Firms searching for “AI paraplanner” are usually shopping for one of four different products, and the price ranges barely overlap. A meeting notetaker for a client conversation costs about $39 to $100 a month. A report drafter runs $67 to $225 per user. A planning engine like MoneyGuide or Income Lab costs $175 to $199 a month. And the consumer-grade floor is free. The prices below were checked in November 2026 against vendor pricing pages and the most complete independent directory in this space, and every number quoted here is the published starting tier, not the enterprise or white-glove quote that closes the deal behind it.
The four categories, and the price of each
| Category | What it does | Tools and starting price |
|---|---|---|
| Meeting notetakers | Join the client call, capture notes and actions | FinMate AI $39/mo; Zocks $67/user/mo (annual); Mili $60/mo; Jump from $100/advisor/mo |
| Report drafting and research | Draft suitability-style reports, scenario summaries | Otter Pro $8.33/user/mo for raw transcripts; Fathom $15/user/mo; generic LLMs from $8/mo |
| Planning engines | Retirement and distribution modeling | MoneyGuide $175/advisor/mo; Income Lab Core $199/mo (annual) |
| End-to-end workflow platforms | Capture, structure, draft, route for sign-off, audit trail | Quote-based, generally above $100/advisor/mo at entry |
The first cheap mistake is comparing across categories: a $39 notetaker looks like a bargain next to a $100 workflow platform until you notice the $39 tool hands you text and leaves the case assembly entirely untouched.
Meeting notetakers: the priced list
The notetaker tier is where published pricing is most complete. FinMate AI positions itself as an agentic co-pilot for advisory meetings with unlimited hours, at $39 a month billed annually on its Standard plan. Mili starts at $60 a month with a 14-day free trial. Zocks starts at $67 per user per month on annual billing. GReminders pairs scheduling with AI meeting notes from $69 a month. Jump, which bundles meeting notes with follow-up workflows and AI-assisted account opening, starts at $100 per advisor per month on its Meet plan. If your CRM is Wealthbox, the built-in AI Notetaker is a $49 per user monthly add-on, which often beats buying a standalone tool because the notes land in the CRM record automatically.
What separates these at the low end is where output goes. A tool that drops a transcript in your inbox has automated the typing. A tool that writes structured notes to the client record has automated the filing step after it, which is the half of the job advisors actually resent.
Check FinMate AI pricing · Check Zocks pricing
Consumer-grade tools still work at zero cost: Fathom has a free forever plan for individuals and $15 per user on paid tiers, and Otter’s free plan covers 300 transcription minutes a month with Pro from $8.33 per user. The catch is compliance, not features: consumer AI tools are consumer data products, and client conversations in them raise exactly the data protection questions an independent paraplanning guide warns about.
Report drafting: cheap inputs, expensive thinking
Drafting is the largest time drain in paraplanning, which is why the category is contested. There is no dominant dedicated report-drafter with public pricing; incumbents sell by quote. What does publish a price is the ingredient layer. A capable general AI assistant starts around $8 a month, and transcription to feed it starts at Otter’s $8.33 per user. Advisory-specific drafting, where the output follows suitability-report structure, objectives, risk profile, capacity for loss, costs and charges, alternatives considered, is where quote-based vendors sit, and Jump’s $100 tier edges into this territory with post-meeting follow-up drafting.
The honest evaluation of the draft layer, pulled from how paraplanning firms actually test tools: run it on a real case, not the vendor’s demo client, and read the first draft as a compliance officer would. The realistic gain is that hours of drafting become a review-and-refine task. That is a large gain. It is not a button.
Planning engines: MoneyGuide at $175, Income Lab at $199
The modeling layer publishes two clean numbers. MoneyGuide starts at $175 per advisor per month for its planning suite. Income Lab prices Core at $199 a month billed annually at $1,990, with monthly billing at $2,388 a year, three years running as the market-share leader in retirement distribution software per the Kitces rankings. These are not AI paraplanning tools in the drafting sense; they are where the analytical core of the plan lives, and increasingly they carry AI assistants on top.
