Every AI Business Tool I Use (And the 6 I Stopped Paying For)

I have a confession. At one point last year, I was paying for 14 different AI tools. Fourteen. My "AI stack" cost more per month than my actual office. Something had to give.

Over the past eight months, I have ruthlessly tested, compared, and culled. I went from 14 tools to 6. My monthly spend dropped from £487 to £127. And honestly? My output is better than it was before.

Here is exactly what I kept, what I ditched, and why.

What I Use Daily

Claude Pro — £18/month

This is my primary AI. I use Claude for writing long-form content, editing client proposals, brainstorming strategies, and working through complex problems. The writing quality is noticeably better than ChatGPT for anything over 500 words. It handles nuance without defaulting to corporate waffle, and the extended context window means I can feed in entire documents and get coherent analysis back.

I still use ChatGPT's free tier for quick tasks — one-off questions, simple rewrites, rapid brainstorming. But for anything that matters, Claude is the tool.

Mira.AI Launch Plan — Free

I built this, so I am biased. But I use it constantly with clients. When someone comes to me with a business idea, the first thing I do is run it through the Launch Plan. Thirty seconds later, we have a structured starting point: target customer, platform recommendation, pricing guidance, and 30-day action plan. It replaces what used to be a two-hour initial consultation of me asking questions and sketching out frameworks on a whiteboard.

For my own projects, I use it to stress-test new ideas. If the Launch Plan output looks thin or unconvincing, the idea probably needs more work before I commit time to it.

MiraReach — £49/month

Customer acquisition is the lifeblood of my business. MiraReach handles prospecting, research, and outreach. It finds businesses matching my criteria, researches them, writes personalised emails, and manages follow-up sequences. I review and approve everything before it sends — the human-in-the-loop approach matters to me.

Last month, MiraReach generated 47 qualified conversations from a pool of 300 prospects. That is a 15.7% conversation rate. Manual outreach, in my experience, gets 3-5%. The time saving alone justifies the cost, but the quality improvement is what keeps me paying.

Canva Pro — £10/month

I use Canva for everything visual. Social media graphics, presentation decks, proposal covers, email headers, blog images. The brand kit feature ensures consistency across everything. The AI features — Magic Eraser, text-to-image, background removal — save me from needing a separate design tool for basic edits.

I considered switching to Adobe Express, which has improved massively. But Canva's template ecosystem is still unmatched for non-designers. I am not a designer. I need things to look good without requiring design skills. Canva delivers.

Notion AI — £8/month (add-on to Notion)

My entire business runs on Notion. Client projects, content calendars, meeting notes, knowledge base, task management. The AI add-on is genuinely useful for summarising meeting notes, generating action items from messy brainstorms, and searching across my workspace with natural language queries.

Is it essential? No. Notion without AI is still brilliant. But the AI features save me roughly 30 minutes a day on admin tasks. Over a month, that is 10 hours reclaimed. Worth £8 by any calculation.

Wix — £22/month

My website and blog run on Wix. It is not an AI tool per se, but the AI site builder and built-in SEO tools make it relevant. The blog you are reading right now is hosted on Wix. The SEO dashboard shows me which articles are ranking, which keywords are growing, and where to focus next. For a small business, it is a competent all-in-one platform.

What I Cancelled (And Why)

1. Jasper — was £39/month

I used Jasper for over a year. It was one of the first AI writing tools I adopted. But here is the truth: ChatGPT and Claude made it redundant.

When Jasper launched, the value proposition was clear — it gave you access to GPT-powered writing with templates and workflows optimised for marketing copy. But now that you can access GPT-4 directly through ChatGPT (free or £16/month for Plus), and Claude offers superior long-form writing, Jasper's templates do not justify the premium.

The "Brand Voice" feature was interesting but never quite worked as advertised. I spent hours training it and still had to heavily edit the output. Claude produces better on-brand content with a simple prompt that includes my tone guidelines.

Monthly saving: £39

2. Copy.ai — was £36/month

Copy.ai is a template machine. Pick a template — product description, ad copy, email subject line — fill in the inputs, get output. It works. The output is decent. But it is also formulaic.

Every output felt like it came from the same mould. After three months, I could spot "Copy.ai voice" in my own marketing, and that is not a compliment. The templates encourage you to fit your business into predefined structures rather than developing genuinely distinctive copy.

I replaced it entirely with Claude and a set of custom prompts. More effort to set up initially, but the output is unique to my brand rather than to a template library shared by thousands of other businesses.

Monthly saving: £36

3. Writesonic — was £16/month

Writesonic's problem was reliability. The content it produced was sometimes excellent and sometimes completely fabricated. Hallucinations were frequent, particularly with facts, statistics, and claims. I found myself fact-checking every piece so thoroughly that the time saving evaporated.

