Most "best AI tools" lists are generated automatically and have never been opened by anybody. This one is short on purpose: twelve tools that are genuinely useful when you are dealing with money, each one tried, each one with its catch written underneath, and each one showing which country ends up holding what you type. Ten of the twelve cost nothing at all to use seriously.
OpenAI · United States
The best-known assistant and the easiest place to start. For money work its strength is turning a mess into a shape: pasted figures into a tidy table, a confusing letter from an insurer into plain language, a vague worry into a list of questions to put to your bank.
The catch: The free tier is generous for plain text but tightens quickly on file uploads and research. It knows nothing about today unless it searches the web first.
Open ChatGPTAnthropic · United States
Built for long documents. Paste in a thirty-page fund prospectus, a tenancy agreement or an annual report and ask what is actually in it; it keeps the whole document in view and quotes the passage it is answering from, so you can check it.
The catch: The free tier allows a fixed number of messages in a rolling window, and one long document can consume several of them at once.
Open ClaudeGoogle · United States
Google's assistant, and the one that sits inside Gmail, Docs and Sheets. If your budget already lives in a Google spreadsheet, this is the tool that can read it and answer questions about it without you copying anything out.
The catch: The genuinely useful spreadsheet and inbox features require a Google account, and the deeper ones a paid Workspace or AI plan.
Open GeminiMistral AI · France
A French assistant, called Le Chat until May 2026. It is the mainstream choice whose company, servers and legal home are all inside the European Union, and it is fast and capable enough for everyday work.
The catch: Smaller than the American assistants, so it is weaker on obscure subjects and on very long or very difficult documents.
Open Mistral VibeDeepSeek · China
A Chinese assistant that is unusually strong at step-by-step reasoning and arithmetic, and free with no paid tier pushing at you. Useful as a second pair of eyes on a calculation you have already done yourself.
The catch: The company is in China and your conversations are stored there. Treat anything you type as something you have published.
Open DeepSeekAlibaba · China
Alibaba's assistant: free, and noticeably better than the American tools at languages they tend to neglect, Persian among them. A reasonable second opinion when an answer somewhere else looks wrong.
The catch: The same jurisdiction caveat as DeepSeek - a Chinese company, with your conversations stored in China.
Open Qwen ChatPerplexity AI · United States
A search engine that answers in sentences and puts the sources underneath every claim. The right tool for a question like "what is the current rate of inflation in the UK", precisely because you can click through and check whether it told you the truth.
The catch: Free searches are capped per day, and the thorough research mode belongs to the paid plan.
Open PerplexityGoogle · United States
Upload your own documents and ask questions of those documents and nothing else. For a folder of payslips, fund factsheets, pension statements or insurance policies it is the most useful free tool on this page, and every answer points at the page it came from.
The catch: It refuses by design to answer from general knowledge, so it is useless for anything that is not in the files you gave it.
Open NotebookLMMicrosoft · United States
Microsoft's assistant, free on the web and built into Windows. Its real advantage is Excel: describing the formula you want in ordinary words and getting the formula back is faster than hunting through the function menu.
The catch: The version that works inside Excel, Word and Outlook needs a paid Microsoft 365 plan; the free one is the website.
Open Microsoft CopilotDeepL SE · Germany
A German translator that remains the most accurate for European languages, and the one to reach for with a contract, a letter from HMRC or a foreign company report. It translates whole files and keeps the layout intact.
The catch: The free tier caps the length of a single text and the number of document files you may translate each month.
Open DeepLOllama · Your own computer
Runs an AI model on your own computer. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is logged by anyone, and it keeps working with the internet switched off. This is the honest answer for bank statements and anything else that must not leave the house.
The catch: It is driven from the command line, and a free model on an ordinary laptop is clearly weaker than the online assistants.
Open OllamaElement Labs · Your own computer
The same idea as Ollama in a normal application window: choose a model from a list, click download, and chat with it offline. The easiest way to try a completely private AI without ever opening a terminal.
The catch: Models are several gigabytes each, and a computer without a reasonable graphics card will answer slowly.
