You want to generate images, write scripts, produce a music track and a voiceover. 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 high-end 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 anything at all.
Here we break down, line by line, what ChatGPT, Midjourney, Suno, and their neighbors really cost, including the fees nobody puts on the pricing page: VAT, currency conversion fees, credits that expire, annual commitments. Then, four concrete ways to bring the total down, from a single subscription that bundles the tools to pay-as-you-go. At the end, a table tells you which option matches your actual production 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 before tax for services billed in dollars. These price grids change often: always check the official page before pulling 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 5 times the free tier'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 | Voiceover | 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 VAT and currency fees are applied, your bank statement shows about €85. Over twelve months: €1,020.
The full stack. The same thing, but Midjourney on Standard (because 200 images no longer cut it), 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 don't see it coming because each subscription gets signed up in a different month, on a different card, for a one-off need that quietly turns permanent.
The hidden fees that inflate the bill by about 25%
Between the price listed on the vendor's site and the amount actually charged to your account, 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.
- 20% VAT. Dollar prices are listed before tax. A private individual in France pays 20% more. The $20 for ChatGPT Plus becomes $24 on the statement.
- Currency conversion fees. Most bank cards charge 1 to 3% on a payment in a foreign currency, sometimes with a flat fee per transaction. Across five monthly subscriptions, you notice it.
- Credits that don't roll over. With Suno, Runway, or ElevenLabs, unused credits vanish on your renewal date. A month away on vacation is a month paid for nothing.
- Being pushed up to the higher tier. On Midjourney, keeping your images private (stealth mode) is only included starting with 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 upfront. On a tool you abandon after three months, the discount turns into a straight loss.
- Forgotten subscriptions. This is the number one source of waste. A tool you tried in January and never opened again keeps charging you every single month. Try it: open your last six months of statements and count.
Method 1: one subscription that includes the tools and the credits
Bundling text, image, video, and music into a single subscription brings the bill down to €29.90 a month, about a third of the cost of a stack of separate tools.
That's the idea behind Skilzy's AI Lab: you learn to create, and you create right inside the platform with the real tools, with credits included in the subscription. No juggling multiple bank cards, passwords, and billing dates. More than 15 programs cover image generation, video (UGC, ads, faceless channels, avatars, voiceovers), 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, versus €1,020 for the light stack described above. That's a gap of more than €650 a year. The details of what's included in each plan are on the Skilzy pricing page.
A second lever on cost: two state-recognized certifications are available from 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 you may be able to get partly covered depending on your situation. You can check the official listing on the France Compétences RS7439 record.
To try before you pay, the discovery demo gives you 7 days with 1 image, 1 video, 1 music track, and 10 messages, no credit card required. It's not much, and it isn't meant to be: it's there so you can check that the interface suits you, not so you can 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 the better fit for that specific job. The single-subscription logic wins when you work across several formats at moderate volume, which describes the vast majority of creators. It's the same reasoning we laid out in our comparison of an alternative to ChatGPT Plus with a single subscription for every model.
Method 2: squeeze everything you can 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 genuinely useful, and an article that hid them from you would cost you money. Here's where the main ones actually stand.
| Tool | Free plan | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Yes, lighter model | Low message limits, advanced features restricted |
| Claude | Yes | Daily quota runs out fast on long texts |
| Midjourney | No, dropped 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 | Lots of templates and elements locked behind Pro |
The strategy that works: start entirely on free plans for two to three weeks, note what actually blocks you, and pay only for the one thing that blocks you. Nine times out of ten, it isn't the one you expected.
Still, watch out for a classic trap: chaining five free tools together for a single task costs time, and time has a price too. We measured it on a specific case in cutting out, changing the background, cropping: five tools or one. And on image retouching in particular, the line between what free tools handle beautifully and what they fumble 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 rotate a single subscription
If you produce in bursts rather than every day, pay-as-you-go API access and rotating a single monthly subscription often land under €15 a month.
Method 3: APIs and prepaid credits
Instead of paying a fixed monthly fee, you top up an account and get charged for each use. For text, moderate use comes to a few euros a month, well under the $20 of a flat plan. For images, budget somewhere around 3 to 8 cents per generation depending on the model and the 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 sold mostly by subscription, with no metered equivalent. So this method mainly suits text and image, and mainly someone who already automates tasks, like in our guide to automating social media publishing.
Method 4: monthly rotation
One active subscription at a time, no commitment, switched every month depending on what you're producing. Month 1: Midjourney to build up a bank of visuals. Month 2: you cancel and take Suno for your music. Month 3: ElevenLabs for the voiceovers.
Average cost: €10 to €30 a month instead of €85. The conditions for making it work: never take an annual plan, set a cancellation reminder two days ahead in your calendar, 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 only want a look | A few tries | Discovery demo with no credit card, then free plans | €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 and you're technically comfortable | Irregular | Method 3, pay-as-you-go API | €5 to €20 |
| You produce high volume in a single format | 500 images or more | Dedicated subscription for that one tool | €30 to €60 |
| You're tackling a project in blocks | 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 |
One 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 often still wins.
What to remember
The real cost isn't the listed price: add 25% for VAT, currency conversion, and lost credits. Before deciding anything, open your bank statement and list the AI subscriptions you're paying for without ever opening them: that's usually where the first savings are, before you even change methods. Then choose based on the number of formats you produce, not on the tool everyone happens to be talking about. And test before you pay: seven days with no credit card is enough to tell whether a tool fits the way you work.
