How to choose an AI tool: test it on your own work before paying

You can pick an AI tool in an afternoon and then pay for it for a year. Our AI catalogue of 64 services shows what that order costs you: free plans with catches, annual prices that only look cheap, and data settings the pricing page skips. If you are working out how to choose an AI tool, a one-month test on your own work catches most of it.

Start with the task

Write down the one task you want off your plate in a sentence, such as “transcribe client calls” or “cut an ad from my own footage”. The catalogue sorts services into ten jobs, and our role guide from this morning maps them to professions. Pick two candidates from the same job.

Read the free plan’s small print

Of the 64 services, 49 have a free plan, and 17 of those carry a catch you notice only in use:

• 10 put a watermark on the result, Descript, HeyGen, Runway and Synthesia among them;
• 5 give a one-off allowance that does not renew, such as Gamma’s 400 credits;
• 4 block commercial use or require attribution: ElevenLabs, Meshy, Recraft and Suno.

With a watermark on, you can judge quality but can’t send the result to a client. Fifteen services have no free plan at all: Jasper gives a seven-day trial, and Midjourney gives nothing.

Test on your own material

Run the same three real tasks through both candidates in one week: an easy one, a typical one, and one that went wrong last time. Use your own files instead of the vendor’s demo prompts, and write down how many minutes you spend fixing each result.

Before you upload client files, check where they go. Seven services in the catalogue state that your data can stay out of model training: ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, DeepL, Fireflies.ai, Granola and Jasper. For the rest, find that setting or that plan first, or test with material you could publish. An AI agent that works inside your inbox or code repository sees more than a chat window, so read its permissions too.

Pay monthly first

Annual billing saves money only if you still use the tool in month ten. In our catalogue the gap reaches almost four times, at Beautiful.ai:

• Beautiful.ai Pro: $12 a month billed yearly, $45 billed monthly;
• Speechify Premium: $11.58 against $29;
• QuillBot Premium: $4.17 against $9.95;
• Otter.ai Pro: $8.33 against $16.99.

Pay one or two months at the monthly price and move to annual once the tool saves you time each week. Vendors change prices as well, so every card shows its check date. We checked these between 12 October and 2 November.

Prices and plan terms come from vendors’ pricing pages as checked for our catalogue. Vendors change them without notice, and some set prices by country.