ChatGPT Subscription or a Custom AI Solution?

Businesses often ask us to build an AI tool when what they need is to give five people a paid subscription and an afternoon of training. We say that fairly often, and it saves everyone money.

A subscription is enough when

People use it themselves — writing, summarising, translating, drafting. The work is occasional, a human reviews everything, and nothing needs to connect to your internal systems. This covers the majority of what most offices actually want from AI.

Custom is worth it when

• The AI must read your own products, orders or records
• It runs automatically, without a person prompting it
• Customers interact with it directly on your site or app
• Your data can't be pasted into a public tool
• The volume makes per-seat subscriptions more expensive

The data question decides most cases

If staff are pasting patient details, customer records or financial data into a public chat tool, that's a problem regardless of cost. In those situations a controlled setup isn't a luxury — it's the only responsible option.

Try the cheap path first

Give the team subscriptions for a month and watch what they actually use it for. The patterns that emerge will tell you exactly what's worth building — and often that nothing is.