Open your bank app and count the AI subscriptions. Go on. If you work in marketing, there’s a good chance you’re paying for at least three tools that all do roughly the same thing, and using one of them properly.
Here’s our honest guide to what earns its monthly fee, and what you can cancel today.
Pay for one AI assistant, not three
ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro and Google AI Pro (Gemini) all sit at around the same price, roughly $20 a month in the US with local pricing elsewhere. They’re all very good at drafting, rewriting, summarising and brainstorming. The differences between them matter far less than how well you use the one you’ve got.
Pick one. Try the free versions side by side on your real work for a week, choose the one whose writing sounds most like you, and stick with it. Build up your saved instructions, your brand voice notes and your go-to prompts in that one tool. That’s where the time savings actually come from.
Worth every penny if you use them weekly
- Canva Pro. If you make graphics every week, the brand kit, one-click resizing and background remover pay for themselves. Its AI tools are part of the same subscription, so you may not need a separate image tool at all.
- A proper short-form video editor. If Reels and TikToks are your job, auto-captions and quick cuts save hours. CapCut Pro, for example, was £21.99 a month or £199.99 a year in the UK as of July 2026, so pay yearly if you’re committed.
- Your one AI assistant. See above. One, used properly, every day.
The best AI tool is the one you’ve actually learned to use.
The ones to cancel
- Your second and third chatbot. Unless you genuinely use them for different jobs every week, they’re duplicates.
- Single-job “AI copywriting” apps. Many of them are built on the same models your assistant already gives you. If it only writes captions or product descriptions, your main assistant can do that with a good saved prompt.
- Caption and hashtag generators. Same story. And the captions that perform best still sound like a person wrote them.
- Meeting note-takers you never open. Zoom and Google Meet include AI meeting notes on many paid plans, and Microsoft offers it through Copilot. Check what you already have first.
- Anything you signed up to for a free trial. You know the one.
Do a ten-minute subscription audit
List every tool, what it costs a year (not a month, it’s more sobering), when you last used it, and what else you pay for that does the same job. Keep anything you use weekly that nothing else covers. Cancel the rest. You can always come back, and most of these tools will have changed completely in six months anyway.
Prices change all the time, so check each tool’s pricing page before you subscribe or renew.
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