Every small-business owner in the Tri-Cities is being pitched AI right now — usually as an expensive platform that promises to "transform" everything. Most of that is noise. A handful of tools genuinely save time and make money. Here's the short list, and where a custom build actually beats an off-the-shelf tool.
Start here: the $20/month tools every small business should have
ChatGPT Plus — $20/month
Highest-ROI purchase you'll make. Drafts emails, rewrites quotes, generates job descriptions, brainstorms marketing angles, cleans up meeting notes. If you're not using it daily, you're leaving hours on the table every week.
Claude Pro — $20/month
Better than ChatGPT for long documents, contract review, and careful writing. Many Tri-Cities business owners run both — Claude for anything that needs judgment, ChatGPT for anything that needs speed.
Marketing and social
Vposty — small monthly
AI-generated social posts targeted at trades and small business (built by the same team behind RomanThings). Solid pick if you're posting to Instagram or Facebook and don't have a marketing person.
Canva Pro with Magic Studio — $15/month
AI image generation, background removal, and brand kits. It's the fastest path from "I need a flyer for Saturday's event" to actually having one.
Descript — $12–$24/month
Edit video and podcast recordings by editing the transcript. Removes filler words automatically. If you post to TikTok, Reels, or YouTube, this alone saves hours per video.
Admin and operations
Otter or Fireflies — $10–$20/month
AI meeting transcription and summaries. Automatic follow-up notes after client calls, which is a huge win for contractors and consultants juggling quotes.
Zapier or Make with AI steps — $20–$50/month
Connect the tools you already use (Gmail, QuickBooks, Google Sheets, HubSpot) and let AI classify, summarize, and route data automatically. This is where most small businesses stop, because the wiring is tedious. Which brings us to the next category.
When off-the-shelf runs out: custom AI builds
Off-the-shelf tools are general-purpose. Once you know what you actually want AI to do for your business, a small custom build almost always outperforms stacking more subscriptions. Common Tri-Cities requests we see:
- Website chatbot trained on your services, hours, and pricing — answers leads at 10pm so you don't lose them by morning.
- Quote-writing assistant that takes bullet notes from a site visit and spits out a client-ready proposal in your voice.
- Inbox triage — an automation that reads incoming email, labels it (lead / vendor / spam / support), drafts a reply, and posts new leads to your CRM.
- Internal knowledge assistant — an AI that can answer "what's our warranty policy?" or "what did we quote the Jones project?" from your own documents.
A focused build like these usually runs $2,000–$8,000 as a one-time cost and ships in 2–4 weeks. Compare that to $200/month for a SaaS tool that only does 60% of what you actually want.
What to skip (for now)
- Enterprise AI platforms pitching $50k+ — the marketing is aimed at Fortune 500, not a Tri-Cities small business.
- "AI SEO" tools that generate 500 auto-blog posts — Google now demotes this content, and it makes your site look spammy.
- Consumer-grade AI on customer PII — always use business-tier plans (ChatGPT Team, Claude for Work) for anything touching customer data.
How to start
- Pick one repetitive task you do every week that feels dumb.
- Try to solve it with ChatGPT or Claude first. Give it a week.
- If off-the-shelf doesn't cut it, that's your case for a custom build.
If you're at step 3, that's exactly what RomanThings builds — one useful thing, shipped in 2–4 weeks, from a small studio in Pasco, WA.