Comparison

Affordable legal AI under $100 per month

A practical look at legal AI you can run for under $100/user/month — what you get, what you give up, and where the cheap option is genuinely good enough.

By The Draftiro team · Product· 9 min read·Published

Most marquee legal AI tools are priced for firms that bill at $400+ an hour. If you're a solo or a small firm running lean, the real question is: what can you actually get for under $100 per user per month, and is it good enough? Here's the honest map.

The under-$100 reality

Verified mid-2026 pricing makes the gap stark. Most AI-grounded research platforms start well above $100/user/mo:

  • Clio Work — ~$199/user/mo.
  • CoCounsel — ~$225–$500/user/mo.
  • Lexis+ AI — ~$200–$400/attorney/mo.
  • Spellbook — ~$100–$300/seat/mo.
  • Harvey — ~$1,000+/attorney/mo.

Under $100, the field thins out fast. Draftiro's Solo plan is $89/mo, Starter is $29/mo, and there's a free plan with no card. That's the band this article is about.

What you should expect under $100

An affordable tool shouldn't mean a toy. At the under-$100 tier you should still get:

  1. AI drafting for the documents you actually produce — demand letters, motions, discovery, client correspondence.
  2. Citation validation. Every case cite checked against a real database (Draftiro uses the free, public CourtListener corpus), with statutes flagged "unchecked."
  3. Conflict checking with an audit trail that survives a disciplinary review.
  4. Deadline math under FRCP 6 and state rules, with the correct judicial-holiday sets.
  5. A clean data posture — Draftiro runs on the paid Gemini tier, so your data never trains AI models.

What you give up

Be honest with yourself about the trade-offs:

  • The deepest research corpora. Westlaw and Lexis are genuinely deeper than a public-corpus tool. If you file appeals where opposing counsel shepardizes every cite, budget for one of them on top.
  • Enterprise procurement features. SAML SSO, a dedicated CSM, custom security questionnaires — these matter at 50 seats, not at one.
  • A completed SOC 2 Type II report, today. Draftiro's is in progress; some competitors (e.g. Spellbook) already hold one. If a finished report is a hard requirement right now, factor that in.

The verdict

For the large majority of solo and small-firm work, an under-$100 AI workspace is not a compromise — it's the right-sized tool. The expensive platforms are buying you research depth and enterprise procurement, neither of which most solos need every day. Start with the pricing page, or see how the free-and-$29 tier stacks up against Clio Work and CoCounsel.

This article was published by the Draftiro team and reviewed by our attorney advisors. See our team and how we track AI ethics opinions.

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