AI tools for teams, priced per person and per use
Nine tools, A to Z, judged on the number nobody puts on the pricing page: what a seat costs when the person holding it uses it twice a month.
Per-seat AI pricing has a quiet problem. Usage inside a team is never even — two or three people will use a tool hourly and the rest will open it occasionally — and a flat per-seat licence charges the same for both. On a team of ten, that is usually where most of the budget goes.
So the questions below are about shape rather than features: whether unused allowance is wasted or pooled, whether an occasional user costs you a full seat, and whether the tool works in the applications your team already has rather than the ones it would have to adopt. Listed alphabetically.
The list below is in alphabetical order, not ranked. aiCat is one of the tools in it, so any ranking we published would be worth what you would expect — instead, every entry says plainly which situation it is the right answer for, and which it is not.
What was actually compared
- Per-seat price against what a quiet seat actually costs you
- Whether unused allowance is wasted, pooled or carried
- Shared settings, shared history and administrative control
- Whether people can keep using the applications they already use
- How long a new hire takes to become productive with it
All 9, A to Z
| Tool | Price from | What it is | Languages | Strongest at |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiCat | Free · Premium from $6/mo | Every app, OS-wide | Any language the model speaks | One key that proof-reads, translates, explains, detects, dictates and reads aloud |
| ChatGPT | Free · Plus from $20/mo | Chat assistant | Multilingual | General reasoning that is still at or near the top of the field; Long, open-ended sessions where the task changes as you go |
| Claude | Free · Pro from ~$17/mo | Chat assistant | Multilingual | Long-form writing that keeps a consistent voice; Following detailed instructions about tone and structure |
| Copyleaks | Free (limited) · from ~$10/mo | AI and plagiarism detector | Multilingual | Plagiarism and AI detection in one product; Wider language support than most detectors |
| Grammarly | Free · Pro from ~$12/mo | Writing assistant | English-first | Deep grammar, spelling and clarity checking in English; A browser extension plus Office, Google Docs and desktop surfaces |
| Microsoft Copilot | Free · business from ~$30/user/mo | Workspace assistant | Multilingual | Deeply wired into Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams; Answers grounded in your organisation's own files |
| Notion AI | From ~$10/member/mo on top of Notion | Workspace assistant | Multilingual | Writing and editing inside Notion pages, where it is genuinely good; Answering questions about your own workspace, with the sources linked |
| Otter.ai | Free (capped) · Pro from ~$8.33/mo | Meeting transcription | English-first | Meeting transcription with speakers separated and searchable; Joins Zoom, Meet and Teams by itself |
| Sapling | Free · Pro from ~$25/mo | Business writing assistant | Several, English strongest | Built for customer-facing teams: CRM and helpdesk integrations; Autocomplete and snippet expansion for repeated replies |
The list, A to Z
aiCat
For the seats that would otherwise be wasted
Why: Usage-based rather than per-seat, so the five people who use it twice a week cost almost nothing while the three who live in it are covered. Shared settings and a memory that carries your product names to a new hire. Team + Offline from $18 per member.
Watch out: An install per machine, and the admin surface is younger than the enterprise incumbents'.
Download for free →ChatGPT
The seat everybody asks for by name
Why: Team plans, admin controls, and the assistant most new hires already know how to use, which is worth more than it sounds.
Watch out: Per-seat and flat: the occasional user costs the same as the daily one.
aiCat vs ChatGPT →Claude
For teams whose output is long documents
Why: Team plans with the strongest long-document behaviour on this list, useful where the deliverable is a report rather than a reply.
Watch out: Per-seat, and it is a window rather than a layer over the tools you already use.
What a shared memory does →Copyleaks
For teams that commission content from other people
Why: AI detection and plagiarism in one scan with team seats and shared history — bought for a specific function, not as a general assistant.
Watch out: Enterprise-shaped onboarding, and the detector caveats apply to it as much as to any other.
