5 AI tools at 20 people: $47,520 a year

That is the median row in this index — $9,504/year a tool at 20 seats — multiplied by 5, or $2,376 a year per person. It is not a survey and not an estimate: it is arithmetic on the 65 researched prices in the table below, each one read off the vendor’s own pricing page at the seat count a product org this size actually lands on.

All 108 rows, dearest first

Every tool below is one we have covered and priced at a 20-person product org — the number the vendor hides behind “Contact sales”. Read off their own pricing page at the seat count a real team buys where they publish one, and marked buyer-reported or our own arithmetic where they do not. Not the headline tier, and not a list price nobody pays. The spread runs from $1,188/year to $50,000/year.

1 of the 65 researched prices below is a figure no one else publishes. Checked 2026-10-21: for that row there is no vendor rate card and no third-party page carrying a price for the tool at all, so this table is the only published source for it. Flagged in the table below. How that was checked →

No sponsorships · no affiliate links · no vendor has ever paid to be in this table

“Only published source” means we could find no price for that tool published anywhere but here — not on the vendor's own rate card, and not on any third-party page, tracker, round-up or directory listing. How it was decided, on 2026-10-21: we took every researched row the price watch can find no vendor-published figure for and that no page in our citation ledger cites (23 rows), searched each one by hand — the tool's name with "pricing" and "cost", the figure itself, and its G2, Capterra and Vendr listings — and read every result back. 22 of the 23 turned out to have a price published somewhere else, so they are not flagged, whatever our own records said.

The locked column is the Adoption Brief half: the adopt / pilot / skip call, the SSO, SOC 2 and data-handling line, and the three-line pitch you can paste into #product. It is what a subscription buys, and it arrives on five new tools every weekday morning — 7 issues of it with no card, or $96/year outright with no email form at all, both at the top of this page. Prefer one tool at a time? Each tool’s own page carries its write-up and the working behind the figure.

Proposing we trial Miro for Product Acceleration as the home for discovery workshops, so synthesis and the first brief draft come off the board itself.

Today a workshop costs us two to three days of manual sticky sorting and writing afterwards; this collapses that into a reviewable draft the same day.

Ask: one squad, two discovery sessions, one PM owning the board template, four weeks, then we compare brief quality against our last two.

That column is locked on the other 107 rows in this table. Unlock it — $96/year, $10/month with 7 free days, or $490/year for the whole organisation.

How these numbers were worked out

• Every figure is for a 20-person product org— 20 seats, the tier a team that size actually lands on, including the minimums and platform fees that only appear once you ask.
• It was read off the vendor’s own pricing page on the day the tool ran where they publish one; where they do not, the tag under the figure says whether it is buyer-reported or our own arithmetic on their published units. The issue it ran in is linked from its page. Prices rot: the date is always on the row.
• Where a vendor publishes nothing, the row says so. We never print a number we did not research, and the tool’s page carries the comparable unit the vendor does publish plus the band buyers report.
• Where the figure is our arithmetic on a usage-priced tool, the working is on the tool’s own page, in the paragraph the number came out of.
• Every morning a job re-reads the vendor pricing pages behind these figures and diffs the published numbers against the ones we quoted. When a vendor’s own page moves, the row above is flagged and the change is recorded — dated, with the excerpt it was read from — on the price-change log.
• A diff cannot catch a figure that was never the vendor’s — our own ×12 of a monthly rate, or a different product’s plan price read out of the same paragraph. Those are found by hand, and the 10 rows corrected that way are listed, with what they said before and the vendor page that was re-read, on the correction log.
• Every figure here is for the same twenty people, which is the right basis for a seat licence and the wrong multiplier for a tool the vendor meters some other way. One row whose vendor unit is activity-based rather than per-seat carries a line under the figure naming the real unit and what the number assumes about it — Sentry bills Seer per active contributor, meaning any user who opens two or more pull requests in a month to a Seer-enabled repository, counted fresh each month, so twenty seats is not twenty billable units. Where we cannot state a figure in the unit we claim, the row says so.
• Found one that has moved? Email [email protected] and we will re-check it in the next issue.

Quoting this table, or recomputing it

Every row above is also published as data, free and without an email. The whole table is one CSV at https://signal-brief19.acoco.ai/ai-tool-prices.csv — 18 columns: tool, category, one_line_description, price_status, price_label, amount_usd_low, amount_usd_high, price_period, annual_usd_low, annual_usd_high, annual_basis, seats, vendor_url, signal_brief_url, issue_number, issue_url, issue_date, price_checked_on. The same rows are embedded in this page as schema.org JSON-LD: a Dataset whose distribution is that CSV, and an ItemListcarrying each tool’s name, category and annual figure.

The table also resolves as one citable dataset. Its Croissant descriptor (/ai-tool-prices/croissant.json, ML Commons 1.1 — the file Google Dataset Search and Hugging Face read) defines every column and its type against the CSV above. The same schema is published as a Frictionless Data Package (/ai-tool-prices/datapackage.json), and a catalog document (/ai-tool-prices/index.json) carries the revision date, the terms and every distribution URL in one place. All three are regenerated with the table, so the version they state is the day the figures last changed — never a build date.

Read annual_basis before you quote a number — vendor_annual_figure = the vendor's own published yearly price; buyer_reported_annual_figure = a figure buyers, resellers or a third-party tracker report, which the vendor does not publish; signal_brief_arithmetic = our own multiplication on the vendor's published units; annualised_from_monthly_by_signal_brief = the vendor's published monthly price × 12; period_unstated = the brief quotes a figure with no period and we will not call it annual; none = no figure. An empty price is never a zero price: price_status says whether the vendor publishes nothing or we have not priced it yet. Each price is read off the vendor's own published pricing page, where there is one, on the day that tool ran in Signal Brief — or, for a row re-read by hand since, on the day of that re-read, which is the day price_checked_on carries — priced at 20 seats — the tier a 20-person product org actually lands on, including minimums and platform fees — never the headline tier and never a list price nobody pays. Where a vendor publishes no rate card, the row says so instead of carrying an estimate. Where a vendor publishes only a monthly figure, the annual column is that figure × 12 and annual_basis says so. Where the figure is a band buyers or third-party trackers report rather than one the vendor publishes, or our own multiplication on published units, annual_basis says that too — and a figure quoted for one seat, one test or one ticket is never published as the org's annual cost. Every published figure is checked before it is printed: its twelve-month equivalent must fall between $50 and $1,000,000 a year at a 20-person product org, and both ends of it must appear in the stored brief the row links to. A figure that fails either check is not published at all — the row says the vendor publishes no rate card, or that we have not priced the tool yet. Prices rot, so never present a figure without the issue date on its row.

Licence: CC BY 4.0. This dataset is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC-BY-4.0) — free to quote, redistribute and recompute, commercially or otherwise. The one condition is attribution: credit Signal Brief and link https://signal-brief19.acoco.ai/ai-tool-prices. Cite it as — Signal Brief, “AI tool price index” (https://signal-brief19.acoco.ai/ai-tool-prices), revision 2026-10-26, CC-BY-4.0. Found a figure that has moved, or want the row corrected? Email [email protected].

65 of these came out of 28 issues, five tools at a time, at 7am on a weekday. Read every issue in full, or browse the tools A–Z. The dearest line in the table is $50,000/year (Decagon Duet Apprentice, decagon.ai).