Updated on October 14, 2024
With the rapid growth of AI, the number of new apps and platforms for increased productivity can feel overwhelming. Learning all of them consumes time and money, but these tools can be worthwhile if you start small and grow gradually. This is especially true for small businesses and sole proprietors with limited hands on deck because AI tools can help you accomplish more tasks without adding staff members.
Fortunately, many of these new products offer free trials or subscriptions that allow you to try them before putting any money down.
This guide highlights 20 budget-friendly AI solutions that can help small businesses like yours enhance their productivity in meetings, marketing, content creation, email management, task management, accounting, and more.
General all-purpose
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is an AI platform that offers many functions, such as creating different types of written text, interpreting legal or expert jargon, identifying key takeaways from guest reviews, and analyzing, interpreting, and reformatting data. The platform uses a large language model (LLM) AI program trained on extensive data sets. It has a vast bank of GPTs (generative pretrained transformers) that provide a litany of different functions.
ChatGPT 3.5 is available free of charge. The advantage of the paid version is that it offers larger data sets and high-capacity memory, according to Coursera.
Cost: $20 per month for ChatGPT Pro (4.0)
Beautiful AI
Beautiful AI is a presentation tool enhanced with AI capabilities. It uses AI and templates to streamline the design of graphics, charts, images, sides, and more. As a result, it efficiently produces polished presentations that look like they took hours to create.
Cost: Tiered pricing, starting at $12 per month
Marketing & Content Creation
Canva
Canva is a design tool with AI features for creating professional marketing materials, such as eye-catching graphics and social media images. The platform uses AI to suggest designs, automate resizing, and recommend layouts based on your content and preferences. It also offers templates, color schemes, and fonts for event flyers, welcome guides, brochures, and other promotional materials.
Pixlr
Pixlr is a versatile online photo editing tool. It uses AI to automate and speed up editing, including removing backgrounds, enhancing colors, and retouching images. It also offers an AI image generator. Small businesses can use Pixlr to create professional-quality visuals for social media and marketing materials without having advanced design skills.
Cost: Tiered pricing, starting at $1.99 per month
Read more: VR Photography: Dos and Don’ts
Grammarly
Grammarly is a cloud-based writing assistant that uses AI features to alert you to grammar, spelling, punctuation, plagiarism, and delivery errors and suggests substitutions. The tool can enhance the quality of your writing in listings, marketing materials, social media posts, correspondence, and other written communications.
Cost: Tiered pricing
Copy AI
Copy AI is an AI platform that creates marketing copy, social media posts, product or listing descriptions, blog ideas, email content, and other written communications. Like ChatGPT, users input prompts to produce content. The tool also suggests relevant keywords and phrases to increase your content’s visibility and has more than 90 copywriting templates.
Cost: Tiered pricing, including a free version
Jasper AI
Jasper AI is an AI platform that assists with content development and marketing. It can help you create compelling emails, property descriptions, engaging blog posts, social media posts, website copy, and guest communications tailored to your audience. Its most significant advantage may be its automated ability to increase your content’s visibility with search engine optimization (SEO), the strategic use and placement of keywords, headings/subheadings, and images/videos. The tool can also be trained to generate content based on your company values, context, and input.
Cost: Starts at $39 per month for the Creator plan
Read more: Improving your vacation rental content SEO
Video creation
Riverside
Riverside is a studio-quality recording software with AI capabilities to enhance video and audio production. It offers features like automatic transcription, noise removal, and instant conversion of long-form content into short clips. Speaker View automatically switches to active speakers, and AI Show Notes generates summaries, titles, and descriptions for social media. You can also brand your content by adding logos, subtitles, and custom backgrounds.
Cost: Tiered pricing, including a free version
Predis
Predis AI helps you create social media and advertising videos and carousels. It uses AI features to suggest creative content ideas and produce high-quality videos faster than you could manually. It provides intuitive video editing tools that allow small business owners to customize and refine their content and build their online presence with professionally edited videos.
Cost: Tiered pricing, including a free plan
InVideo
InVideo offers text-to-video conversion, customizable templates, and AI-assisted edited tools for social media and marketing videos. The application can transform text prompts quickly into video content, create high-definition ads, or produce social media clips with AI-generated voiceovers. It also integrates with social media platforms for easy posting.