What a shared memory does →Grammarly
For a company that needs one voice across everybody
Why: Team style guides and brand tones are the reason companies buy this rather than letting people expense individual licences.
Watch out: English-first, integration-bound, and per-seat whatever the usage.
aiCat vs Grammarly →Microsoft Copilot
The default where Microsoft already is
Why: Deep in Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams, grounded in the organisation's own files, and frequently already on the invoice.
Watch out: From about $30 per user per month, usually annual, and nothing outside the Microsoft estate.
What a shared memory does →Notion AI
For a team whose knowledge genuinely lives in Notion
Why: Answers from your own specs, notes and decisions with links back to them, and one admin surface if you are already standardised there.
Watch out: Only inside Notion, on top of a Notion seat, from about $10 per member per month.
aiCat vs Notion AI →Otter.ai
For the meeting-notes problem specifically
Why: One narrow job done completely: calls transcribed, searchable and shared, so writing them up stops being somebody's task.
Watch out: Not a dictation tool, English-first, and capped by minutes below Pro.
What a shared memory does →Sapling
For a customer-facing team measured on replies
Why: Snippets, autocomplete and quality analytics inside the helpdesk and CRM the team already uses.
Watch out: From about $25/month per seat, and the value is in the integrations rather than the writing.
What a shared memory does →Hands-on notes
First-person impressions from using these, not a benchmark. They are here because everything above this point is a table, and a table cannot tell you which tool you will still be opening in three months.
Rolled out to a team of eight, which is where the pricing shape stopped being an abstraction: three people use it constantly, five use it a few times a week, and per-use billing meant the five cost almost nothing. Onboarding was the easiest part — four minutes each, no training session. What people mentioned unprompted afterwards was the combination of dictation and text on the same keys, and that it holds on to the things they have told it about a project and reuses them. It is a downloaded app, so there is an install step for each machine; for a team that wants an assistant in every application rather than in one, that is the trade.
Already licensed, already in Word and Teams, and for the people who live there it is the obvious answer. For the developers and the support team it was a line item nobody used.
The team style guide is the feature that justifies a business purchase. It is also the feature nobody notices until somebody sends a customer email in the wrong register.
One seat, shared transcripts, and the meeting notes stopped being one person's job. Narrow, cheap, and it solved a specific complaint completely.
One of them is a hotkey. Try it on the text you have open
Free to start with 10 aiCatCoins, no card. Premium starts from $6/month. macOS, Windows and Linux.
aiCat pricing at a glance
| Plan | Price | aiCatCoins / month | Max selection | What it unlocks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 10 | 500 chars | Everything aiCat does, plus free dictation and your own memory |
| Premium | from $6/mo (list $10) | 3 000 | 5 000 chars | Think More, read-aloud, encrypted memory, premium models |
| Team + Offline | from $18/member | 12 000 | 50 000 chars | Edit your memory, MCP access, local models, team sync |
| Enterprise | from $90/member | 150 000 | Unlimited | SSO, audit, best coin rate |
Shortlist of one? Start with the one that costs nothing to try
aiCat's free tier includes every task, 10 aiCatCoins a month, and coins bought outright never expire. macOS, Windows and Linux.
Frequently asked
What is the real cost of a per-seat AI licence?
Divide the annual cost by the number of times the person opens it. On most teams the median user opens a $30/month tool a handful of times a month, which puts the per-use cost in the dollars rather than the cents.
What should a ten-person team actually buy?
Usually two things, not one: whatever is deeply integrated with where the work already lives, and one general tool priced by use for everybody else. Buying one expensive seat for all ten is how the budget disappears.
Does a shared memory help a team?
It helps a new hire most. A memory holding your product names, your customers' terminology and your house conventions removes the first fortnight of asking the same questions.
Which operating systems does aiCat support?
macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows 10/11, and Linux as AppImage, .deb or .rpm.
Is my text sent anywhere?
Only the text you explicitly act on is sent to the model you selected, for that one request. Your history is stored locally on your device. Team + Offline can run a local model so nothing leaves the machine at all.