8 affordable AI tools for new and growing businesses in 2025

AI is rapidly changing our world, and that's especially true in the office. From the advent of new AI services like ChatGPT, to the integration of large language models into consumer products like iOS, Android, Windows, and Google Workspace. But AI isn’t just a way to search for information. If you know how to leverage generative AI, it can be a huge productivity booster. As a business leader, knowing how to use popular AI chatbots and dedicated AI business tools is quickly becoming non-optional.

AI can also get expensive, and quick. If you’re building a new business, it’s perhaps not even worth looking at some of the higher-priced enterprise AI tools yet. Thankfully, there are tons of more affordable AI tools for small and growing businesses. Here’s a look at some of the best AI tools for business owners.

ChatGPT

Let's start with a tool you're probably familiar with already. ChatGPT may not be business-focused specifically, but there are plenty of good reasons for small businesses to have access to a do-it-all chatbot like ChatGPT. You might find it useful for answering everyday questions about accounting, or as a sounding board during brainstorming sessions. And that barely scratches the surface of what ChatGPT can do. ChatGPT can generate marketing material, generate and edit emails, or help you build custom apps through vibe coding.

It goes without saying that you should never blindly follow advice or information from ChatGPT or any other AI assistant — always double-check any information ChatGPT gives you before you implement it, and consider whether ChatGPT’s recommendations are actually useful for your particular business or not.

ChatGPT can be used for free, but the $20-per-month plan increases usage limits. There’s also a $200-per-month plan, which has the maximum usage limits and new experimental features. As your business grows, you can also look at OpenAI's enterprise ChatGPT plans.

Descript

For most small businesses, marketing is an important method for growth, but it can also be one of the biggest expenses that small businesses face. Descript is an easy way to get started with editing video content for the purpose of business marketing, allowing you to cut together videos by editing the transcript like you would a Word document. Descript generates the transcripts using AI, plus it lets you overdub videos with AI voices and offers a range of effects to help enhance your video. It also helps you remove filler words like "um" from recordings easily. If you don't know too much about video editing but feel like video needs to be an important part of your marketing, then Descript is worth taking a look at.

Descript starts at $16 per person per month and ranges up to $50 per person per month. Plans range based on the number of transcription hours you get, as well as other features like 4K exports and AI speech.

Cursor

Your website, apps, and other software can be an important part of how your business runs – but if you don't have much experience with coding, it can be tricky to improve those services. Even if you do have tons of coding experience, you've probably spent countless hours working on your website and software. Cursor can help in both of these situations, allowing those with little experience to work on their code using AI and allowing those with tons of coding experience to more easily find bugs, refine and improve their code, and more. 

Cursor is an AI coding platform that lets you talk to an AI assistant in natural language. It can code on its own based on your feedback, or it can help you refine your code to ensure everything is running as smoothly as possible.

Cursor has a free trial, but it’s only so you can test it out for two weeks. After that, you’ll need to subscribe to either the $20-per-month Pro plan or the $200-per-month Ultra plan.

Canva Magic Studio

Businesses don't just rely on video and their website for marketing; they also rely on images and graphics. These images and graphics can appear on a website, but they can also appear in social media, on ads, and in presentations. Once upon a time, you had to pay an expensive designer with years of Photoshop training, but thanks to generative AI, we're living in a post-Photoshop world.

Canva Magic Studio is Canva’s suite of AI-based tools. Canva customers can use natural language prompts to create graphics for advertising campaigns, refine existing graphics with AI-based editing tools, and elevate pitch decks with improved visuals. Canva even has video-based tools, allowing you to create and edit videos without spending hours learning video-editing tools through trial and error. 

You can access some AI-based tools in the Canva Free plan, but usage is very limited. To get the most of Canva Magic Studio, you’ll need to subscribe to the $120-per-year Canva Pro plan, or one of the business-focused plans.

Jasper

Marketing and advertising aren’t all about video and graphics — it’s also about text. Plenty of AI tools can generate text, but Jasper is built specifically for creating and editing copy in a more organized way. It can handle general marketing copy, blog posts, social media posts, and more – plus you can upload examples of previous marketing copy to help give it a sense of your product, style, and general brand voice. Jasper also has a range of other helpful tools, including image tools, chat tools, and more.

Jasper costs $69 per month per person, but you can get a discount by paying yearly.

Otter AI

If your business involves having a lot of meetings, then it can be useful to have those meetings transcribed. Otter AI is perfect for this. It can transcribe your meetings, then allow you to search through the transcriptions so you can retrieve information about meetings later down the line. It also serves as an AI note-taking tool, automatically summarizes meetings, and has an AI chat feature that those in meetings can use to find out information.

There’s a basic free plan, but most businesses will want to subscribe to one of the paid plans, which start at $8.33 per user per month.

Julius

Running a business often involves collecting and processing large amounts of data, and it can be difficult to really put that data to use to grow your business. Julius is designed to do this. With Julius, you can upload all kinds of different data, then ask basic questions in natural language using one of the many built-in models. It can even create charts based on your prompts, and it supports the uploading of large files. You can do all of this without having to code, but if you do want to code for advanced work, you can do so with R, Python, or SQL.

There's a free plan that offers basic features, but many businesses will want to upgrade to a paid plan, which starts at $16 per month.

Shortcut AI

Despite all the advances in generative AI, many chatbots still can't help you edit spreadsheets directly. That's exactly what Shortcut AI is meant to do. This newly launched service uses AI to do all the tedious footwork and formatting that goes into building complex spreadsheets. If you can never quite remember how to create a pivot table, or simply need help managing large spreadsheets, try Shortcut AI. Think of it as the intern you can't quite afford yet.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.