The AI hype machine has produced an avalanche of tools marketed at small businesses. Most of them are thin wrappers around ChatGPT with a markup. Some of them are genuinely useful. Telling the two apart isn’t always easy.

I’ve tested dozens of AI tools over the past year, either for my own small projects or while helping friends sort through the noise. Here’s my honest assessment of what’s worth paying for, what’s free, and what’s a waste of money.

Worth paying for

Anthropic’s Claude Pro ($20 USD/month) — If you’re only going to pay for one AI tool, make it a good general-purpose assistant. Claude handles writing, analysis, coding help, document review, and research better than most specialised tools. I use it daily for drafting emails, summarising long documents, and brainstorming ideas. The context window is massive, which means you can paste in entire documents for analysis.

Otter.ai ($16.99 USD/month) — If you have regular meetings, Otter is worth every cent. It transcribes meetings in real-time, generates summaries, identifies action items, and lets you search through past meeting transcripts. I’ve seen small business owners save 3-4 hours a week on meeting notes alone.

Canva Pro ($21.99 AUD/month) — Canva’s AI features have gotten genuinely good. The background remover, Magic Resize, and AI image generation tools are practical for anyone doing their own marketing. If you’re a small business creating social media posts, presentations, or basic marketing materials, Canva Pro pays for itself quickly.

Free and genuinely useful

ChatGPT free tier — OpenAI’s free tier is more than enough for occasional use. Writing help, brainstorming, basic code generation, and research all work fine without paying. The limits on GPT-4o are generous enough for most small business needs.

Google’s NotebookLM — This is an underrated free tool. Upload documents, and it creates an AI-powered research assistant that can answer questions specifically about those documents. Useful for contract review, policy analysis, or making sense of lengthy reports.

Gamma — For quick presentation creation, Gamma’s free tier is surprisingly capable. Give it a topic and some bullet points, and it generates a reasonable-looking presentation in minutes. It’s not going to win design awards, but for internal presentations and pitch decks, it saves considerable time.

Not worth the money (for most small businesses)

AI-powered CRMs — Most AI features in CRMs like HubSpot or Salesforce are designed for enterprise sales teams with hundreds of leads. If you’re a small business with 50 clients, you don’t need AI lead scoring. A spreadsheet works fine.

AI content generators — Tools like Jasper, Copy.ai, and their many competitors produce generic, obviously AI-written content. If your marketing strategy relies on publishing AI slop, you’re doing it wrong. Use a general-purpose AI to help you write, but don’t outsource your entire content strategy to a content mill bot.

AI bookkeeping tools — Xero and MYOB already have automation features built in. Adding a separate AI layer on top is usually redundant for small businesses. Save your money and learn to use what you’re already paying for.

The honest assessment

Most small businesses need one or two AI tools at most. A good general-purpose assistant (Claude or ChatGPT) handles 80% of use cases. For specific needs — meeting transcription, design, presentation creation — pick one tool and learn it well.

If you’re finding it hard to figure out which tools make sense for your particular setup, it can help to talk to someone who’s seen a range of businesses go through this. Team400 is an AI consultancy that works with small and mid-sized companies on exactly this kind of thing — figuring out where AI actually adds value versus where it’s just a shiny distraction.

The biggest mistake I see is subscribing to ten different AI tools and using none of them properly. Start small. Master one tool. Add another when you’ve genuinely outgrown the first.

AI can save a small business real time and money. But only if you’re disciplined about what you adopt and honest about what you actually need.