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

Published or commonly quoted mid-2026 pricing makes the gap stark (check each vendor's current pricing). Most AI-grounded research platforms start well above $100/user/mo:

Clio Work — ~$199/user/mo.
CoCounsel — Essentials listed from $340.85/mo (September 2026).
Lexis+ AI — ~$200–$400/attorney/mo.
Spellbook — quote-based; no public price we could verify.
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:

AI drafting for the documents you actually produce — demand letters, motions, discovery, client correspondence.
Citation validation. Detected supported case citations can be checked against the free, public CourtListener corpus when available, with statutes flagged "unchecked."
Conflict checking with an audit trail of who searched, what matched, and what was decided.
Deadline math under FRCP 6, with state judicial-holiday sets where the tool models them.
A clean data posture — Draftiro does not use your matter content to train AI models, and it uses Google's paid Gemini API terms rather than a free consumer tier.

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 has not completed a SOC 2 audit and holds no SOC 2 report; 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.