A five-person marketing agency needs seven layers: an AI assistant for everyone, meeting notes, design, short video, SEO research, client reporting and an automation tool. At list prices that costs about $660 a month on annual billing and $750 on monthly billing, roughly $130 to $150 per seat, with reporting the biggest variable.
That total assumes ten retained clients and one person per specialist job. The shape matters more than the total: three layers (SEO, reporting and design) account for about 70 per cent of the spend, while the layer people talk about most, the AI assistant, costs $20 to $25 a head. Drop the reporting platform and the bill falls by $200 a month.
The costed stack for five seats
Prices are list prices in USD from each vendor's own page in October and November 2026. "Annual" means billed yearly and shown per month; "monthly" means billed month to month. Where a vendor's page showed only one billing option, the same figure appears in both columns and is marked.
| Layer | Tool and seats | Annual, per month | Monthly, per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Assistant | ChatGPT Business Standard, 5 seats (Claude Team Standard costs the same) | $100.00 | $125.00 |
| Meeting notes | Fireflies Pro, 2 seats | $20.00 | $36.00 |
| Design | Canva Business, 5 seats at $250 a year each | $104.17 | $104.17 (annual price only) |
| Video | Runway Standard, 1 seat, plus Opus Clip Starter | $27.00 (Opus Clip at its monthly price) | $30.00 |
| SEO | Semrush SEO plan plus one extra user | $162.33 | $184.00 |
| Reporting | AgencyAnalytics Core, 10 clients at $20 | $200.00 | $200.00 (annual price only) |
| Automation | Zapier Professional, 2,000 tasks | $49.00 | $73.50 |
| Total | $662.50 | $752.67 |
Per seat that is $132.50 on annual billing and $150.53 monthly. Take out the reporting platform, as an agency that builds reports by hand would, and the totals drop to $462.50 and $552.67.
A few of those numbers need context. ChatGPT Business and Claude Team both bill $20 a seat on annual terms and $25 monthly, and both want at least two seats. Semrush's page shows the SEO plan at $139 a month, or about $117 a month billed annually, with extra users from $45 a month; I read that from the page this week, and the line-up has changed since the old Pro, Guru and Business tiers, so check before you budget. AgencyAnalytics showed one plan, Core, at $20 per client per month billed annually, with volume pricing mentioned for agencies with 25 or more clients; the page says annual billing saves 20 per cent, so a month-to-month contract costs more than the $200 shown. Opus Clip's page lists monthly prices only. Canva Business is $250 a year per person on its pricing page.
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Buy nowWho needs which seat
Buying by role stops the common waste of putting every tool on every person. Here is the allocation behind the table, for a team of five.
| Role | Assistant | Notes | Design | Other seats |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Founder and strategy lead | Yes | Yes | Yes | Zapier owner |
| Account manager | Yes | Yes | Yes | Reporting platform admin |
| SEO and content lead | Yes | No | Yes | Semrush, plus the extra user |
| Designer | Yes | No | Yes | Runway |
| Social and video producer | Yes | No | Yes | Opus Clip |
Notice what is shared. One Zapier account is owned by one person, and one reporting platform login sits with the account manager, with client users added on its own terms. Sharing a login to save a seat breaks most vendors' terms and makes it impossible to see who did what, so I would not do it. Buy the extra Semrush user instead.
The assistant layer: one plan or the suite you already pay for
ChatGPT Business Standard and Claude Team Standard are the two obvious picks, at $20 a seat on annual terms or $25 monthly. Both default to not training on business content, both support shared projects, and both cap seats well above five (ChatGPT Business at 200 paid seats, Claude Team at 150). Pick on the output your people prefer for writing and analysis, not the price, because there is none to separate them. A one-week trial where each of the five uses both on live work, then votes, tells you more than a feature table.
If your agency already pays for Google Workspace, there is a cheaper first step. Gemini is built into Business Standard and above (about $14 a user a month list price) across Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet and Drive. Five seats at that tier is $70 and you may already pay it. Test whether it covers drafting and summarising before you add a separate assistant. Google Meet's note-taking feature needs an eligible Workspace edition or a Google AI plan, so check your edition before you buy a note-taker as well. Agencies on Microsoft have the equivalent: Microsoft 365 Copilot Business is $21 a user a month on annual terms.