Open LM StudioEvery entry was opened and checked by hand on 2026-09-23. Prices are approximate, quoted in US dollars, and change often - confirm on the provider's own site before paying for anything.
An AI assistant is a very good reader and a very poor accountant. That one sentence decides almost every question on this page: hand it the forty-page pension document and it will save you an evening, hand it your actual figures and it will give you a number that looks right and is not. Use it for the reading; use a calculator for the arithmetic.
Anything you type into a tool that runs on somebody else's computer has left your house. Treat these as things you would not put on a postcard:
If you need help with a document that contains any of that, there are two honest options: black out the identifying parts first, or use one of the two tools on this page that run on your own machine and send nothing anywhere.
This is the column most directories leave out, and it is often the one that matters. Of the twelve tools listed here, seven belong to companies in the United States, two to companies inside the European Union (France and Germany), two to companies in China, and two run entirely on your own computer.
Since leaving the EU the UK has its own version of the GDPR, so an American or Chinese service is not automatically off limits - but the practical question is unchanged: your text may be processed a long way from home, under somebody else's law. The Chinese services are subject to Chinese law and store conversations there; they are excellent and they are free, and they are the wrong place for anything personal. The two European ones are the simplest position to defend if you ever have to explain yourself. The two that run locally raise no question at all, because nothing ever leaves the machine.
The directory uses three honest labels. Free to use means you can do real work indefinitely without paying. Free, with limits means there is a cap an ordinary user will hit - a number of messages, a document count, a length limit. Free trial only means it stops.
There is a second meaning of free that nobody advertises: on most free tiers your conversations are used to improve the service. Every one of these tools has a setting that governs this, usually buried in privacy or data controls. Find it before you type anything you care about, not after.
Good: explaining a piece of jargon in plain language; summarising a long contract or report and pointing at the clause it is summarising; drafting a letter to a bank, insurer or landlord; turning a heap of pasted figures into a tidy table; translating a foreign document; and - the most underrated of all - telling you which questions you should be asking an adviser.
Bad: arithmetic on your real numbers, which it approximates rather than calculates; today's prices, rates and thresholds, which it does not know unless it searches first; and the specific rules of the tax, pension and benefits system, which change every year and which it will state with complete confidence anyway. For numbers, use a calculator - that is exactly what the ones on this site are for. For rules that cost money to get wrong, use a professional.
For a folder of your own files - payslips, fund factsheets, pension or insurance letters - NotebookLM, because it answers only from those files and points at the page it used. For a single long document pasted in, Claude, because it keeps the whole thing in view and quotes the passage it is answering from. Both are free.
Not to an online tool, no. A statement carries your sort code and account number, your address and everyone you have paid. Either black those parts out first, or use Ollama or LM Studio, which run the model on your own computer and send nothing anywhere at all.
On most free tiers, by default, yes. Every service on this page has a setting that controls it, usually under privacy or data controls, and it is worth finding before you type anything you would mind seeing again. Models running on your own machine cannot do this, because there is nowhere for the text to go.
It can explain the method clearly, which is genuinely useful. It will also make small arithmetic errors with total confidence, and it does not know the current rates, bands and thresholds unless it looks them up first. Use a calculator for the numbers and a qualified person for anything where being wrong is expensive.
Mistral Vibe is a French company and DeepL is a German one, so both sit inside the EU and under European data protection law. Ollama and LM Studio keep your data close by in the most literal way possible: it never leaves your computer. Everything else on the list is American or Chinese.
Because a list of hundreds has not been checked by anybody, and it shows: those pages are full of products that were renamed, priced differently or shut down months ago. Every entry here was opened, tried and written up by a person, and every one names its drawback. A short list that is right beats a long list that is decoration.
By hand, a few times a year, and the date of the last check is printed underneath the list. You will notice the entries carry no model names and no feature lists - that is deliberate. Those details change within weeks, and a directory full of stale specifics is worse than one that only claims what it can keep true.
For information only. This is not financial or tax advice.