Motivation letters with AI: SwissJobs.app or ChatGPT — which delivers more?

Feature comparison

As of 4 September 2026. "not stated" means it could not be read on their own site — not "does not exist". Our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow, not from marketing copy.

Pricing side by side

As of 4 September 2026. "not stated" means it could not be read on their own site — not "does not exist". Our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow, not from marketing copy.

English-language Swiss adverts are the longest and the quietest

We drew 120 open adverts per advert language on 4 September, excluded apprenticeships and internships, and looked at the text a writing tool actually receives. English-language adverts were by far the longest: a median of 473 words against 359 in French, 248 in German and 245 in Italian. They are also the quietest about how to reach anyone — a phone number appears in 0.9 per cent of them, against 20.0 per cent of German-language adverts.

That combination is worth sitting with, because it describes exactly the reader most likely to reach for an international tool. You have the most text to paste and you get the least back from it. Not one English-language advert in the sample carried a postcode and town, let alone a street.

A second thing does not show up in a word count at all. An English-language advert in Switzerland does not mean an English-speaking application process, and it does not mean American conventions apply. The document is a Bewerbungsdossier — cover letter, CV, and Arbeitszeugnisse, the written employer references every Swiss employee collects on leaving a job. arbeit.swiss asks for all of it in a single PDF. A US resume-and-cover-letter pair, produced by a tool that has never heard of any of this, is a different artefact.

The formal parts, and the one that is almost never in the advert

arbeit.swiss, run by the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs and the cantonal employment offices, sets out seven formal parts of a cover letter, and two of them decide this comparison: the employer’s postal address, and the subject heading. Six of the seven are data, format and layout. Exactly one is writing.

Across 444 adverts with readable text, four carried a complete postal address with a street number, postcode and town — 0.9 per cent. Counting a postcode and town without a street brings it to five, or 1.1 per cent. Email addresses appear in 8.3 per cent and phone numbers in 8.1 per cent, and the German-language market is the generous one on both counts.

Neither tool can read out of the advert something the advert does not contain, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise. We do not hold it either: the record we hand the generator carries the job title, the employer and the advert text, not a street address. What separates the two tools is the next step — what each of them does when a required field has nothing behind it.

Invent it, or leave the gap showing

A language model is built to return a complete, plausible piece of text. Ask for a letter without giving it the recipient, and a recipient appears. Ask without naming the hiring manager, and a name appears. This is not a defect; it is the product working as intended, and it is where the general advice to "let AI write it" quietly stops being useful.

Our generator has that tendency switched off in the prompt. Where a real value is missing it is told to use an obvious placeholder for you to fill — "Company Name" for the employer, "[Position Title]" for the role, an obviously fake pattern for phone and email — and it is explicitly forbidden to output realistic-looking contact details, person names or company names. A second rule stops the letter borrowing from the advert: only facts, skills and experience that appear in your own material may be used, and anything the advert asks for that you have not supplied is raised beside the letter as a suggestion rather than written into it as a claim.

The honest qualifier: you can instruct a chat to behave the same way, and the instruction works. "Invent nothing, mark anything missing as a placeholder" is one sentence. The difference is the default — which is what a tool does on the occasions when you are not thinking about it.

Why more text is the wrong thing to want

A chat reads as more helpful the more it produces, so it tends to hand you three paragraphs past the point of usefulness. On a Swiss cover letter that lands you in the one formal mistake every reader notices immediately: a second page. The page is tighter than it looks, because the sender block, recipient block, date and subject heading have already taken their share before the first sentence.

Our generator handles that with a limit rather than a suggestion. The body between the subject heading and the closing may run to at most 900 characters, and the instruction tells the model to count and never to pad. That is two or three tight paragraphs. The number is in the code, and it is checkable on the letter you get.

Set against a median advert of 298 words, the letter is far shorter than its own source material. Most of the advert has to be thrown away, and the whole craft is in which part. A tool with no length limit hands that decision back to you after the text already exists — which is the most expensive moment to make it.

From prose to a document

What a chat produces is an answer in a chat window. Turning it into a letter is your work: sender line, recipient block, place and date, a bold subject heading, a signature, margins, PDF. It never appears in the advice because it does not look like it is worth mentioning, and it is the part that actually takes the time — once per application, every time.

In our editor the letter is a document from the first draft. The order is fixed in the generator: a place-and-date line built from today’s date, which is passed in explicitly so that reworking an old letter cannot leave last month’s date standing; then the recipient block; then the subject heading carrying the job title, with no "Re:" in front of it; then two or three paragraphs; then the closing and your name. It leaves as a PDF or a Word file with no watermark on either — which matters, because arbeit.swiss wants one PDF for the whole dossier, and a Word file is the version you can still paste into an employer’s form field.

What is striking about ChatGPT’s plan table is what is not in it. We read all four private plans row by row on 4 September — context windows, file uploads, projects, image generation, memory, privacy. There are rows for extensions into Excel, PowerPoint and Google Sheets, and none for handing back a finished application document — a cover letter is not a spreadsheet. That is a product decision rather than a flaw: it is a chat, and it is not trying to be anything else.

What ChatGPT is plainly better at

Price first, because it is real. The free tier covers this task, the plan overview lists unlimited text chats on it, and nobody counts how many letters you write in an evening. Our free account has limits — five letters a day, ten a month, and the same allowance again for AI edit instructions — and downloading the finished file belongs to the seven-day trial. If you are writing one application and then stopping, the chat is cheaper. That is the common case, not an edge case.

Then there is everything around the application that has nothing to do with the document: seeing a sentence three ways, translating a phrase out of a German advert, thinking through a salary question, preparing for the interview. An application tool does none of that.

And the objection to us that we are not leaving out: our letter assistant asks for an account on the very first screen. We checked it on 4 September — signed out, the assistant sends you to the signup page. The letter editor itself opens with no account, and five sample letters for a standard application, an apprenticeship, a speculative application, an internship and an English-language application download as Word files with no signup at all — but the path that writes from the advert does not. ChatGPT needs an account too; the difference is that it is one account for everything you do there.

Who should pick which

Applying to Swiss adverts over several weeks, wanting a distinct letter per role: we would say SwissJobs.app. The letter is written from the advert text and your CV, comes out as a finished document in a language you set per letter, and the gaps stay gaps instead of becoming inventions. On our own adverts the title, employer and advert text are already in the form; for any other advert you paste the text, exactly as you would anywhere else.

Writing one application, or wanting to stay inside a tool you already pay attention to, or needing the cost to be zero: use ChatGPT — and give it three instructions. Paste the whole advert text rather than a link. Tell it to invent nothing and mark anything missing as a placeholder. Give it a length so the result fits one page.

Doing both is not a contradiction. The chat is the better workshop for a sentence; the application tool is the better place for the document. Neither of them can give you the employer’s postal address — that is on the company’s own website, and looking it up stays your job either way.

The five-minute test

Take the finished letter from whichever tool produced it and mark every factual claim in it: each name, number, address and skill. Then cross out everything that came from your CV or from the advert text. Whatever survives was added by the tool.

If nothing survives, send it. If a name, an address or a piece of experience survives, you have just found a claim that you, not the tool, will have to stand behind in the interview. The test takes five minutes, works on any provider including ours, and is the only one that says whether "delivers more" also means "delivers something usable" in your case.