What to avoid is paying for two assistants per person. The "second opinion" use is rare, and a free tier covers it.
For a ten-person version of the same decision, see the AI rollout plan for a marketing agency, which sequences who gets access first.
Design: Business seats or two Pro licences
Canva Business at $250 a year per person is $20.83 a month, which is $104.17 for five. Canva Pro for one person is $144 a year ($12 a month). The difference buys team admin tools and shared control of brand assets. On Free, Canva gives only limited access to its AI features, and its AI allowances have shifted in recent months, so check the current allowance on Canva's page before quoting a client any number of AI generations.
A lean agency can run two Pro licences, one for the designer and one for the social producer, and give everyone else read access to shared files. That is $24 a month instead of $104, and it works as long as brand assets are stored per client and handed over cleanly when a client leaves. Once more than two people edit the same templates, the Business seats pay for themselves in fewer overwritten files.
Video: where credits run out first
Generation tools are priced in credits, and credits are where an agency's estimate and its bill diverge. Runway Standard is $12 a month annually or $15 monthly and includes 625 credits; video generation costs 12 credits a second, so 625 credits is about 52 seconds of finished output in the month, with no allowance for retakes. A free account gets 125 one-off credits.
A realistic mistake. An agency promises a client six 10-second social clips and budgets one generation per clip, which would be 60 seconds and about 720 credits, already past the Standard allowance. In practice each clip takes three tries. That is 180 seconds, roughly 2,160 credits, more than three times the monthly allowance. The fix is to price tests separately, use stills and motion graphics for most clips, and move to a higher Runway plan only for the months that need it.
Opus Clip is priced by processed minutes of source video: Starter is $15 for 150 minutes and Pro $29 for 300; the free plan gives 60 minutes a month with a watermark. Two 60-minute client webinars and a 25-minute interview use 145 minutes, just inside Starter; one more webinar pushes the agency onto Pro. Opus Clip's help centre is silent on AI training and its privacy policy tells users to keep special-category data out, so keep client videos with sensitive content away from it.
I would leave avatar and voice tools out of the base stack. HeyGen Creator is $29 a month ($24 annually), Business $149 plus $20 a seat, and ElevenLabs Creator is $22 a month. Each adds consent questions: a cloned voice or a lookalike avatar needs written permission from the person it copies, and ElevenLabs only allows Professional Voice Cloning from the Creator plan up, with a voice-captcha check. Buy them when a client brief calls for them, not before.
SEO: pay for seats, not for hope
Semrush is the largest single line after reporting, and the one most often over-seated. The SEO plan is aimed at freelancers and small businesses, with 5 websites to monitor and 500 keywords tracked daily according to the pricing page; it also lists AI search tracking features. An agency with ten clients may outgrow 5 monitored websites, which is the first thing to check against your client count. The Starter plan keeps the same limits and adds AI visibility tracking. Pro+ raises them to 15 websites and 1,500 keywords at $299 a month, or $248.17 billed annually, which adds about $131 a month to the annual-billing total and $160 to the monthly one.
Put the seat rule into practice. Two people need SEO data: the SEO lead and one other person. Everyone else works from exports or screenshots. A $45 extra user is cheaper than a third full licence, and a shared Google Sheet of weekly rank changes serves the rest of the team. The assistant then does what it is good at: turning an export of 200 queries into a grouped content plan.
A short worked case. The SEO lead exports queries for a kitchen fitter client, 200 rows with clicks, impressions and position. She asks the assistant to cluster them by intent, flag queries sitting at positions 8 to 15 with over 50 impressions, and suggest one page change each. The tool saves perhaps 90 minutes of sorting; what it cannot do is judge whether a query is worth chasing for a business that fits kitchens in only one area. That step stays with her.
Reporting: per-client pricing changes the maths
AgencyAnalytics charges per client, not per seat, so the bill grows with your roster. At $20 a client on annual billing, 10 clients is $200 a month and 18 clients is $360. Its page lists AI features included in Core (AgencyAI insights and analysis, Ask AI, AI Summary and MCP access for ChatGPT and Claude) and an optional AI Tracker add-on priced in credits at $20.83 a month per 250 credits on annual billing.
