At some point this year you have asked yourself the question, or someone on your team has asked it for you: “do we pay for ChatGPT for everyone, or do we commission something custom?” And the answers you find usually come from whoever sells one of the two things.
We sell the second one, so let’s get it out of the way: most SMBs should start with the subscription. But there is a point where the subscription falls short, and it pays to recognise it before you discover it through wasted hours. Here it is with official prices and concrete criteria.
What the subscriptions cost (official prices, August 2026)
The three most common team plans, according to each vendor’s pricing page:
| Tool | Price per user/month | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT Business (OpenAI) | $20 billed annually, $25 monthly | 2-seat minimum |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot (add-on) | €18.20 billed annually | Requires a base Microsoft 365 plan; promo at €15.60 until 30/09/2026 |
| Claude Team (Anthropic) | $20 billed annually, $25 monthly | Premium seats with higher usage at $100 |
The dollar prices are the official international ones and exclude taxes; what lands on your Spanish invoice will vary slightly. In round numbers: a 10-person team comes to roughly €2,400–3,000 a year. Not free, but it is the cheapest way there is to put real AI in your team’s hands.
What the subscription does well (and what it doesn’t)
A subscription gives you a copilot: an excellent tool for helping each person work better. Drafting and reviewing text, summarising documents and meetings, preparing proposals, analysing a spreadsheet, getting unstuck. If your team lives in Word, Excel and Outlook, Copilot slots into the tools they already use; ChatGPT and Claude are stronger as general assistants.
But notice the pattern: in every one of those cases there is a person in front of the screen. Someone opens the tool, asks, reviews and uses the result. That also defines its limits:
- It doesn’t run on its own. The subscription won’t process the 400 invoices that land in a mailbox every month while nobody is watching. Someone would have to copy and paste them one by one.
- It isn’t connected to your systems. It doesn’t post anything to your ERP, doesn’t match the order against the delivery note, doesn’t update your CRM.
- It depends on each person. Two employees with the same licence get different results. There is no process: there are individual habits.
- The output isn’t auditable. For tasks with tax or contractual implications you need traceability, not a chat window.
None of this is a flaw: the tool is simply designed for something else. The expensive mistake is trying to turn a subscription into a process through sheer human discipline.
When the subscription is all you need
If these conditions hold, look no further:
- The benefit you are after is that each person works faster, not that a process stops being done by hand.
- The tasks are varied and occasional: a report today, a proposal tomorrow.
- The repetitive volume is low: nothing that eats hours from the same person every week.
- You don’t need the output to end up recorded in any system.
If that’s you, buy the subscription, set some minimal usage rules (what data never gets pasted into a chat, how to review what comes out) and measure for three months. It is the best cost-benefit ratio available, and you don’t need anyone like us.
When custom automation pays off
The signal is always the same: one specific, repetitive, high-volume process that keeps eating hours even though everyone has their licence. The examples we see most:
- Extracting data from invoices, delivery notes or orders that arrive by email and posting them where they belong.
- Classifying and answering operational email from customers and suppliers.
- Generating repetitive documents (quotes, reports, product sheets) from your real data.
There the maths stops being per user and becomes per process. A scoped AI automation starts at around €3,000 —that’s our published price— and isn’t billed per seat: it runs on its own, connected to your systems, with the same result at 9 in the morning as at 11 at night.
The honest calculation starts from your baseline: if a process takes 20 hours a month and you value the hour at €25, that’s €6,000 a year. A €3,000–5,000 automation pays for itself within the first year; if the process only takes two hours a month, don’t commission it — and be wary of anyone who sells it to you anyway.
It’s not “one or the other”
The combination that works best in SMBs is sequential:
- Start with the subscription. Low cost, near-zero risk, and your team learns what AI can be asked to do.
- Watch where it hurts. After two or three months a pattern shows up: the task everyone does with the chat by hand, copying and pasting the same thing every week.
- Automate that bottleneck. That exact task —with a name, a volume and measured hours— is the candidate for a custom project. Leave everything else on the subscription.
That way the custom project isn’t born from a promise but from a fact: you know which process it is, how many hours it costs and what solving it is worth.
Where we stand
If you are torn between paying €20 a month per person or commissioning a build, start with the €20. And when one specific process becomes the usual suspect behind the lost hours, put numbers on it and automate it. If you want us to look at it with you, here is how we work and here is where to tell us about it: within 24 hours we’ll tell you whether your case justifies a custom project or the subscription already covers you. The second answer is good news too.