The cheapest AI setup a 5-person shop can start with

Three things, added in this order, and the bill stops at about twenty dollars a month. Not because cheap is the goal, but because the shops that go broke on this stuff all made the same mistake: they bought the third thing first.

The rule underneath the whole list

Pay for one AI. One. Not Claude and ChatGPT and Gemini, one of them. Every one of the big three does 90 percent of what a five-person shop needs, and the 10 percent they argue about online has nothing to do with writing a text to a customer. Two subscriptions does not make you twice as fast. It makes you switch tabs.

Month one: one paid seat, about $20

Pick whichever one you already like the feel of, and pay for it. The free versions are real and you can absolutely start there, but they run out mid-job, which is exactly when you learn to distrust the tool.

Then spend twenty minutes doing the part everyone skips. Put your actual business into it: your prices, your services, your hours, how you talk to customers. Every answer after that stops being generic.

Month two: your Google listing, $0

This is free, it takes an afternoon, and for a local shop it out-earns the AI subscription. Your Google Business Profile is the thing a stranger actually sees when they search what you do. Most shops fill in the name and the phone number and quit.

Use the AI you just paid for to write the parts you hate writing. The description, the service list, the answers to the questions people keep asking. That is the whole point of doing it in this order. Month one buys you a writer. Month two gives the writer something worth doing.

There is a longer walkthrough of the six fields shops leave blank here.

Month three: stop typing, $0

Everyone in a five-person shop has the same problem. The work is done with your hands, so the typing happens at 9pm when you are tired and short with people. Talking is faster than typing for almost everybody, and the dictation built into your phone and your computer is free and already installed.

Talk out the messy version. Let the AI clean it up. You will send three times as many follow-ups because the cost of sending one dropped to nothing. If you want a version that runs on your own machine and never sends your voice anywhere, that is here, also free.

So what does it actually cost

About twenty dollars a month, forever, for a five-person shop. The ceiling is fifty, and you only go there when one specific job is genuinely costing you more than that in wasted hours. If you cannot name the job, you do not need the upgrade.

What to skip for now

Skip the second AI subscription. Skip the AI phone receptionist until a missed-call text has been running for three months and is not enough. Skip image and video generators, they are fun and they sell nothing. Skip anything with the word agent, framework, or workflow in the name until the three things above are boring.

And skip the tool somebody sold you at a trade show that you have not opened in six weeks. Cancel it. That is usually where the twenty dollars comes from in the first place.

The mistake this order is designed to prevent

Most people buy the exciting thing first, get a result that is 80 percent right, decide AI is overrated, and go back to doing it by hand. The order matters more than the tools do. Something that writes, then something that gets you found, then something that saves your hands. Boring on purpose.

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