I Tried Every Major AI Tool for 6 Months — Only 5 Actually Made Me Money
Six months. Dozens of AI tools. Honest verdict on which ones genuinely increased income and which ones were expensive ChatGPT wrappers that wasted my time.
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For the past six months I treated AI tools like a second job.
Not productivity experiments. Not curiosity. Specifically testing which ones made me money — either directly or by making income-generating work faster, better, or more scalable.
Here is the honest verdict.
The 5 that made real money
1. ChatGPT Plus ($20/month)
Obvious inclusion. But most people use it wrong, so let me be specific about the use cases that actually generate income.
What makes money: Writing production — I estimate going from around 600 words per hour to about 2,000 words per hour on topics I know well. That is a direct multiplier on freelance writing income. Same quality, same rate, one-quarter of the time.
Business research — competitor analysis, market sizing, product positioning for clients. Work that used to take half a day now takes 20 minutes. I charge the same rate either way.
Proposal and scope document drafting — the parts of client work that are formulaic and necessary but not billable in themselves. Saves 1–2 hours per new client.
What it does NOT do: Replace expertise. I generate better output because I know my field. People who use ChatGPT as a substitute for knowledge produce generic work no one pays premium rates for.
Estimated income contribution over 6 months: Hard to isolate perfectly, but the writing speed increase alone enabled me to take on two additional clients I would otherwise have declined for lack of capacity.
2. ElevenLabs (~$11/month on the Starter plan)
Specifically relevant if you run any kind of video or audio content — faceless YouTube, podcast, course material, video ads.
I tested every major AI voice generator. ElevenLabs is not close to the competition on quality. The voices in 2026 sound like real professional narrators, not text-to-speech robots from 2019.
For my faceless YouTube channel targeting the finance niche, this is the difference between a channel that sounds credible enough to watch and one where people click away in 30 seconds.
Income contribution: My faceless channel earns around £820/month. The narration quality from ElevenLabs is a meaningful part of why people stay and watch.
3. SurferSEO ($29/month)
The least exciting tool on this list and the one with the most direct impact on my affiliate income.
SurferSEO analyses the top 10 pages ranking for any search term and tells you: recommended article length, which semantic terms to include, how many headings to use, and which competitor pages are outperforming yours and why. Boring. Effective.
Several of my comparison articles ranking on page one of Google would not be there without SurferSEO's optimisation guidance. I know because I tested writing articles with and without it. The ones with SurferSEO rank. The ones without it mostly do not.
Income contribution: Affiliate income directly attributable to SurferSEO-optimised content: roughly £900–£1,200/month.
4. Make.com ($18/month)
This earned money not by producing content but by eliminating the hours I spent on admin that I could not bill for.
Make.com automates my client onboarding (new client confirmed → contract sent → project folder created → welcome email and kickoff call scheduled), my content publishing calendar, and my invoice tracking. Time saved: roughly four to five hours per week.
At my effective hourly rate, that is £200–£300 per week in reclaimed billable time. Make.com costs £18/month.
Income contribution: Reclaimed approximately £800–£1,200 in previously lost billable hours per month.
5. Midjourney ($10/month)
Specifically for thumbnail creation on YouTube and product mockup images for Gumroad listings.
I am not a designer. Before Midjourney, my thumbnails were made in Canva with stock photos and looked it. After Midjourney plus Canva for text and layout, they look like they were designed by someone who knew what they were doing.
Better thumbnails drive more clicks. More clicks drive more views and more affiliate traffic. The improvement in click-through rate from better thumbnails has been measurable.
Income contribution: Estimated £150–£200/month improvement in YouTube and product revenue from better visual quality.
The tools that wasted my money
Jasper ($49/month): Essentially an expensive ChatGPT wrapper with a prettier interface and less capability. There is no use case where Jasper does something ChatGPT cannot do for $29 less per month.
Writesonic ($19/month): Same issue. Fine for specific marketing copy workflows if you want templates, but ChatGPT does everything it does with more flexibility.
Synthesia ($30/month): AI avatar video presenter. The avatars currently look slightly wrong in a way most viewers notice immediately — slightly too smooth, slightly too perfect, slightly uncanny. For any content where authenticity matters, this actively hurts credibility. Might be worth revisiting in 12 months when the technology improves.
Copy.ai ($49/month): Built specifically for marketing copy and ad writing. If that is 90% of your work, this might justify the cost. For anyone doing a wider range of content work, it does not.
Notion AI (add-on): Genuinely useful if you live in Notion. Not useful enough to justify if you do not already have Notion as a central part of your workflow.
The actual lesson
Most AI tools that are not ChatGPT are ChatGPT wrappers with a narrower feature set and a higher price tag.
Unless a specialised tool does something genuinely specific that ChatGPT cannot — like ElevenLabs on voice quality, or SurferSEO on SEO analysis — you are mostly paying for a different interface built on top of the same underlying technology.
Spend $20/month on ChatGPT Plus. Add one specialist tool matched to your specific income method. That is probably the entire stack you need.
Everything else is noise.
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