// the tuesday guide

Which AI subscription is worth it for your business in 2026

2026 · 09 · 08 — THE TUESDAY GUIDEWhich AI subscription is really worth it

The scene repeats itself in every office, shop and workshop that has tried artificial intelligence in the past year: three active subscriptions, one used every day, the other two just sitting there making noise on the bank statement. €20 here, €15 there, €10 for a service activated in March and never opened again: that's €500 a year going out without anyone being able to say what they produced in return.

The problem isn't the price, which is low. The problem is that the choice is made backwards: you start from the name you heard at the bar or in an Instagram video, instead of from the work you want off your desk. This guide takes the opposite route and in twenty minutes gets you to a single decision, with the September 2026 price lists in hand.

1 · Before the price comes the work

None of these tools is “the best” outright: they're good at different things. So the first question isn't which one to choose, it's which job is stealing the most of your time every week. In small Italian businesses the recurring jobs are four, and you can count them on one hand.

Writing: emails to customers, quotes, product descriptions, website copy, posts. It's the most common case and also the one where the difference between one tool and another shows most, because you can hear the tone. Reading and summarizing: contracts, specifications, tenders, forty-page PDFs from which you need one line. Making images: product photos, social media graphics, flyers. Running something on its own: a chatbot on your website, automatic sorting of incoming requests, data extraction from incoming documents. Careful, because this last one isn't a subscription: it's a project, and further on we'll see why the difference weighs on the bill.

2 · What they really cost, as of September 2026

Here are the price lists in euros, for a single user, as they stand today. ChatGPT has three tiers: Go at about €8 a month, Plus at about €23, Pro at about €103. Claude Pro sits around €15 a month. Google starts at about €5 with AI Plus and goes up to €21.99 with AI Pro, which brings 2 TB of storage shared across Gmail, Drive and Photos. Microsoft 365 Personal, with Copilot included, runs about €10 a month.

Two things to note, because they're the ones that make the difference on the bill. First: the top tier — the €100 Pro — is for people grinding through heavy work all day, not for someone who writes ten emails and two quotes. Nine times out of ten the middle tier is already oversized. Second: the €5 or €8 plan isn't a crippled version, it's the same thing with fewer messages per day. If you run out, you found out by spending €8 instead of €23, and you move up the following month.

3 · Look at what you're already paying for

This is the step almost everyone skips, and it's the one that saves the most. Over the past year and a half, providers have slipped artificial intelligence into subscriptions you already have, often raising the price by a couple of euros and sending an email nobody read. Google Workspace Business Standard — the mailbox with your own domain, the one you've been paying for for years — went up to about €16.80 per user per month precisely because they put Gemini inside it: if you use it, you're already paying for Google's AI. Same story for anyone with Microsoft 365 in the office, and Copilot.

The result is the most widespread trap of 2026: paying twice for the same tool, once inside a bundle and once as a separate subscription activated out of curiosity. Before adding a line to your bank statement, open the list of recurring charges on your card and read what the ones already there now include.

4 · Just one, and for at least three months

The temptation to keep two “to compare them” is strong and needs to be cleared away right now: whoever keeps two ends up using both badly. These tools perform in proportion to how well you know them, not to how powerful they are — the difference between a mediocre result and a good one almost always lies in how you asked the question, not in the model that answered.

So: just one, for three months, the one that covers job number one on your list. In three months you learn its habits, figure out where it goes wrong and build your own repertoire of requests that work. Only then, if you have a specific reason — not curiosity — do you consider a second one. And if in the meantime a new one comes out that everyone is talking about, just make a mental note of it: switching tools every six weeks means staying forever at day-one level.

5 · When paying per use beats the flat fee

There's a second door almost nobody opens, and for certain jobs it's the right one. Besides subscriptions there's pay-as-you-go: you pay for the work the tool actually does, measured to the cent, with no fixed fee. It's the road to take when the AI isn't supposed to chat with you but to work on its own inside one of your processes: the chatbot answering customers on your website at night, the system that reads incoming invoices and sorts them, the automation that writes product listings starting from the price list.

The difference on the bill is big and goes in the right direction. An automation handling a few hundred requests a month, at current prices, generally costs a few euros — we're talking figures below the cost of a single subscription — because you pay only for what it consumes. And prices per unit of work have gone down over the past year, not up: the latest version of Claude, released in early September, costs about 25% less than the previous one. The flip side is that pay-as-you-go has to be set up once by someone who knows what they're doing, and it has to be watched: there's no automatic ceiling here like there is with a subscription.

6 · The twenty-minute test

Let's close with the procedure, which is short and done only once. Five minutes: write down the three jobs that weigh on you most, in order of hours lost. Ten minutes: open the recurring charges on your card from the past six months, mark what you're already paying for and cancel what you haven't opened in the past month. Five minutes: activate a single subscription, the base tier, the one that covers job number one — and set the three-month alarm.

If the three jobs reveal that the problem isn't writing or reading, but a piece of process that repeats itself identically every day, then the choice isn't between ChatGPT and Claude: it's between keeping that job manual or handing it to a system built around your business. That's exactly the starting point of AI consulting for SMEs, and the honest answer is sometimes “keep doing it by hand”: if you do a job twice a month, automating it costs more than it returns.

In short

Start from the work you want off your desk, not from the name of the tool. The September 2026 price lists say that for a small business the right figure is between €8 and €15 a month, and that the €100 tier is for a different line of work. Before activating anything, check what you're already paying for: Gemini is inside Workspace and Copilot inside Microsoft 365, and double spending is the most common mistake of the year. Then just one, for three months, with an alarm on your phone. And if what you need isn't a tool to talk to but a job that gets done on its own while you do something else, a subscription isn't the answer: that's paid per use and built once.

Sources: AI Subscription Pricing Comparison 2026 (price lists compared) · Fastweb Plus (what you get by paying for an AI chatbot) · bryan.it (how much Copilot costs) · GPTPrompts (Google AI Pro and Ultra prices in Italy) · Google Workspace (official per-user price list) · Mailbird (the Workspace price increase with Gemini included) · Anthropic (Claude Fable 5.1 and the price cut).

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