: "By default, we will not use your inputs or outputs from our commercial products (e.g. Claude for Work, Anthropic API, Claude Gov, etc.) to train our models." OpenAI, on ChatGPT Business: "OpenAI won't train on your workspace's data." On the personal side, OpenAI's own page for the Go plan says the opposite: "OpenAI may use conversations to improve model performance and safety. You can opt out of having your data used for training at any time."

So that's what the upgrade really is. You're paying about $5 a person a month for the setting to be right from the start, rather than relying on five people to each remember to change it. Our article on whether AI trains on your business data goes into that in more detail.

Automations with more than one step cost money

An automation platform is the tool that connects your other apps and passes information between them, like a very reliable office junior who copies details from one system to another the moment they arrive. Each thing it does is usually counted as a "task".

Zapier's free plan gives you 100 tasks a month. In its plan comparison, the Steps row reads "Two-step" on Free and "Multi-step" on Professional. Two-step means one trigger and one action: "when this happens, do that". Very little useful business work is a single action. "When a form comes in, check whether we already know them, then create the record, then tell someone" is four steps.

Zapier Professional is $29.99 a month paid monthly for its smallest paid tier of 750 tasks a month. The "Starting from $19.99" on the pricing page is the price with the toggle on "Pay yearly (Save 33%)". The detail that's easy to miss is the seats row: Free 1, Professional 1, Team 25. Professional is a one-person plan. As soon as a second person needs to own or edit an automation, you're on Team, "Starting from $69" a month on yearly billing, or $103.50 a month paid monthly.

The alternatives are cheaper and a little less polished. Make gives 1,000 credits a month free, then shows Core from $12 a month for 10,000 credits, Pro from $21 and Teams from $38 on yearly billing, or $16, $28 and $51 paid monthly. n8n starts at €20 a month billed annually for 2,500 workflow runs. Its Community Edition is free to host yourself, which means running it on your own server, a bit like owning a van instead of using a courier: no delivery fee, but you handle the servicing, the updates and noticing when it breaks down.

Add a single Zapier Professional plan to five Claude Team seats and the monthly software bill is about $155, or about $120 if everything is on annual terms.

None of those prices are in pounds

Anthropic's billing guidance says it plainly: "Prices shown are for US customers and exclude applicable taxes. Pricing, currency, and tax handling vary by region." The pricing page carries the same footnote: "Prices shown don't include applicable tax."

OpenAI does bill in pounds here, and GBP appears on its supported currency list against the United Kingdom. But its own Go help page notes that "All purchases are in USD - we offer a local currency billing in a limited set of countries", so what you get depends on where you are and how you signed up. Zapier offers a pounds option on its pricing page, but it converts from the dollar price using an exchange rate held in the page itself, so the pound figure moves with the currency markets rather than being a fixed UK price. n8n showed us its prices in euros.

Then there's VAT. HMRC's guidance is that "the place of supply of cross-border digital services is the consumer's location" and that "if you are a business making supplies of digital services to UK consumers, those supplies are liable to UK VAT", at the standard rate of 20%. If you're VAT registered, you give the supplier your number, the sale is treated as business-to-business, and "the customer will be responsible for accounting for any VAT due to the tax authorities in their country", so it evens out. If your turnover is under the £90,000 registration threshold and you haven't registered voluntarily, that 20% is simply an extra cost.

So the honest budget line isn't $155. It's $155, plus or minus the exchange rate on the day your card is charged, plus 20% if you're not VAT registered.

The subscription is the cheapest part

The Office for National Statistics is fairly clear on this. Reviewing what stops businesses adopting AI, it reports that among businesses that do report a barrier, "a lack of expertise is one of the most cited barriers". In its June 2026 survey, cost was mentioned by around 7% to 14% of businesses across all size bands, while lack of expertise stood out, at around 18% among businesses with 100 to 249 employees. That survey only covers businesses with 10 or more employees, so a five-person firm sits below it, and it's best read as a general guide rather than a measure of businesses your size.

There are three costs no pricing page shows.

Working out what to automate. This is the big one, and it's mostly your time rather than money. It means someone looking at how the work really happens, not how the process document says it happens, and finding the parts that repeat the same way every time. Nobody can honestly give you a number of hours for this without looking at your business first.

This is the part we do. If you'd rather not work it out yourself, we're happy to look at how your work runs and set up the automations for you. Our work starts from £2,500, half when you book and half once it's working, and anything bigger is quoted after a free call. Our pricing page explains how.

Keeping things running. Most business software has a back door that other programs are allowed to knock on, called an API, and that's how automations connect. When an app changes that door, a form field gets renamed or someone reorganises a spreadsheet, an automation can stop working without telling anyone. It's sensible to budget for the fact that something set up in the spring may need attention later in the year.

Tools that turn out not to connect. Before paying for anything, check that the software you already use, such as your accounts package, your booking system or an older customer database, supports the specific action you need, rather than just appearing on a list of integrations. "It integrates" and "it does the one thing you want" are different claims. If you're not sure whether your tools will connect, we're happy to check that with you on a free call before you commit to any subscriptions.

What should you budget?

Take about $155 a month as the software starting point for five people, before VAT and currency conversion, and treat it as a minimum rather than an estimate. Then expect to spend far more in hours than in money over the first few months, because that's where the real cost is.

Pay monthly until the tools have proved themselves. The annual discount is real, around 20% on both business plans, but it's a poor trade if you discover in week six that two of your five seats aren't being used.

When your work does repeat, AI and automation can take a genuinely useful amount of routine work off your hands, and that's where the money is well spent. If every job you do is different, though, the automation platform probably isn't worth it for a business your size yet. Two or three business seats and nothing else is a perfectly sensible place to start.

If you'd like to see the kind of routine work that's worth automating, you can read about what we do.

Sources

Checked on 8 October 2026. Software prices change more often than almost anything else we write about, and every figure here is a list price in dollars or euros before tax. Treat the numbers as a shape, not a quote, and follow the links before you budget on them.

The next step

The cost of waiting is not zero.

Somewhere in your market, a business the same size as yours has stopped writing follow-ups by hand. They are quoting faster than you, chasing money you are still chasing manually, and starting Monday already knowing where they stand. That gap does not stay the same size.

Half an hour on the phone. You describe your week, we tell you honestly which parts of it are worth automating and which are cheaper left alone. No pitch, and nothing to sign - you decide whether you want to take it further.

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