The Cost of a Lean AI Growth Stack vs a 5-Person Team (2026 Data)

A complete software growth stack — CRM, email, analytics, SEO, social, automation, the lot — costs roughly £105 a month at its paid floor, and closer to £0 if you start on free tiers; the five-person team it replaces costs north of £27,500 a month fully loaded. That is the trade in one line, and the gap is not subtle: it is two orders of magnitude. We priced every tool in our catalogue to find the real number. 201 of them carry a published entry price across 50 categories, the median entry price is £20 per month, and 58 per cent ship a free tier you can genuinely build on. The expensive part of growth was never the tools. It was always the people you had to hire to operate them — and that is precisely the gap an agentic stack closes. This study lays out the real numbers, where the money actually hides, the worked examples that make it concrete, and how a solo founder should read the spreadsheet.