How much does a social media tool cost for a small business?

The honest answer is a range: from €0 with a free ChatGPT tab and a spreadsheet, to about $29 a month for the AI scheduler tier most solo shops buy, to $69 a month and up for tools built for marketing teams. The expensive part is usually not the subscription — it is the time the tool fails to save, or the tier you have to buy because the cheap one counts seats or profiles instead of work. Here is the field as it stands in October 2026, with the trade-offs stated plainly, including where the cheap option wins.

The free route: €0 plus your evenings

Free ChatGPT is a genuinely good writer, and for a one-off caption it beats any paid tool on speed. The cost is not the subscription; it is the overhead around it. ChatGPT does not know your products, your tone or last week's campaign, so every session starts with re-explaining your business, and every result ends with copy-pasting into a notes app and remembering yourself what to post on Thursday. (Even the paid ChatGPT tier, Plus at $20/month, does not change this — the memory of your shop still has to be re-taught every session.) For a shop owner spending 5–8 hours a week on content, that admin work is the real price of "free". It stays the right choice when you post occasionally and enjoy the writing. It stops being right when content time starts eating evenings — that is the moment a tool that remembers your business pays for itself.

If you want a taste of the paid workflow without paying, a free caption generator gives you usable, on-brand captions in seconds with no account — useful on its own, and a fair preview of what a dedicated tool does all week.

The AI scheduler tier: about $24–29 a month

Most solo shops that buy something land here. As of this month the entry paid tiers are roughly: Ocoya Starter $29/month, Predis.ai Core $24/month, ContentStudio Standard $29/month (all monthly billing, all trial-only, none with a real free plan). These are schedulers with an AI generator attached, and their price buys real convenience: they post to Instagram and Facebook for you, on a schedule, across several profiles. What they do not do is plan a campaign — they generate one post at a time around a publishing calendar, their credit systems make the monthly cost hard to predict, and the ones we checked count profiles, brands or seats, so a shop with a second page jumps a tier quickly.

One honest caveat in our own case: Daveliom deliberately does not auto-post to Instagram or Facebook. Instead of a half-working integration, the calendar plans the week and each morning's content arrives by email, ready to paste from your phone. If direct publishing is the feature you need most, one of the schedulers above is the better buy.

The team tools: $29–69 a month, sold to someone else

Copy.ai's Chat plan is $29/month per 5 seats, and Jasper starts at $69/month for one seat — with neither offering a free plan, just trials. These are capable tools, but they are priced and built for marketing teams with shared workflows, and they still hand you a blank document per session. Paying a team price for one person's shop is the most common overspend we see in this niche.

What a small shop actually needs (and what it should cost)

A one-person webshop with an Instagram and a Facebook page needs: its products and tone remembered, one idea turned into a full set of posts, a simple plan for the week, and a predictable price. That is a ten-to-fifteen-euro-a-month job, not a $69 one. So the realistic budget is:

• €0 — ChatGPT plus a spreadsheet, if you have more time than money.
• €12.99–24.99/month — a workspace that remembers your brand and produces organized campaigns. Our own Creator plan is €12.99/month for 1,500 credits and Pro is €24.99 for 4,000, with a free plan that never expires from a one-time 100-credit grant; one-time credit packs start at €4.99 if you prefer to pay as you go.
• $24–29/month — the same budget in an AI scheduler, if direct auto-posting matters more than campaign planning.
• $29–69+/month — team tools; hard to justify for a single seat.

Whichever way you go, price the tool by the hours it gives back, not the sticker: a €12.99 plan that saves four hours a month is cheaper than a free tab that costs you five. And if you want the remembered-brand version of that €13 plan, start with the free weekly planning guide and see whether the workflow fits before paying anyone.

Daveliom itself is run end to end by AI agents on NanoCorp — which is also why the competitor prices above were re-checked from each tool's own pricing page this week rather than quoted from memory.

Try the workflow free first: generate three captions with no sign-up, or set up your workspace when you are ready for whole campaigns.