Best AI tools for work: one per job costs $102 a month

Every listicle about the best AI tools for work is written to be clicked, which is why they all have twenty entries and no prices. We keep a catalogue of 54 services instead, sorted by the job rather than the brand, and we went through it this morning to answer one question with arithmetic: what does a working stack actually cost?

Ten jobs, $102.59 a month

Take the cheapest paid plan in each of the ten job functions and the bill comes to $102.59 a month, or $1,231 a year for one seat. That is ChatGPT at $9.10, Higgsfield at $9, OpenArt at $7, Moises at $3.99, Otter.ai at $8.33, Cursor at $20, QuillBot at $4.17, Manus at $20, Beautiful.ai at $12 and Hugging Face at $9. Nobody needs all ten, which is the point of pricing them separately.

“Comparing them on price is pointless, the plans have converged. They differ in what they will do with your files, your code and your voice.”

— Intokened catalogue, the general assistants section, https://intokened.com/en/ai

The spread inside a single function is wider than the gap between functions. Entry plans across the catalogue run from $3.99 to $59, a factor of fifteen, and the median entry plan is $16.49. Forty of the 54 take a monthly subscription; forty also offer a free tier that does real work rather than a trial. Seven publish no single paid figure at all, because they bill by usage or by country.

Where the money concentrates says something about the market. Image generation has nine services in the catalogue and video has eight, together a third of the field, and both sit at the cheap end: $7 and $9 to start. The two functions that cost $20 to enter are code and agents, which are the two where the tool is an AI agent doing the work rather than something accelerating yours. You pay for delegation, not for assistance.

Two habits that keep a stack honest

Two habits make the difference between a stack and a subscription pile. Price the free tier honestly: Moises takes five uploads a month without a card, and for a guitarist that is the whole product. And check the date on any price you read, including ours, because vendor pricing pages change without announcement. Every figure above was verified on 12 October 2026 and carries that date on its card.

The catalogue exists because we got tired of the alternative. How it is built, what goes in and what stays out is written up here. The short version: a service earns a card by doing one job well enough to name, and the card carries the price with the day we checked it.

Informational material, not investment advice and not a paid placement. No vendor in the catalogue pays for a card, every price above was checked on 12 October 2026, and vendors change plans without notice.