A solo consultant's AI stack for under $50 a month

This is a stack for one person who bills their own time: client calls, proposals, a deck now and then, occasional images and voice. No team seats, no enterprise anything.

The rule I applied: pay only where the free tier breaks under real use, and prefer tools whose limits are published.

Meetings: $0

Fathom, free. Unlimited recordings, transcripts and clips; only the advanced AI summaries are limited. For one person recording their own client calls, this is the entire job done for nothing, and it is the only free tier in its category without a monthly counter.

What you give up: archive search across months of calls, which is a team problem more than a solo one. If you find yourself hunting for a decision from March, that is the signal to move to Fireflies at $18/mo.

One caveat to know: there are reports of timestamp bugs on very long recordings, so if you need to jump back to minute 80 of a workshop, verify before you rely on it.

Full comparison: best AI meeting notes tools

Writing and correctness: $0

Grammarly, free. Core grammar and spelling checking is unlimited and works inside whatever you write in, plus 100 AI prompts a month. For proposals and client email that is enough.

If you rewrite heavily, non-native writing, or turning rough notes into prose, add QuillBot at $8.33/mo, which does paraphrasing properly rather than as a side feature. Its free tier (125-word paraphrases) is worth trying first.

What I would not buy at this scale: a $59/mo marketing-copy platform. That is a team's brand-voice tool, and there are seven cheaper ways to do the parts you need.

Decks: $0

Pitch, free. Unlimited presentations and 10GB of storage on the free plan, which no rival matches. You also get 100 one-time AI credits, treat those as a trial of the AI, not as the reason to use it.

Watch for Gamma's free plan if you are shopping around: its 400 credits are granted once and never refill, which reads as free and behaves as a trial. If your decks must land in a client's PowerPoint template, Plus AI at $10/mo works inside PowerPoint itself and saves a conversion that routinely breaks formatting.

Images: $0

Leonardo, free. 150 tokens a day is the most sustained free allowance in image generation, and for occasional blog headers or slide art it never runs out.

The hard limit is legal, not technical: the free tier is personal use only. The moment an image goes into client work, you need a paid plan. Leonardo's is $12/mo, or Playground at $15/mo whose free tier unusually does include a commercial licence.

If your images contain text, headlines, packaging, thumbnails, none of these are right. Ideogram at $8/mo is the tool that renders typography properly.

Voice: $6/mo, or $0 to test

ElevenLabs, $6/mo. The quality bar for narration, and the cheapest slot worth paying for in this stack if you produce any audio at all.

If you are only testing, Cartesia's free tier gives roughly 27 minutes a month, the largest free allowance in the category, but excludes commercial use, cloning and localisation. Every free voice tier here excludes commercial use, so the $6 becomes non-optional the moment you publish.

Budget note: ElevenLabs' credits burn at different rates per model, so a month can cost more than you planned. Pick one model and stay on it.

Job-hunting, if that is also your situation: $8/mo

Kickresume, $8/mo, or free, since its free tier is the only one in that category with unlimited PDF downloads. Most rivals let you build a resume and then export TXT only.

Avoid the trial-to-subscription pattern that dominates the category: Zety converts $1.95 into $25.95 every four weeks, which is thirteen charges a year.

The total

Job	Tool	Cost
Meetings	Fathom	$0
Writing	Grammarly	$0
Rewriting (optional)	QuillBot	$8.33
Decks	Pitch	$0
Images	Leonardo	$0 personal / $12 commercial
Voice	ElevenLabs	$6
Resume (situational)	Kickresume	$8

$14.33/month for the core stack with paid voice and rewriting. $34.99 including a commercial image licence and a resume builder. Two of the five everyday jobs cost nothing at all.

What I deliberately left out

A general chatbot subscription. Not because they are useless, but because at this scale the free tiers of several assistants cover occasional use, and $4.16–$8/mo is easy to add later once you know which model you actually reach for.

Anything with unpublished limits. Several capable tools do not disclose their free-tier caps numerically. For a solo operator, an undisclosed limit is a scheduling risk.

Anything on an annual-only plan. Prezi is annual-billing only, and committing a year to a tool you have used for a week is the wrong shape of bet when you are one person.