The question is not whether the tool is good, but whether it replaces more than $20 of staff time per client per month. A monthly report that takes 90 minutes to assemble by hand at a loaded staff cost of $35 an hour is $52.50 of time. If the platform brings that to 30 minutes, it saves $35 of time per report and pays for itself. If your reports are bespoke decks with commentary written from scratch, it saves much less and a spreadsheet plus an assistant may be the better value.
Google's Data Studio (renamed back from Looker Studio in April 2026) is the usual cost-free alternative for charts; check its current terms on Google's own page rather than relying on mine. The workflow to automate the commentary, rather than the charts, is in how marketing agencies use AI to automate client reporting.
A prompt, a sample output and the fix
Here is last month's data for a childcare nursery client (sheet pasted).
Write 120 words of report commentary for the owner.
Rules: lead with enquiries, not impressions; quote only numbers that
appear in the sheet; one recommendation; no jargon.An illustrative output: "Enquiries rose to 31 from 24, with 19 coming from search. Cost per enquiry fell to $14. Facebook produced 4 enquiries on 22 per cent of spend, so I recommend moving $150 to search next month." The fix is a check, not a rewrite: compare each figure to the sheet. Assistants sometimes round or restate a number from an earlier month, so the account manager ticks off every figure before it goes to the client.
Automation and notes: the small lines that grow
Zapier's Professional plan with 2,000 tasks is $49 a month annually and $73.50 monthly; the 750-task tier is $19.99 and $29.99. Triggers and filters do not count as tasks, but each action does, and an AI step uses 1, 3 or 5 tasks depending on the tier chosen. A weekly flow that pulls a client's figures, drafts a summary with an AI step (say 3 tasks) and posts to a team channel and logs a row (2 tasks) uses 5 tasks per client per run. Ten clients over four weeks is 200 tasks, a tenth of the plan. Flows triggered by every new lead use far more, which is where the plan fills up.
Fireflies Pro is $10 a seat on annual billing and $18 monthly. Two seats cover the founder and the account manager, who run most client calls. Tell clients and call participants before any recording, and keep a retention rule: delete transcripts after 30 days unless a client asks otherwise. If an automation sends call summaries to a client, have a person read it first. A note-taker can mishear a figure or an owner, and a wrong action item sent under your name is worse than a late one.
Seven workflows that suit this layer are laid out in AI workflow automation for agencies.
What the stack costs per client, and the hours that repay it
Ten clients on $662.50 is $66.25 a client a month. If your average retainer is $2,500, the stack is 2.65 per cent of revenue. At a $900 retainer it is 7.4 per cent, which is where trimming starts to matter.
A break-even sum: at a loaded staff cost of $40 an hour, $662.50 is 16.6 hours. Across five people that is about 3.3 hours each a month. Most people saving an hour a week on drafting alone clear that on their own. The test is whether you can name the hours. Ask each person to log time on three recurring jobs for four weeks, before and after, and use those figures, not a vendor's claim.
Cutting fourteen tools to seven: a before and after
Take an agency that has grown a toolbox by accident. Before: two AI writing tools, two note-takers, three design or image subscriptions, one stock video generator, a keyword tool, a rank tracker, a reporting tool, a separate scheduler for social posts and a spare automation account. Fourteen subscriptions, five people, and nobody can say who uses what.
The audit takes one afternoon. List every subscription with its owner, monthly cost and last-used date. Cancel anything unused for 30 days. Merge duplicates by picking the one the team actually opens. Move the survivors to named seats. Illustrative result: fourteen tools become seven, and the monthly total falls by a third. The saving matters less than the clarity of one owner per tool.
What to leave out of the five-seat stack
- A dedicated AI writing platform for every seat. Jasper Pro is $69 a month per seat ($59 annually) and lists one seat on its plan; across five people that is $295 to $345 a month. A shared project in ChatGPT or Claude, loaded with a brand voice file, does most of the same job, as covered in how agencies keep brand voice consistent.
- A second assistant plan. Not needed when one is chosen after a trial.
- Avatar and voice-clone tools. Add on demand, with written consent from any person copied.
- More Semrush seats than people who read the data. Exports solve it.
