# How Much Does AI Cost for a Small Business in Canada?

Source: https://www.entuit.com/blog/ai-cost-small-business-canada
Published: 2026-10-04
Tags: ai, small-business, ai-for-business, pricing, canada, toronto

Real 2026 numbers in Canadian dollars: what off-the-shelf AI tools, a custom AI project, and the monthly running costs actually add up to for a business of 2–50 people, and when it isn't worth it.

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For most Canadian small businesses, AI costs between **$30 and $45 a month per person** for off-the-shelf tools, or **$2,500 to $15,000 one time** for a custom AI project built around your own work, plus a **running cost that's usually under $150 a month**. The six-figure numbers you hear about are for large companies. A business of 2–50 people rarely needs anything close to that.

What follows is how those numbers break down, what drives them up, the costs people forget, and the cases where we'd tell you not to spend the money at all. All prices are in Canadian dollars.

## What are the three ways to pay for AI?

Almost every small business ends up in one of three places:

1. **Off-the-shelf AI tools.** ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and the AI features built into software you already use. You pay a monthly subscription per person.
2. **A custom AI project.** AI set up to do one specific job in *your* business: answering your customers' questions from your own pricing and policies, reading your invoices into your accounting system, or drafting your quotes in your voice. You pay once to have it built, then a small monthly running cost.
3. **Ongoing support.** Someone who keeps the custom work running, improves it, and handles the hosting. You pay a monthly retainer.

Most businesses should start with the first, move to the second when a specific job is clearly eating hours, and only need the third once they have more than one custom tool in production.

## How much do off-the-shelf AI tools cost?

Business plans for the main AI assistants run roughly **$30 to $45 CAD per person per month** at the time of writing, depending on the tool and whether you pay annually. Prices move, so check before you buy, but the order of magnitude has been stable.

For a 10-person team, that's **$3,600 to $5,400 a year** if everyone gets a seat. Two practical notes:

- **Not everyone needs a seat.** Start with the two or three people who write the most email, proposals, or documents. Expand when they're using it every day.
- **Use the business plan, not personal accounts.** Business plans generally exclude your data from training and give you admin control. A team of people pasting customer information into personal free accounts is how privacy problems start. Our [guide to AI data residency in Canada](/blog/canadian-ai-data-residency) covers what PIPEDA expects.

Off-the-shelf tools are good at *helping a person do their job faster*. They're not good at *doing a job on their own inside your systems*. That's where custom work comes in.

## How much does a custom AI project cost?

A well-scoped custom AI project for a small business typically costs **$2,500 to $15,000 CAD**, one time. Where you land depends on three things:

- **How many systems it touches.** AI that answers questions from a set of documents is simpler than AI that reads an invoice, matches it to a purchase order in your accounting software, and files it.
- **How clean your information is.** If your pricing, policies, and procedures are written down and current, setup is quick. If they live in three people's heads and a shared drive from 2017, part of the project is getting them into shape.
- **How much checking it needs.** Most good small-business AI has a person approve the output before it goes anywhere. Building that review step properly is part of the work, and it's what keeps the AI from embarrassing you.

For reference, here's how our own fixed prices map onto that range:

| What you get | Price (CAD) | Time |
|---|---|---|
| A **Technical Review**: where AI would genuinely save you time, what it would cost, and what isn't worth doing | $2,500 | 1 week |
| A **Build Sprint**: one AI feature, website, or internal tool, built and launched | $7,500 | 2 weeks |
| **Monthly Support**: ongoing improvements, hosting, and monitoring | $3,000/mo and up | Ongoing |

Most first projects fit in a single Build Sprint. Larger ones are usually two sprints, scoped one at a time, so you see results before you commit to the second. Full details are on our [services page](/services).

By comparison, large consultancies typically quote six figures for AI work spread over many months. That's often the right price for a bank. It isn't for a 12-person firm.

## What does AI cost to run every month?

This is the number that surprises people, in a good way. Once a custom AI feature is built, the **running cost is usually $20 to $150 CAD a month** for a small business. It has two parts:

- **AI model usage.** You pay the AI provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others) a small amount for each piece of work. For typical small-business volumes, think a few hundred to a few thousand customer questions or documents a month, this is often **tens of dollars a month**. Choosing the right model for each job matters: a well-built system uses an inexpensive model for routine work and saves the expensive ones for the hard cases. We wrote about that approach in [The Cost-Efficient AI Stack](/blog/cost-efficient-ai-stack).
- **Hosting.** The small app or service the AI lives in. For most projects this is **$0 to $50 a month** on modern hosting platforms.

If someone quotes you a running cost in the thousands per month for a small-business workload, ask exactly what it's paying for.

## What hidden costs should you plan for?

The build and the monthly bill are the visible costs. These are the ones people forget:

- **Your team's time during setup.** Expect a few hours of someone's time to explain how the work is done today and to review early results. It's the most valuable input to the project.
- **Getting your information in order.** If the AI is going to answer from your policies, those policies need to be written down and current. Sometimes this is the biggest piece of work, and it's useful even without AI.
- **Review time.** If a person approves what the AI produces, that's still time, just much less than doing the work from scratch.
- **Upkeep.** AI providers retire and update their models, usually once or twice a year. Someone needs to test the switch. Either budget a few hours a year, or have it covered by a support plan.
- **Accounts in your name.** Make sure the AI provider account, the hosting, and the code are registered to *your* business, not the consultant's. Otherwise "cheap" can turn expensive the day you want to change providers.

## A worked example: a 12-person office

Here's an illustrative example (not a specific client) of how the math works.

A 12-person property management office has two problems. Tenants email the same twenty questions every week, and a staff member spends Monday mornings retyping contractor invoices into the accounting system. Between them, those two jobs take about **8 hours a week**.

| | Cost (CAD) |
|---|---|
| Build Sprint: an assistant that drafts tenant answers from the office's own policies, plus AI invoice reading with a person approving each one | $7,500 one time |
| AI model usage and hosting | ~$80 a month |
| **First-year total** | **~$8,500** |

If that work is done by staff costing about $35 an hour, 8 hours a week is roughly **$14,500 a year**. Even if the AI only takes back three-quarters of that time, the project pays for itself in under a year, and the time goes back to work that actually needs a person.

Your numbers will differ. The point is to run this math *before* you buy anything. If it doesn't add up, don't do it.

## When is AI not worth the money?

We tell people this on calls regularly. AI is probably not worth paying for yet if:

- **The task happens rarely.** Automating something that takes an hour a month won't pay back the setup.
- **Nobody can describe how the work is done today.** AI can't automate a process that doesn't exist yet. Write the process down first.
- **The answer has to be perfect with no one checking.** AI makes mistakes. Good setups put a person on the final step. If that isn't possible, AI isn't the right tool for that job.
- **The real problem is something else.** Sometimes a slow job is slow because of an outdated website, a missing form, or a spreadsheet that should be a simple app. Fixing that may be cheaper and save more time than AI would.

## How do you get a reliable number for your business?

The fastest way to a real number is to pick **one specific job** that eats your team's time and get it scoped in writing: what will be built, what it will cost, what it will cost to run, and what you'll own at the end. Be wary of anyone who can't give you a fixed price for a well-defined job, and of anyone who wants to bill hourly with no cap.

If you're in Toronto or elsewhere in Canada and want that number, [book a free 30-minute call](/contact). Tell us where the time goes, and we'll tell you what AI can realistically take off your plate, what it would cost in Canadian dollars, and whether it's worth doing at all. For local projects, see our page on [AI consulting in Toronto](/ai-consulting-toronto).