Every business owner eventually asks the same thing: if my team starts using ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot or Gemini, what does it cost me each month? The answer is rarely on one page, because each vendor prices differently, in a different currency, and with a different catch about billing. This article puts the four side by side using each vendor's own pricing page, checked on 4 October 2026, works out the monthly bill for a team of 5, 20 and 50, and says where we think most small businesses overspend.
What one AI seat costs per person, per month
A "seat" is one person's login on a business plan. These are the entry business plans from each vendor, not the individual plans, all in US dollars. Vendors may show a different currency to visitors in some countries, so your own checkout page can differ.
| Plan | Billed annually | Billed monthly | Minimum |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT Business (OpenAI) | $20 | $25 | 2 users |
| Claude Team, Standard seat (Anthropic) | $20 | $25 | 2 seats |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot Business (add-on) | $18 | Pay-monthly option offered, price not shown | Needs an existing Microsoft 365 plan |
| Google Workspace Business Standard | Not shown on the page | $14, billed monthly | None stated |
Three of these are not the same kind of product, and the table hides that. ChatGPT Business and Claude Team are AI assistants you pay for on their own. Copilot Business is an add-on that sits on top of a Microsoft 365 subscription you must already have. Google Workspace is an email, storage and office suite that happens to include Gemini, so its $14 buys far more than AI.
Microsoft shows its Copilot Business price as $18, marked down from $21, per user per month, paid yearly. We did not find an end date for the lower price on the page, so check it before you plan around it. Microsoft also sells Microsoft 365 Business Standard with Copilot already built in at $23.50 per user per month, paid yearly, and Business Premium with Copilot at $32.
The monthly bill for 5, 20 and 50 people
Here is the worst case: every person gets a seat. Figures are per month on annual billing, which is the cheaper way to buy, and we multiplied the list prices above. They exclude tax and card charges.
| Plan | 5 people | 20 people | 50 people |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT Business, annual | $100 | $400 | $1,000 |
| ChatGPT Business, monthly | $125 | $500 | $1,250 |
| Claude Team Standard, annual | $100 | $400 | $1,000 |
| Claude Team Standard, monthly | $125 | $500 | $1,250 |
| Copilot Business add-on, annual | $90 | $360 | $900 |
| Google Workspace Business Standard | $70 | $280 | $700 |
Claude Team is listed for up to 150 users, so all three team sizes fit. If you pay from outside the US, the amount that leaves your account depends on your card's exchange rate that day, and your bank may add a foreign-payment fee or tax. Ask your bank before you assume the sticker price is what you will pay.
Annual billing saves exactly a fifth, if you can commit
For the two assistants that publish both prices, the annual rate is 20% lower. Both ChatGPT Business and Claude Team Standard are $20 a seat on annual billing against $25 on monthly. On a 20-person team that is $400 a month instead of $500, or $1,200 a year saved. That is not a rounding error.
- Choose annual when the people using it are already using it. If your team has been on free plans for months and the usage is daily, you are not guessing.
- Choose monthly when you are still testing. A 20% saving on a plan nobody opens is still money wasted.
- Read the renewal terms. Microsoft labels its yearly plans as annual subscriptions that auto-renew. Put the renewal date in a calendar the day you buy.
The cheapest AI seat is the one that is cancelled before the third month if nobody opens it.
You may already be paying for some of this
Before you add a new subscription, look at what you already pay for. Google says Workspace Business Starter includes the Gemini assistant in Gmail and basic Gemini app access, and that Business Standard widens this to Gemini in Docs, Meet and more, with access to more models. If your team already lives in Google Workspace, a first experiment costs nothing extra. The same logic applies to Microsoft: if you have a Microsoft 365 plan, Copilot Business is an add-on to it, not a replacement.
This also changes the comparison. If you already pay $14 for Workspace, you are not choosing between $14 and $20. You are asking whether a separate assistant is worth another $20 on top, for the people who would use it every day. Read the longer comparison in ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini in 2026 before you decide, and the Microsoft Copilot guide if your office runs on Excel and Outlook.
Do not buy a seat for everyone
This is our opinion, not a measured result: most small teams should start with seats for about one person in four, and give those seats to the people who write, analyse or answer customers all day. The rest can use the free tier or the AI already inside the suite they pay for. Here is what that looks like on annual billing, rounded up so both plans still meet their two-seat minimum.
| Team size | Seats | ChatGPT Business or Claude Team Standard, annual |
|---|---|---|
| 5 people | 2 | $40 |
| 20 people | 5 | $100 |
| 50 people | 13 | $260 |
- Review after 60 days. Look at who logged in and what they produced. Add seats for people who ask for them, and remove the ones who did not use theirs.
- Heavy users are the exception. Both vendors sell a Premium seat at $100 a month on annual billing ($125 monthly) that they say gives five times the usage of a Standard seat, and both let you mix seat types. If one person hits limits every day, upgrade that person only.
- Check the limits before you promise "unlimited". Anthropic says its plans reset usage on a rolling five-hour window, with weekly limits added on Team and Enterprise. OpenAI marks unlimited chat as subject to abuse guardrails and says its team plans can buy credits for more access.
A worked example: a 20-person shop
Say a 20-person distribution business has an office manager, three sales staff and an accountant who would use AI daily, plus a few others who might. Five ChatGPT Business seats on annual billing come to $100 a month, against $400 if all twenty people got one. That is a $300 monthly difference, from the same price list. If the five heavy users turn out to need more, you add seats for them at $20 each. Swapping one Standard seat for a $100 Premium seat, for the person who hits the limits first, takes the total to $180. Claude Team has the same prices, so the same arithmetic applies.
Before you buy any seat, write down three things: which tasks you want faster (for example drafting quotations, replying to customers or summarising long documents), who does those tasks today, and how many hours a week they take. If you cannot name the tasks, you are not ready to pay for seats. If you can, the hours give you a simple test: a seat is worth keeping when the time it saves a person is worth more than the price of that seat. A $20 seat only has to save a small amount of an employee's time to pay for itself, but only if the person uses it on real work every week.
What these numbers leave out
A seat subscription covers a person typing into a chat window. It does not cover work that runs by itself.
- Automated jobs. A support chatbot on your website, a tool that reads invoices or a summary of every phone call is billed by usage through an API, not per seat. We explain how to cost that in Cheapest AI model for a small business app, and the price changes coming on 1 January 2027 in AI prices have an expiry date.
- Tax and card fees. None of the figures above include them.
- Training time. A seat nobody knows how to use is a monthly cost with no return. Plan an hour of showing people real tasks from your own business.
- Data rules. Business and team plans differ from free plans in how they treat your content. Read each vendor's terms for your plan before staff paste customer data into any of them.
Where to go from here
If what you really need is AI answering your customers, not your staff, a per-seat plan is the wrong tool. Our AI Chat Assistant and SmartLine voice agent run on hosted AI models, so the usage-cost question above is one we handle in production. If you keep your books in IO Snack Accounts, you can also record these subscriptions as a monthly expense and see what AI really costs you over a year. For a recommendation based on your own team, talk to us.
Prices in this article were read from each vendor's page on 4 October 2026 and will move. Treat the tables as a snapshot, and re-check before you pay.