- Premium tiers nobody has hit a limit on. ChatGPT Business Premium and Claude Team Premium are $100 a seat annually and $125 monthly, and their value is a higher usage allowance, which one heavy user may need and four others do not.
Client data and the contract
Business plans for ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini in Workspace do not train on business content by default; consumer plans have a setting to switch training off, and I would not put client material through a personal account. Two contract points follow. Tell clients which tools touch their data, and add AI disclosure, ownership and approval wording to your agreements. The clause list is in AI clauses for agency contracts.
The agency in the earlier examples, with a craft brewery supplier and a specialist food importer among its clients, should also decide per client which tools may see their sales data. A short permissions sheet, one row per client and one column per tool, answers that in a minute.
Not every task suits the stack. Which jobs to keep with people is covered in which agency tasks AI handles well, and which it doesn't.
A 30-day buying plan
Week one: start the assistant trials and the tool audit. Week two: pick the assistant, move to named seats and set up client projects. Week three: add design and notes seats for the people who need them. Week four: price reporting against a month of logged hours, and decide on video only if a client brief needs it. At day 60, review seat use and cancel anything with fewer than two active users a week.
Questions agency owners ask about the stack
Does every person in the agency need every tool?
No. The assistant is the only layer worth giving to all five. Design, video, SEO and reporting seats go to the people who do that work. In the costed stack here, only two people hold note-taker seats and one holds each of the video, automation and SEO seats.
Is the client reporting platform worth $20 per client a month?
It is worth it when reports are monthly, standardised and take over an hour each to assemble by hand. At ten clients that is $200 a month. If your reports are bespoke decks, a spreadsheet plus an assistant may cost less and fit better.
Should we pay for ChatGPT Business or use the Gemini in Workspace we already have?
If your team already pays for a Google Workspace edition with Gemini built in, trial that first. Pay for a separate assistant plan only if people keep hitting its limits or need shared projects and a no-training default on business content.
What is the most common way an agency overspends?
Buying seats for the whole team on tools only one person uses, and keeping generation tools with credits that nobody tracks. Review seat use after 60 days and cancel anything with fewer than two active users a week.
Can we pass AI tool costs on to clients?
You can, but clients mostly want outcomes priced, not tools itemised. Fold the stack into retainers and packages, and pass through only unusual client-specific costs such as a premium licence they asked for.
Further reads
- Marketing Agency Pricing After AI: Retainers, Packages and Deliverables — Price retainers now that the stack changes your costs.
- ChatGPT Prompts for a Marketing Agency: Briefs, QA and Client Updates — Prompts for briefs, quality checks and client updates.
- AI Content Workflow for Agencies: From Brief to Approved Draft — Run drafts from brief to approval without chaos.
- AI Influencer Marketing for Agencies: Shortlist, Vet and Pitch — Another job the same stack can take on.
- AI Media Planning for Small Agencies: Channel Mix and Budget Splits — Use the stack for channel mix and budget splits.
- Agency Client Retention: Spot At-Risk Retainers With AI — Spot at-risk retainers before they leave.
- How Small Agencies Use AI to Write New-Business Pitches — Win new work with the same tools.
- Best AI UGC Video Editors for Marketing Agencies: Costs and a One-Brief Trial Plan — AI video editors tested on one client brief.
- Timesheet Software for Agencies: Budgets, Billable Hours and AI — Four timesheet tools compared on project budgets, burn alerts, billable-hour reports and AI, with a worked fixed-fee project and a weekly AI budget digest.
- Marketing AI Software Solutions: An Agency Checklist and Scorecard — A trial scorecard and purchase gate for agencies comparing AI tools across real client work.
- PPC Audit Template: Run Google Ads Audits for New Clients With AI — A five-section Google Ads audit template, the AI prompts that summarise the exports, and a filled sample with a one-page prospect summary.
- How Does Claude Help a Marketing Agency? Six Jobs and Their Limits — Six agency jobs Claude does well, the limit of each, a test you can run on your own brief, and plan costs against ChatGPT.
- AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.
Sources: vendor pricing pages for ChatGPT Business, Claude, Fireflies, Canva, Runway, Opus Clip, Semrush, AgencyAnalytics and Zapier, checked October to November 2026.