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 that bundles the tools together 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.
| Tool | What it's for | Plan | Listed price | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT Plus | Text, ideas, scripts | Plus | $20/month | Advanced models, higher usage limits |
| Claude Pro | Long text, analysis, code | Pro | $20/month | Roughly 5x the free plan's limits |
| Midjourney | Images, light use | Basic | $10/month | Around 200 fast images per month |
| Midjourney | Images, regular use | Standard | $30/month | 15 hours of fast generation, then relax mode |
| Suno | Music | Pro | $10/month | 2,500 credits, around 500 tracks, commercial rights |
| ElevenLabs | Voice-over | Creator | $22/month | Around 100,000 characters per month |
| Runway | Generative video | Standard | $15/month | 625 credits per month |
| HeyGen | Talking avatars | Creator | $29/month | Around 30 minutes of video per month |
| Canva | Editing, formats, retouching | Pro | €11.99/month | Templates, resizing, backgrounds |
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: a single subscription that includes the tools and the credits
Bundling text, image, video and music into one subscription brings the bill down to €29.90 a month, roughly a third of the cost of a stack of separate tools.
That's the idea behind the Skilzy AI Lab: you learn to create, and you create directly inside the platform with the real tools, with credits 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 simple: €29.90 a month with no commitment, so €358.80 a year, against €1,020 for the light stack described above. That's a gap of more than €650 a year. The full breakdown of what's included in each plan is 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.
To try before you pay, the discovery demo gives you 7 days with 1 image, 1 video, 1 track and 10 messages, with no credit card. It's not much, and it's designed to check that the interface suits you, not to produce a campaign.
Let's be honest about the limits: if you generate 2,000 images a month for a product catalog, a dedicated Midjourney subscription will still be a better fit for that specific job. The single-subscription logic wins when you touch several formats at moderate volume, which describes the vast majority of creators. The reasoning is the same one laid out in our comparison, an alternative to ChatGPT Plus with one subscription for every model.
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.
| Tool | Free tier | Where it breaks down |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Yes, lighter model | Low message limits, advanced features restricted |
| Claude | Yes | Daily quota hit fast on long texts |
| Midjourney | No, removed back in 2023 | No free trial at all, paid plan required |
| Suno | Yes, 50 credits per day | Around 10 tracks, no commercial rights |
| ElevenLabs | Yes, 10,000 characters per month | Attribution required, commercial use restricted |
| Canva | Yes | Many templates and elements are Pro-only |
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.
| Your profile | Monthly volume | Method | Realistic budget |
|---|---|---|---|
| You're just exploring, you want a look | A few experiments | Discovery demo with no credit card, then free tiers | €0 |
| You publish 1 to 2 pieces a week, across several formats | 20 visuals, 4 videos, 2 tracks | Method 1, single subscription | €29.90 |
| You automate text, you're technically comfortable | Irregular | Method 3, pay-per-use API | €5 to €20 |
| You produce high volume in a single format | 500 images or more | Dedicated subscription to that tool | €30 to €60 |
| You tackle a project in bursts | Occasional and intense | Method 4, monthly rotation | €10 to €30 |
| You want a certification eligible for funding | Regular | Method 1 with a certification track | €29.90, funding possible |
A simple rule to settle it: as soon as you're using three different paid tools, the single subscription becomes cheaper. Below three, a dedicated plan or the API usually still wins.
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: seven days without a credit card is enough to know whether a tool fits the way you work.
