AI Personal Assistant for Business: What a Business AI Assistant Costs and What It Actually Does

The advertised price is a floor, because almost everything here is credit metered

This is the part the comparison articles skip, and it is the single most useful thing to understand before you spend anything. The cheap end of this category is not really priced per month. It is priced per unit of work, with a monthly allowance bundled in, and the allowances are much smaller than the marketing implies.

Sintra is the clearest example. Read off sintra.ai/pricing on September 8, 2026, a Sintra X plan gives you access to twelve or more AI helpers with names and job titles, and includes 250 credits a month. Not 250 per helper. 250 in total, shared across the lot. For a business generating real volume of email, content and support replies, that is a few days of use, not a month. The pricing itself is a term ladder rather than a plan ladder, billed upfront for the whole term, and the pricing page currently runs it as a sale: $48.50 a month if you buy one month (against a regular $97), $23.60 a month on three months (regular $177 for the term), and $15.60 a month on twelve (regular $624 for the year). Sintra's help center states it no longer sells individual helper plans, so older guides quoting one helper at $39 are out of date. There is no free tier, and the safety net is a 14-day money-back guarantee you have to request from support. We work through what 250 credits actually buys, action by action, in Sintra AI pricing.

Lindy meters the same way but with much larger allowances and a much higher entry price. Read off lindy.ai/pricing the same day: Plus is $29.99 per user per month with 3,000 credits per user, Pro is $99.99 with 15,000, and Max is $199.99 with 35,000. Enterprise is quoted individually and is the tier that carries HIPAA compliance with a signed BAA, audit logs and onboarding. Credits go into one shared team pool and do not roll over month to month. When the pool runs dry Lindy pauses until the next cycle, unless you buy top-ups at $10 per 1,000 credits or switch on overages billed at twice the normal rate, which is covered in our Lindy AI assistant review. New teammates who join through Slack get a 7-day free trial, while direct signups are billed immediately.

One change worth knowing if you are reading an older guide: Lindy no longer has a free plan. It moved to the Plus, Pro and Max lineup in early 2026 and removed the free tier at the same time, which is recorded in more than one independent pricing write-up as well as being visible on the current page. Plenty of articles still ranking on this keyword tell you to start free at Lindy. You cannot.

The practical consequence is simple. Do not compare the monthly numbers. Estimate your monthly volume of actual tasks, ask each vendor what that costs in credits at your model choice, and compare the totals. A $15.60 plan with 250 credits and a $149 flat plan with no meter can land in the same place, and the flat one is the one you can put in a budget.

How much does an AI personal assistant cost?

Between roughly $15 and $200 per user per month for the metered products, and $149 to $399 a month flat for a managed office assistant. Every figure below was read off the vendor, with the date it was checked, because prices in this category moved twice in 2026 already.

At the cheap end, Sintra X runs $15.60 to $48.50 a month depending on the term you commit to, with 250 credits. Motion, verified on September 6, 2026, is $19 per seat per month on Pro AI with 7,500 AI credits per seat, and $29 per seat on Business AI with 15,000, with overage at 25 cents per 100 credits on Pro and 19 cents on Business. A ChatGPT Business seat, verified September 1, 2026, is $25 per seat monthly or $20 on annual billing, with a two-seat minimum. Claude Team is $25 standard or $20 annual on the same date. Lindy starts at $29.99 and goes to $199.99 per user.

Then there is the comparison nobody in this category likes making, which is against a person. A US-based virtual assistant service runs somewhere around $1,380 to $2,600 a month for part-time coverage, and a full-time employed executive assistant costs roughly $65,000 to $88,000 a year loaded, which is about $5,400 a month. Against those numbers every product on this page is cheap, which is exactly why the marketing in this category leans so hard on the salary comparison. It is a fair comparison only if the software actually removes the work rather than making you faster at it, and for chat assistants it does not.

If your suite already includes an AI assistant, price that at zero before you buy anything. We work through what Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace each actually bundle on Copilot vs Gemini, and a meaningful share of AI budgets in small offices get spent on capability the company was already licensed for.

Can AI replace a personal assistant?

It can replace most of the tasks and none of the judgment, and being clear about which is which is the difference between a purchase that sticks and one that gets cancelled in month three.

The replaceable part is larger than people expect. Scheduling and rescheduling, triaging an inbox, drafting the same six emails, filing documents where they belong, pulling a meeting into notes and actions, chasing people who said they would do something and did not, retyping data from one system into another. That work is patterned, high volume and low stakes individually, and software is genuinely better at it than a distracted human because it never forgets and never gets busy.