For a solo advisor, $175 to $199 a month for the planning engine plus $39 to $100 for the notetaker is the realistic stack, roughly $2,600 to $3,600 a year, and it replaces nothing you would have paid a human paraplanner for except the write-up time. The comparison firms keep making against AI, an outsourced paraplanner at per-report pricing, is genuinely cheaper at low volume and worse as volume grows, because per-report pricing means every case costs again, while software is flat.
End-to-end platforms: no price tag, for a reason
The full workflow category, which carries the case from meeting capture through structured data, analysis, drafted report, forced human sign-off, and audit trail, is nearly all quote-based. Jump is the closest to transparency at from $100 per advisor per month. Everything else in the category sells on demonstration, which itself is a data point: when a category prices by quote, implementation and support are part of the product, and the sticker price comparison against $39 notetakers is meaningless.
Check Jump pricing (free trial on the Meet plan)
What makes the category worth the quote process for multi-advisor firms is the input problem. Independent analysis of the category in mid-2026 was blunt about it: cheap per-seat tools that only draft leave the hardest work, gathering and reconciling the inputs, exactly where it was, and the tool that fixes the data-gathering half costs more precisely because it does the harder half.
What a year actually costs, three realistic stacks
- Solo advisor, minimal compliance exposure: Fathom free plus a general assistant at $8 a month: $96 a year, with the advisor doing all review and assuming the consumer-tool data risk. This is the stack many small firms start with and outgrow.
- Small firm, CRM-integrated notes: Wealthbox AI Notetaker at $49 per user per month (2 users: $1,176 a year) plus MoneyGuide at $175 per advisor (1 advisor: $2,100 a year): about $3,276 a year. Notes land in the CRM, planning happens in a real engine.
- Growth firm, all-in: Jump at $100 per advisor per month (3 advisors: $3,600 a year) plus Income Lab Core at $1,990 billed annually: roughly $5,590 a year, with follow-up drafting and account-opening workflows included at the Jump tier.
Against an outsourced human paraplanner at typical per-report rates, all three stacks break even between two and four plans a month. Above that, software wins on flat cost; below it, outsourcing wins on zero fixed commitment.
The checks that separate good buys from expensive ones
- Price by hours, not seats. Cost per fully produced and reviewed report, including the reviewing time, is the only unit that reflects the value. Per-seat prices hide it when usage is uneven across advisors.
- Test on a real case, redacted. Every tool looks strong on a tidy fictional client. The awkward facts, the half-answered objective, the off-template client, is where the difference shows.
- Watch for confident fabrication. An invented figure or a plausible number where an honest “unavailable” belongs is disqualifying in this category, because the errors flow into regulated documents if uncaught.
- Require enforced sign-off, not encouraged sign-off. The workflow should force human approval and record who approved what. A tool that lets a draft flow straight to a client was not designed for regulated firms.
- Interrogate data handling first. Where client data sits, whether it trains models, and who can access it. A vague answer here ends the conversation, whatever the price.
Where the value actually sits
The pattern across the pricing: the $39 to $100 notetaker tier is mature, priced transparently, and a safe first buy that saves write-up time today. The drafting layer is where the biggest single time saving sits, but no vendor currently wins on published per-tool pricing, so evaluate it by running your own case. The planning engine is the most expensive line with the clearest justification, because the modeling is the part a $39 tool cannot fake. And the end-to-end platform is worth quote-gathering only once the firm has outgrown piecing the categories together itself.
Whatever the tool, the binding constraint is review capacity. Producing drafts faster than a qualified person can properly check them is not capacity gained. It is risk added.
Check Income Lab pricing · Check MoneyGuide pricing
Pricing reviewed November 10, 2026 against vendor pages and the Best AI for Advisors directory (list prices read October 21, 2026, updated November 9, 2026). Most vendors in this category change tiers and pricing mid-cycle and many quote-only vendors never publish at all, so confirm on the vendor page before commitment. Some links here are affiliate links, which cost you nothing and do not affect which tools appear.