Cost: Tiered pricing, including a free version
Social media
Buffer
Buffer is a social media management tool that uses AI to analyze audience activity and recommend the best times to post, maximizing engagement with your content. The tool allows small business owners to manage multiple social media accounts efficiently, schedule posts, and track performance metrics. It is particularly beneficial for small businesses focused on content scheduling, as it offers post recommendations and analytics to optimize social media strategy and boost visibility.
Cost: Tiered pricing, including a free version
FeedHive
FeedHive is a social media automation tool that leverages AI to optimize posting schedules by analyzing audience behavior and recommending posting times for higher engagement. Its content calendar feature enables small business owners to plan and organize posts in advance, ensuring a consistent flow of content. FeedHive also features an analytics dashboard for tracking posts’ performance.
Pricing: Tiered pricing, starting at about $20 per month
Read more: 10 Social Media Strategies to Market Your Vacation Rental
Meetings and note-taking
Zoom
Zoom’s virtual meetings may not immediately come to mind when considering AI. However, the application leverages AI to generate automated transcriptions, meeting summaries, and background noise suppression, which can be helpful in meetings of all kinds.
Fathom
The Fathom app is a meeting and note-taking tool that uses AI to transcribe, highlight, and summarize your video calls automatically and identifies each speaker by their name or email. It streamlines note-taking and captures key takeaways and action items, allowing you to be fully present and engaged during meetings. It can be useful during meetings and webinars and works with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams.
NotebookLM
Notebook LM is an AI-enabled research assistant by Google that summarizes and extracts key insights from notes and documents. When you upload a document to the website, the research assistant answers questions about the content or distills takeaways into a more straightforward format like a briefing, list of FAQs, or bullet points. It also can respond with citations and quotations from your uploaded documents.
Cost: This tool is still in the testing phase, and Google is offering it free of charge at this time (October 2024).
Email management
Superhuman
Superhuman is an email-writing assistant with AI features. It allows you to type a few phrases; the assistant will automatically turn them into professional emails. You can train the app to match the voice and tone of emails you have previously written. The app also prioritizes messages and tracks open and read rates, helping you optimize email timing and content for better open and read rates the next time.
Cost: $25 per month for the Starter Plan
Boomerang
Boomerang is an email management tool that uses AI to manage email campaigns and perform other functions. Its AI feature, Respondable, analyzes your emails to provide suggestions on tone, length, and subject line that improve the likelihood of a response, which can improve a campaign’s effectiveness. It also tracks responses, suggests the best times to send emails for maximum engagement, and sends reminders to pay bills.
Cost: $4.98 per month for the Personal Plan, $14.98 per month for the Pro Plan
Read more: The Ultimate Vacation Rental Software Guide
Task management
Airtable
Airtable is a cloud-based collaboration platform with AI features that combines the features of a database and a spreadsheet. It allows users to organize their to-do lists, set deadlines, assign tasks, and track progress in a customizable way.
Cost: Tiered pricing
Nifty
Nifty is a collaborative project management platform designed to streamline workflows and centralize project management. It combines task management, time tracking, file sharing, team collaboration, and project planning features. The platform uses AI features to create workflows with lists, statuses, and project tasks, and users can quickly find projects by searching keywords.
Cost: $39 per month for up to 10 users
Accounting
QuickBooks Online
QuickBooks Online is an accounting platform with AI enhancements. The tool automatically imports and categorizes transactions from connected bank accounts, reducing manual entry and allowing automated invoice creation and tracking. It also analyzes your financial data and generates custom reports on trends, highlighting any areas of concern to help you make wise financial decisions proactively.
Pricing: $17.50 per month for a Simple Start plan
Xero
Xero is a small business accounting software that offers AI-enabled automated data entry from banks, accounts, and apps. It also recognizes financial institutions, tracks spending and generates financial reports.
Cost: The company currently has a promotion for 95% off the first three months of a subscription, with the starting price at 75 cents per month.
Read more: AI Dos and Don’ts: Using AI in Your Vacation Rental Business
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