The Real Monthly Cost of AI Tools for a 5-Person Team (What We Actually Pay)
The advertised price on an AI tool’s pricing page is rarely what you end up paying. Usage caps, seat minimums, and “essential” add-ons push the real number up — sometimes by 40-60%. Here’s what a 5-person team at our own agency actually spends across writing, coding, and design tools.
Core LLM subscription
- Claude Team: $25-30/seat = ~$140/month for 5 seats
- ChatGPT Team: $25-30/seat = ~$140/month for 5 seats
We pay for one of these fully as the team default, plus individual Plus/Pro accounts for the 1-2 people who lean on the other — add roughly $20-40/month for that overlap.
Our line item: ~$180/month
Code assistant
- Claude Code usage on the API, pay-as-you-go, typically runs $50-150/month for a small team depending on how heavily it’s used.
Our line item: ~$100/month
Design / image generation
- Increasingly covered by image generation bundled into our existing Claude/ChatGPT subscriptions above, which has reduced what we used to spend on a dedicated image tool.
Our line item: ~$20-30/month
Automation / glue
- n8n self-hosted on our own VPS: effectively free beyond server cost we’re already paying for other projects.
Our line item: near $0, since we run it on infrastructure we already have
Meeting/transcription tools
- A transcription tool for the people who need it, not the whole team: ~$30-45/month.
The real monthly total
| Category | What we actually pay |
|---|---|
| Core LLM | ~$180 |
| Code assistant | ~$100 |
| Design | ~$25 |
| Automation | ~$0 (self-hosted) |
| Meetings | ~$35 |
| Total | ~$340/month |
That’s roughly $68 per person per month — not the $20 “starting at” price most vendors lead with. Still cheap relative to the hours it saves each week, but budget for the real number, not the marketing number, when deciding whether the investment pencils out for your own team.
Where we’ve seen teams overspend
The most common waste: paying for premium seats on tools that 1-2 people actually use daily and the rest touch once a month. We audit actual usage after 60 days and downgrade seats that aren’t earning their cost — most platforms let you do this without losing account history.