The entry plans of AI writing tools cost $9 to $99 a month in 2026 ($7 to $83 on annual billing), and the AI plan a founder already has, Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus, is $20. The bigger line on the bill is still time: the average blog post takes 3 hours 20 minutes to write.
I read every price below on the vendor’s own page and put the date next to it, because the top-ranking price lists for this search disagree with each other on the same plans.
Below: the AI plans, 10 writing and SEO tools, freelance writer rates, what one AI draft costs in tokens, and four stacks added up per month and per year.
Key Numbers, Checked 27 September 2026
I read the AI plans, API prices, Surfer and the two surveys on 27 September 2026, and the writing-tool prices on 15 September 2026.
- Claude Pro is $20 a month, $17 on annual billing (27 September 2026).
- ChatGPT Plus is $20 a month (27 September 2026).
- Entry plans of nine AI writing tools run $9 to $99 a month, or $7 to $83 on annual billing (15 September 2026).
- A freelance blog post costs 25 to 45 cents a word on the EFA 2026 rate chart (27 September 2026).
- The average post is 1,312 words and takes 3 hours 20 minutes to write, per Orbit Media’s 2026 blogger survey of 1,042 content marketers (27 September 2026).
- 92.4% of the bloggers in that survey use AI.
- Claude Sonnet 5 costs $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens (27 September 2026).
- One draft call that reads 60,000 tokens and writes 3,000 costs about 15 cents on Sonnet 5.
I refresh this page quarterly. The next check is due in December 2026.
What the AI Plans Cost: Claude and ChatGPT
Start with the plan, because every other tool on this page sits on top of one.
| Plan | Monthly billing | Annual billing | What changes | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Free | $0 | $0 | Free tier | 27 Sep 2026 |
| Claude Pro | $20 | $17 a month | Base paid plan | 27 Sep 2026 |
| Claude Max 5x | $100 | not read | 5x the usage of Pro | 27 Sep 2026 |
| Claude Max 20x | $200 | not read | 20x the usage of Pro | 27 Sep 2026 |
| Claude Team, standard seat | $25 a seat | $20 a seat | 2 to 150 people | 27 Sep 2026 |
| ChatGPT Plus | $20 | not read | Base paid plan | 27 Sep 2026 |
| ChatGPT Pro | $100 | not read | Individual plan above Plus | 27 Sep 2026 |
| ChatGPT Business, standard seat | $25 a seat | $20 a seat | Team plan | 27 Sep 2026 |
For one founder writing a few posts a week, Pro or Plus is the whole AI bill. Max costs $100 or $200 a month and buys “5x or 20x more usage than Pro”. That’s more room to run. It isn’t better writing.
ChatGPT’s pricing page didn’t show the Free and Go tiers to my logged-in Plus account on the check date, so they aren’t in the table. I’d rather leave a row out than guess it.
What AI Writing and SEO Tools Cost
These are the tools that sell you a writer or an SEO editor on top of your AI plan. Nine prices come from pricing pages I read on 15 September 2026; I read Surfer on 27 September 2026, and it only shows annual-billing rates.
| Tool | Entry plan, month-to-month | Entry plan, annual billing | What the entry plan includes | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Koala Writer Essentials | $9 | $7 a month | 15,000 words a month | 15 Sep 2026 |
| SEOwriting.ai Starter | $19 | $14 a month | Up to 50 articles | 15 Sep 2026 |
| Autoblogging.ai Starter | $19 | $12 a month | 40 credits | 15 Sep 2026 |
| Frase Starter | $49 | $39 a month | 10 articles a month | 15 Sep 2026 |
| Jasper Pro | $69 a seat | $59 a seat | Priced per seat | 15 Sep 2026 |
| Arvow Solo | $99 | $39 a month (sale rate) | Allowance not recorded | 15 Sep 2026 |
| Outrank’s single plan | $99 | $999 a year ($83.25 a month) | 30 articles a month per website | 15 Sep 2026 |
| Byword Starter | $99 | $83 a month | 25 articles a month | 15 Sep 2026 |
| Writesonic Starter | $99 | $79 a month | 15 AI articles a month | 15 Sep 2026 |
| Surfer Discovery | not read | $49 a month | Lowest Surfer tier | 27 Sep 2026 |
| Surfer Standard | not read | $99 a month | Used in stack 2 below | 27 Sep 2026 |
Four of the nine profiled tools start at $99 a month on monthly billing, and three start under $20. Almost every one discounts annual billing: Jasper drops from $69 to $59 a seat, Frase from $49 to $39. If Jasper is the line you want to cut, I priced the Jasper AI alternatives by yearly bill. Higher tiers climb fast. Writesonic Growth is $499 a month.
