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 high-end gym membership: between €85 and €150 a month for someone covering text, image, video, music and voice. That is €1,000 to €1,800 a year, before you have published anything at all.
Here we break down, line by line, what ChatGPT, Midjourney, Suno and their neighbours really cost, including the fees nobody displays: VAT, currency conversion 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. 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 publishers display, excluding promotions and excluding tax for services billed in dollars. These price lists change often: always check the official page before you pull out your card, for example the official ChatGPT pricing.
| Tool | What it does | Plan | Listed price | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT Plus | Text, ideas, scripts | Plus | $20/month | Advanced models, higher usage limits |
| Claude Pro | Long-form text, analysis, code | Pro | $20/month | Roughly 5x the free version's limits |
| Midjourney | Images, light usage | Basic | $10/month | Around 200 fast images per month |
| Midjourney | Images, regular usage | 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, background removal |
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 conversion 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 are no longer enough), plus HeyGen for avatars and Canva for editing: roughly $126 and €11.99, or close to €150 a month. Over twelve months: €1,800.
That number is shocking, but it is completely ordinary. Most people never see it coming because each subscription was taken out 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 around 25%
Between the price listed on the publisher's site and the amount actually charged, the gap is around 25%, because of VAT, currency conversion and non-rolling credits.
Here are the six items that widen 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.
- Currency conversion 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 do not roll over. With Suno, Runway or ElevenLabs, unused credits vanish on your renewal date. A month on holiday is a month paid for nothing.
- Being pushed to the higher 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. The 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 tested in January, never reopened since, keeps charging every month. Try it: open your statement for the last six months 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 is the idea behind Skilzy's AI Lab: you learn to create, and you create directly inside the platform with the real tools, credits included in the subscription. You are not juggling multiple bank cards, passwords and billing dates. More than 15 programmes cover image generation, video (UGC, ads, faceless channels, avatars, voice-over), music, prompt writing, automation with n8n and AI-assisted coding.
The maths is simple: €29.90 a month with no commitment, or €358.80 a year, against €1,020 for the light stack described above. The annual gap is more than €650. The details of what each plan includes are on the Skilzy pricing page.
A second lever on cost: two state-recognised certifications are accessible from the platform, RS7439 (content marketing with AI) and RS6792 (AI and sales). They are eligible for funding, which changes the nature of the expense: it is no longer a hobby subscription, it is training for which part of the cost may be 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 bank card. It is small on purpose: it is there to check that the interface suits you, not to produce a campaign.
Let us be honest about the limits: if you generate 2,000 images a month for a product catalogue, 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 a moderate volume, which describes the vast majority of creators. The reasoning is the same as the one laid out in our comparison of an alternative to ChatGPT Plus with a single subscription for all models.
Method 2: squeezing the most out of the free versions
Free plans are enough to learn and for occasional use, but they almost always hit a wall on three things: volume, resolution and commercial rights.
They exist, they are useful, and an article that hid them from you would cost you money. Here is the real state of the main ones.
| Tool | Free plan | Where it stalls |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Yes, lighter model | Low message limits, advanced features restricted |
| Claude | Yes | Daily quota hit fast on long texts |
| Midjourney | No, removed in 2023 | No free trial, 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 plans 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 is not the one you expected.
Watch out for one classic trap, though: 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 do very well and what they get wrong 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 on rotation
If you produce in bursts rather than every day, metered API access and rotating a single subscription month by month 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 flat plan. For images, budget in the region of 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 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 according to what you are 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 voice-overs.
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 is 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 are just exploring, you want a look | A few experiments | Discovery demo with no bank card, then free versions | €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 are technically comfortable | Irregular | Method 3, metered 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 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 |
A simple rule for deciding: as soon as you use three different paid tools, the single subscription becomes cheaper. Below three, a dedicated plan or the API usually still wins.
What to remember
The real cost is not 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 is often where the first saving is, before you even change method. Then choose based on the number of formats you produce, not on the tool everyone is talking about. And test before you pay: seven days without a bank card is enough to know whether a tool fits the way you work.