The part that does not transfer is judgment and representation. Knowing that a particular client email needs a phone call rather than a reply. Deciding which of two conflicting meeting requests actually matters this week. Handling a delicate conversation on behalf of someone senior. Noticing that something is off before it becomes a problem. An assistant who is good at their job is doing a lot of that quietly, and no current product does any of it.

The realistic framing for a business owner with no assistant is that software takes the first list off your own plate, which is usually the reason you were thinking about hiring in the first place. For a business that already employs an assistant, the framing is the opposite: it removes the grunt work so the role can spend its time on the second list. We cover that second case on executive assistant software, and the hire-versus-buy math on AI executive assistant.

Is there a free AI personal assistant for business?

There are free tiers, and they are worth exhausting before you spend, but the honest answer for 2026 is that the free options in this category have been shrinking rather than growing.

What is genuinely free and genuinely useful: the consumer tiers of ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini will draft, summarize and rewrite all day, which covers the entire first shape of product described above. If your problem is writing speed, you can solve it for nothing this afternoon. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 both bundle an AI assistant into plans a great many businesses already pay for, so check your admin console before you buy a seat of anything.

What is not free any more: Lindy removed its free plan in early 2026, and Sintra has no free tier at all, only a 14-day money-back guarantee. Both facts contradict a lot of the articles currently ranking on this keyword, which is a good reason to check the vendor page yourself before you plan around a free tier that no longer exists.

The thing free tiers cannot give you is the second mode: work that happens on a schedule without you opening anything. That is where the cost sits, because it requires the software to hold state, watch for triggers and be accountable for output. If unfinished work is the problem, the free options will not touch it, and that is not a limitation of the free tier so much as a different product entirely.

Where Officeagent fits, and where it does not

We sell in this category, so here is our stake stated plainly, along with the cases where you should buy something else.

Officeagent is the fourth shape: a managed office assistant that handles a fixed set of office jobs rather than a chat window you prompt. It drafts the follow-ups, files documents, prepares meeting notes and keeps the commitment list, and a human approves anything before it goes out. Pricing is flat and not metered, at $149 a month for a solo operator and $399 a month for an office of up to ten people, which is set out in full on our pricing page. The flat part is deliberate and it is the main reason to choose us over the credit-metered products: you can put the number in a budget and it does not move when you have a busy month.

Where you should buy something else. If your problem is drafting speed, buy a chat assistant. A $20 ChatGPT or Claude seat will do that better per dollar than we will, and we would rather say so than sell you a $149 plan for a $20 problem. If you want to build custom workflows across a lot of tools, an agent builder like Lindy is the right shape and we are not, because we ship a defined set of office jobs rather than a canvas. If calendar mechanics across several executives is the bottleneck, buy a dedicated calendar tool first, and we compare those on executive assistant software. And we do not answer phones, so if you need a voice picking up, we are the wrong purchase entirely.

Where we do fit is the business where small things quietly do not get finished: the follow-up that goes out on day nine instead of day three, the document nobody filed, the recurring report somebody assembles by hand every Monday. That work is patterned enough to hand over and consequential enough to be worth paying for, and the approval queue is what makes it safe to hand over at all. Nothing sends until a person clicks approve.

How to choose one without wasting three months

Work down this list in order and stop when the remaining problems are small enough to ignore. Most bad purchases in this category come from starting at step four.

• Write down the actual complaint in one sentence. "Writing takes too long" and "things do not get finished" lead to completely different products at similar prices, and everything else follows from which one it is.
• Check what you already own. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace both bundle an AI assistant, and the free tiers of ChatGPT and Claude cover the drafting job outright. This step costs an afternoon and regularly saves the entire budget.
• Translate every price into your own volume before comparing. Sintra X includes 250 credits a month and Lindy Plus 3,000 that do not roll over. Ask each vendor what a hundred of your typical tasks costs in credits, then compare those totals rather than the sticker prices.
• Treat an agent builder as a project, not a purchase. Lindy and its peers are genuinely capable, and someone has to build and maintain the workflows. If nobody on your team owns that, the subscription will lapse unused.
• Ask what happens when it gets something wrong. Anything that sends email or touches documents on your behalf needs an approval step, an audit trail, or both. This matters more the more senior the name on the outgoing email.
• Buy the flat plan if your volume is unpredictable. Metering is cheaper when usage is low and steady, and worse than useless for budgeting when it is not.