The per-article tools meter you by the month. Divide the entry price by the allowance and you get a rough cost per article:
- Outrank: $99 for 30 articles, about $3.30 each
- Byword Starter: $99 for 25, about $4
- Frase Starter: $49 for 10, about $4.90
- Writesonic Starter: $99 for 15, about $6.60
Each of these tools runs its drafts on its own AI account, not on yours. Koala Writer lists “GPT-5.6 and Claude Sonnet 5” inside its own plan, for example. If you also pay $20 for Claude or ChatGPT, you pay for the model twice.
What a Human Writer Costs Per Post
The EFA 2026 rate chart, built from a survey run between November 2025 and mid-January 2026, puts work-for-hire blog posts at 25 to 45 cents a word, or $74.50 to $87.50 an hour. Ghostwritten posts come in at 25 to 40 cents a word, or $75 to $100 an hour.
Here’s the math on Orbit Media’s average post:
- 1,312 words at 25 to 45 cents a word is $328 to $590 a post.
- Four posts a month is $1,312 to $2,362.
What if you write it yourself? Orbit’s average post takes 3 hours 20 minutes. Price those hours at the EFA’s hourly rate for blog posts and each one costs you $248 to $292 of your own time. At four posts a month that’s $993 to $1,167 of your time, more than any monthly subscription on this page, Writesonic Growth at $499 included. In any stack where you write the posts, your hours are the largest line on the bill.
The freelancer line swings month to month. In an r/content_marketing thread on blog spend, one commenter put theirs at “Freelancers: $0 most months, maybe $150–300 on the months I hire someone.” Another explained why cheap doesn’t stay cheap: “Cheap writers usually mean you’re doing twice the editing or the content doesn’t rank, so I’d rather pay properly upfront.”
A cheap draft that you rewrite hands the hours straight back to you. That’s why the rewrite share of a post matters more than its per-word rate.
What One AI Draft Costs in Tokens
Paying per token through the API shows the raw cost of a draft with nothing on top. Anthropic’s per-token prices, read on 27 September 2026, per million tokens:
- Claude Sonnet 5: $2 input, $10 output
- Claude Opus 5.5: $4 input, $20 output
- Claude Haiku 4.5: $1 input, $5 output
- Batch API: 50% off input and output
What does one draft cost?
A token is about 0.75 English words. Here’s a worked example, with my assumptions stated: one draft call reads 60,000 tokens (brief, research notes, outline) and writes 3,000 tokens, about 2,250 words. On Sonnet 5 that’s $0.12 in plus $0.03 out, so 15 cents. On Opus 5.5 it’s 30 cents.
A full pipeline calls the model many times, for research, the plan, reviews and revisions, so multiply. It still lands in dollars, not hundreds of them. One poster on r/ClaudeAI built an agentic content workflow for AI search and reported the API bill for a run: “Daily cap set to $60. Actual spend = 7 cents.”
On a flat plan like Claude Pro, one more draft costs $0 until you hit the usage limit. The limit is the real cost, because you wait for it to reset. Pilcrino pauses a run at the plan’s usage limit and resumes on its own when it resets, so a limit costs you a wait, not a second bill. Here’s the full pipeline a Claude Pro plan can run.
Four Content Stacks, Added Up
Every line below uses annual-billing monthly rates, checked on the dates in the tables above. Month-to-month billing costs more: Claude Pro is $20 instead of $17, Jasper Pro $69 instead of $59.
| Stack | Lines | Per month | Per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Plan only | Claude Pro $17 | $17 | $204 |
| 2. Plan + SEO tool + AI writer | Claude Pro $17 + Surfer Standard $99 + Jasper Pro $59 | $175 | $2,100 |
| 3. Plan + autoblog tool | Claude Pro $17 + Outrank $83.25 ($999 a year) | $100.25 | $1,203 |
| 4. Plan + freelancer, 4 posts a month | Claude Pro $17 + $1,312 to $2,362 | $1,329 to $2,379 | $15,948 to $28,548 |
Which line is the smallest?