For blog content especially, accuracy matters. One fabricated statistic in a published article damages your credibility with everyone who reads it. I could not trust Writesonic's output without line-by-line verification, which defeated the purpose of using it.

Claude hallucinates too, occasionally. But at a significantly lower rate, and it tends to flag uncertainty rather than presenting fabrications with confidence.

Monthly saving: £16

4. LivePlan — was £16/month

LivePlan is a business plan generator. You fill in sections, it helps you write projections, and it produces a formatted document. It is well-made software. But the Mira.AI Launch Plan replaced its core function for free.

Here is the thing about business plan generators: they encourage you to write 30-page documents that nobody reads. LivePlan makes the process efficient, but it does not question whether the process is worthwhile. For the two occasions a year I need a formal business plan (client visa applications), I use Claude to generate one in an afternoon. The other 363 days, the Launch Plan covers what I need.

Monthly saving: £16

5. Semrush (paid plan) — was £108/month

This one hurt. Semrush is genuinely excellent software. The keyword research, competitor analysis, and backlink tracking are best-in-class. But £108 a month for a small business is steep, particularly when you are not a full-time SEO professional.

What I discovered: Semrush's free tier gives you 10 searches per day. Combined with Wix's built-in SEO tools (which have improved dramatically), Google Search Console (free), and the occasional manual SERP check, I get 80% of the insight at 0% of the cost.

The 20% I lose — deep competitor backlink analysis, rank tracking at scale, content gap analysis — is useful but not critical for a business my size. If I were managing SEO for 10+ client sites, I would pay for Semrush without hesitation. For my own site and blog, the free alternatives are sufficient.

Monthly saving: £108

6. Lately (AI social media scheduler) — was £29/month

Lately promised to use AI to break long-form content into social media posts and schedule them optimally. The concept is brilliant. The execution was underwhelming.

The AI-generated social posts were mediocre. They pulled sentences from my blog posts but rarely created compelling standalone content. I spent as much time editing the AI output as I would have spent writing posts from scratch.

I replaced it with Buffer's free tier (scheduling three channels is enough for me) and a 30-minute Sunday session where I use Claude to generate the week's social content. Better quality, zero cost for the scheduling, and a workflow that actually fits how I work.

Monthly saving: £29

The Final Tally

£244 saved per month. £2,928 per year. And the quality of my output improved because I stopped context-switching between a dozen platforms and learned to use fewer tools more effectively.

The Lesson

The AI tools market wants you to believe you need a specialist tool for everything. An AI writer. An AI designer. An AI scheduler. An AI SEO tool. An AI business planner. An AI this, an AI that.

You do not.

You need one excellent general-purpose AI (Claude or ChatGPT), one tool for execution that your general AI cannot do (MiraReach for customer acquisition, in my case), and a handful of non-AI tools that are simply good at their job (Canva, Notion, Wix, Buffer).

The rest is overhead. It feels productive to sign up for new tools. It feels like progress to explore dashboards and watch tutorials. But the real progress happens when you pick your tools, learn them deeply, and spend the rest of your time on actual work.

My stack is six tools. Total cost: £107/month. It does everything a £487/month stack did, and does most of it better. The constraint was never the tools. It was how I used them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Claude really better than ChatGPT for business writing?

For long-form content, yes. Claude produces more natural, nuanced prose and is better at maintaining a consistent tone across lengthy documents. For short tasks — quick rewrites, one-off questions, rapid ideation — ChatGPT is marginally faster and its free tier is perfectly adequate. I use both. Claude is my primary tool for anything client-facing or published. ChatGPT handles the quick-and-dirty tasks. If I could only have one, I would keep Claude, but the honest answer is that both are excellent and the gap is narrower than most reviews suggest.

How do you decide when an AI tool is worth paying for?

I apply a simple test: does this tool save me more time or money per month than it costs? If a £49/month tool saves me 5 hours of work per month, and my time is worth more than £10/hour, it pays for itself. If a free alternative gets me 80% of the result, the paid tool needs to justify the remaining 20% in concrete terms. Most fail that test. The tools I keep are the ones where the free alternatives are meaningfully worse, not just slightly less polished.

Will this stack work for a business just starting out?

Start with the free tiers of everything. ChatGPT free, Canva free, Buffer free, Notion free, the Mira.AI Launch Plan. That costs you nothing and covers planning, content, design, scheduling, and organisation. Add MiraReach when you are ready to actively acquire customers. Add Claude Pro when the free tier limits your output. Add Canva Pro when you need brand consistency. Build the stack gradually as revenue justifies each addition. There is no reason to spend £107/month before you have £107/month in revenue.

Want to build your own lean AI stack? Start with a free Mira.AI Launch Plan to map out your business, then explore MiraReach when you are ready to find customers.