The real price of creating with AI (ChatGPT, Midjourney, Suno) and how to split the bill

You want to generate images, write scripts, produce a track and a voice-over. Taken one at a time, each tool costs about as much as a restaurant meal. Stacked end to end, the bill looks more like a premium gym membership: between €85 and €150 a month for someone covering text, image, video, music and voice. That's €1,000 to €1,800 a year, before you've published a single thing.

Here we break down, line by line, what ChatGPT, Midjourney, Suno and their neighbors actually cost, including the fees nobody puts on the pricing page: VAT, foreign exchange charges, credits that expire, annual commitments. Then four concrete ways to bring the total down, from a single subscription for text and images to pay-as-you-go usage. At the end, a table tells you which option matches your real output volume, and how much you save.

What a full AI toolkit really costs in 2026

A creator covering text, image, video, music and voice pays between €85 and €150 a month including tax, or €1,000 to €1,800 over a year.

Here are the most common entry-level plans. The amounts are the ones listed by the vendors, excluding promotions and excluding tax for services billed in dollars. These price grids move often: always check the official page before you pull out your card, for example the official ChatGPT pricing.

Two scenarios to make this concrete.

The light stack. ChatGPT Plus, Midjourney Basic, Suno Pro, ElevenLabs Creator and Runway Standard: $77 a month. Once French VAT and exchange fees are applied, your bank statement shows around €85. Over twelve months: €1,020.

The full stack. Same thing, but Midjourney on Standard (because 200 images stop being enough), plus HeyGen for avatars and Canva for editing: roughly $126 and €11.99, so close to €150 a month. Over twelve months: €1,800.

That number is shocking, but it's completely ordinary. Most people never see it coming because each subscription was signed up for in a different month, on a different card, for a one-off need that quietly became permanent.

The hidden fees that inflate the bill by about 25%

Between the price shown on the vendor's site and the amount actually charged, the gap runs around 25%, thanks to VAT, currency conversion and credits that don't roll over.

Here are the six line items that create the difference.

• VAT at 20%. Dollar prices are listed excluding tax. A private individual in France pays 20% more. The $20 for ChatGPT Plus becomes $24 on the statement.
• Foreign exchange fees. Most bank cards apply 1 to 3% on a payment in a foreign currency, sometimes with a flat fee per transaction. Across five monthly subscriptions, it adds up.
• Credits that don't roll over. With Suno, Runway or ElevenLabs, unused credits vanish on the renewal date. A month on vacation is a month paid for nothing.
• Being pushed up a tier. On Midjourney, keeping your images private (stealth mode) is only included from the Pro plan at $60 a month, double the Standard. On Suno, commercial rights to your tracks require a paid plan.
• The annual commitment. That 15 to 20% discount means paying twelve months up front. On a tool you abandon after three months, the discount turns into a pure loss.
• Forgotten subscriptions. This is the number one source of waste. A tool you tried in January and never reopened keeps charging you every month. Run the test: open your last six months of statements and count.

Method 1: one subscription for text and images, credits included

Bundling text and a few images into a single subscription lightens your tool stack, but video, music and voice still have to be covered separately.

That's the idea behind the Skilzy AI Lab: you learn to create, and you create directly inside the platform, with chat for your texts and credits for your images included in the subscription. You're not juggling multiple bank cards, passwords and billing dates. More than 15 programs cover image generation, video (UGC, ads, faceless channels, avatars, voice-over), music, prompt writing, automation with n8n and AI-assisted coding.

The math is done line by line: in the light stack described above, the single subscription replaces ChatGPT Plus and covers light image use, but not Suno, ElevenLabs or Runway. Music, voice and video still have to be paid for separately. What is included is detailed on the Skilzy pricing page.

A second lever on cost: two state-recognized certifications are available through the platform, RS7439 (content marketing with AI) and RS6792 (AI and sales). They're eligible for funding, which changes the nature of the expense: it's no longer a hobby subscription, it's training that can be partly covered depending on your situation. You can check the official registration on the RS7439 record at France Compétences.

Let's be honest about the limits: the included credits are enough for a few images a month; if you generate hundreds of images for a product catalog, a dedicated Midjourney subscription will still be the better fit. And for video, music or voice-over, you will need a specialized tool anyway. The single-subscription logic wins when your main need is text, with a few visuals on the side. The reasoning is the same one laid out in our comparison, an alternative to ChatGPT Plus with one subscription.

Method 2: squeezing the most out of the free tiers

Free plans are enough for learning and for occasional use, but they almost always hit a wall on three things: volume, resolution and commercial rights.

They exist, they're useful, and an article that hid them from you would cost you money. Here's the real state of the main ones.

The strategy that works: start entirely on free tiers for two to three weeks, note what genuinely blocks you, and pay only for the line that blocks you. Nine times out of ten, it isn't the one you expected.

Watch out for one classic trap, though: chaining five free tools together for a single task costs time, and time gets paid for too. We measured it on a specific case in cutting out, changing the background, cropping: five tools or one. And on image retouching specifically, the line between what free tools do very well and what they miss is detailed in cutting out an image: when free tools are enough, and when they give up.

Methods 3 and 4: pay per use, or run a single subscription at a time

If you produce in bursts rather than every day, API access billed by consumption and monthly rotation of a single subscription often come in under €15 a month.

Method 3: the API and prepaid credits

Instead of paying a fixed plan, you top up an account and get charged for each use. For text, moderate use comes to a few euros a month, well below the $20 of a subscription. For images, budget somewhere around 3 to 8 cents per generation depending on the model and size.

Two caveats: you need to be comfortable with an API key and a technical interface, and not every tool offers it. Music and generative video are still mostly sold as subscriptions, with no metered equivalent. So this method mainly suits text and image, and rather someone who already automates tasks, as in our guide to automating social media publishing.

Method 4: monthly rotation

One active subscription at a time, no commitment, switched each month depending on what you're producing. Month 1: Midjourney to build up a bank of visuals. Month 2: cancel it and take Suno for your music. Month 3: ElevenLabs for the voice-overs.

Average cost: €10 to €30 a month instead of €85. The conditions for making it work: never take an annual plan, put a cancellation reminder in your calendar two days before renewal, and accept working in blocks rather than continuously. It's the cheapest method, and the one that demands the most discipline.

Which method for which profile

The right choice comes down to a single variable: the number of different formats you produce each month, not your technical level.

One simple rule to settle it: if you pay for both a text assistant and an image generator for light use, the single subscription is worth running the numbers on. For video, music or voice, a dedicated plan, the API or rotation remain the right levers.

What to take away

The real cost isn't the listed price: add 25% for VAT, currency conversion and lost credits. Before making any decision, open your bank statement and list the AI subscriptions you pay for without ever opening them: that's often where the first savings are, before you even change method. Then choose based on the number of formats you produce, not on whichever tool everyone is talking about. And test before you pay: free tiers are often enough to know whether a tool fits the way you work.