The AI plan, in every stack that has a second line. The cheapest stack and the dearest are between 78 and 140 times apart. On r/SaaS, one founder put it plainly: “claude pro at $20/month replaced what would have been 2-3 different tools.” Tony Yang relayed another founder’s custom content system at “About $30/month. Replaced four tools at ~$50 each.” That one is second-hand, but it points the same way.
Stacks 1 to 3 still leave the writing to you or a tool. Add $248 to $292 of your time for every post you write yourself.
This is the stack question Pilcrino is built around. It runs on the Claude plan you already pay for, with no new subscription and no API key. The plugin is free; the app is $199 once and on a waitlist today. Stacks 2 and 3 also carry a cost that never shows on an invoice, which is where your product docs go with a SaaS writer.
How I Keep These Prices Dated
The top-ranking price lists for this search disagree on the same plans. One lists Claude Team at $20 a seat and dates its table August 2026. Another lists $30 with a five-seat minimum and says it verified its prices in May 2026, while naming models their makers had replaced long before. Anthropic’s page on 27 September 2026 shows $20 a seat on annual billing and $25 monthly.
The Pilcrino app with an example blog. The competitor and its prices are example data, not real prices.
Pilcrino keeps a competitor profile for each tool: tier names, monthly and annual prices, limits, and the date the page was read, stored on your machine. The writing-tool rows in this post come from profiles read on 15 September 2026.
Today I refresh them by hand, one competitor at a time. I don’t take a price from a profile older than 14 days. These were 12 days old on the check date, so I used them as they stood, which is why this page shows two check dates instead of one. At the next quarterly check, I rerun the profiles and the tables change. The prose mostly doesn’t.
Numbers I Left Out, and Why
Why print what I didn’t use? Because the most-repeated figures in cost roundups are also the least sourced:
- The line that an AI draft costs 10 cents and a human article $300. It came with no source. The EFA chart and the token math above replace it.
- A Gartner AI-spend figure quoted in millions with 60.2% growth. The Gartner release it links to says 47 percent.
- OpenAI API prices, the ChatGPT Go price and Grammarly’s price. I couldn’t read a US-dollar price for any of them on the check date, so I left them out rather than guess.
One cost that doesn’t belong on the bill is a ranking penalty for AI drafting. Posts aren’t penalised for being AI-drafted; here’s whether AI-written posts hurt rankings in more detail.
If the AI plan is the cheapest line and your hours are the biggest, the fix is a workflow that runs on the plan you already have. Today that plan is Claude.
Pilcrino writes posts in your voice that argue for your product. The plugin is free; the app is $199 once, $129 for the first 50, with 12 months of updates and support. Join the Pilcrino waitlist.
Researched and drafted with Pilcrino. Approved by Slav.
FAQ
How much do AI writing tools cost in 2026?
The entry plans of the nine AI writing tools priced on this page run $9 to $99 a month, or $7 to $83 a month on annual billing, read on 15 September 2026. Higher tiers run to hundreds a month, such as Writesonic Growth at $499. Most of them sit on top of a $20 AI plan like Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus.
Is Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus enough to write blog posts?
For a founder writing a few posts a week, yes. Both are $20 a month, and either is enough engine for drafting. Claude Max, at $100 or $200 a month, buys 5x or 20x more usage than Pro, not better writing.
How much does a freelance blog writer charge per post?
The Editorial Freelancers Association’s 2026 rate chart puts work-for-hire blog posts at 25 to 45 cents a word. For Orbit Media’s average post of 1,312 words, that’s $328 to $590 a post, or $1,312 to $2,362 a month at four posts.
What does one AI-written blog draft cost in API fees?
About 15 cents on Claude Sonnet 5 for one call that reads 60,000 tokens and writes 3,000, at $2 and $10 per million tokens. The same call is 30 cents on Opus 5.5. A multi-step pipeline calls the model many times, so it costs more, but still dollars rather than hundreds.
How often is this page updated?
Quarterly. Every price carries the date it was read, AI plans on 27 September 2026 and writing tools on 15 September 2026, and the next check is due in December 2026.