What your AI stack actually costs
Everything on this site is free. This is the one thing that isn't — the same verified data, in a calculator that prices your stack and tells you what to cancel.
40 tools · 162 plans · prices last read 2026-09-04
What's in it
The AI Stack Cost Calculator
A working spreadsheet with 500 live formulas, preloaded with every tool and plan on this site. Tick what you pay for, set your seat counts, and it returns four numbers: your real monthly spend, your annual spend, the discount you're leaving on the table by not paying yearly, and the categories where you're funding two tools to do one job.
.xlsx — Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets, LibreOffice
The Operator's Guide
Fifteen pages. The five places AI money leaks, six complete stacks costed from $18 to $390 a month, five head-to-heads inside the crowded categories, a library of five decision prompts, and a thirty-minute quarterly audit you can actually keep doing.
The one number
Across the 17 plans we track that publish both a monthly and an annual price, the average discount for paying yearly is 26%. The largest is Otter.ai Pro at 51% — the same seat costs $203.88 a year or $99.96 a year depending on which button you clicked when you signed up.
Most people clicked the wrong one. The calculator finds every instance of this in your own stack in about ten minutes.
What it isn't
It isn't a prompt pack, it isn't a list of 500 tools you'll never open, and it doesn't promise you passive income. It's a spreadsheet that tells you the truth about a bill you're already paying, and a short book about what to do with that.
Before you buy
- Prices are US list prices. Several vendors charge different rates by country — the guide covers this, with the exact figures OpenAI shows in South Africa versus the US.
- Four of the 44 tools we track are excluded — Google Gemini, Perplexity, Lovable and Apollo render their pricing in a way we can't yet read honestly. A guessed number is worth less than an admitted gap.
- Vendors change prices without warning. That's why this site exists. The kit is a snapshot with a date on it; the site is the running record, and it stays free.