Tools and Products
Five cheap AI tools now do work small firms used to hire for
A growing number of small businesses are running on tools that cost under $100 a month combined and handle work that would have meant a full-time hire two years ago — support, content, bookkeeping, social scheduling, outreach. These are not experiments. The quality is good enough that the harder question is no longer whether you can afford the tools, but whether you can justify paying a person to do what they now do well.
Why it matters
The cost of running a lean, AI-augmented business is dropping every quarter. The question isn't whether you can afford these tools — it's whether you can afford to keep paying humans to do what they replace.
Network impact
LatencyNo direct impact
SecurityKeep sensitive company data out of public AI tools — use business-tier plans with data privacy guarantees.
ScalabilityEach tool on this list removes a bottleneck that typically blocks growth — stack them and your capacity ceiling rises dramatically.
What to do
- Customer support: test Intercom Fin or Tidio AI for handling your 10 most common support questions
- Content: use Claude or ChatGPT on a $20/month plan to draft all first-pass copy — emails, social, blogs
- Bookkeeping: connect QuickBooks or Wave to an AI layer (Keeper, Docyt) to automate categorization and reporting
- Social: use Buffer or Publer with AI scheduling to maintain a consistent posting cadence without daily effort
- Sales outreach: try Apollo.io or Clay to automate personalized cold email sequences at scale