What does a motivation letter generator cost?

The tools’ landing pages compared

All captured on 4 September 2026 at the same window width, so the comparison is fair.

1. 

   1. SwissJobs.appOur app

   CV and motivation letter straight from a Swiss job advert, no signup.

   SwissJobs.app →

2. 

   2. cvswiss.ch

   AI-written Swiss CV in five minutes.

   cvswiss.ch →

3. 

   3. cv-easy.ch

   Done in 10 minutes, CHF 12 one-off.

   cv-easy.ch →

4. 

   4. lebenslaufapp.ch

   CV and cover letter, free to try.

   lebenslaufapp.ch →

5. 

   5. RadarJob

   Job monitoring with a motivation letter attached, CHF 39 a month.

   RadarJob →

The tools compared directly

As of 4 September 2026. Every figure for another tool comes from that tool's own site; "n/s" means it was not readable there — not that the feature is missing. Our row comes from the code and from walking the live flow.

Why the monthly price is the wrong number

For a CV builder the arithmetic is simple: one document, one price. For a letter it breaks, because the document is new for every advert. That is not a stylistic preference — it is how the Swiss labour administration describes the document. SECO’s application guidance calls the cover letter your personal business card and says it gives a potential employer an overview of your skills, qualifications and motivation for an advertised position. A letter that fits twenty postings fits none of them.

Everything else follows from that. A one-off purchase that unlocks a single document is a good deal for a CV and often a trap for letters: cvswiss.ch sells a clean CV download for CHF 5, but the letter only appears in the CHF 15 subscription. A subscription that looks dear for one file gets cheaper with every application — CHF 15 across ten letters is CHF 1.50 each, across twenty it is seventy-five centimes.

The number nobody prints is how many letters you will write. If you are registered with an RAV — the regional employment centre — the required number of applications is agreed with your adviser and the practice differs from canton to canton; the federal FAQ on unemployment benefit names no national figure, only the consequence of insufficient job-search efforts. If you are not registered, count the postings genuinely worth applying to this week and multiply by four.

Then run the sum both ways. A tool at CHF 39 once is cheaper than any monthly plan from the third letter onwards — provided the letter it produces is one you would actually send. A free offer that ends after the first letter really costs whatever you pay the vendor you move to for the second.

What the free tiers actually allow

«Free» means five different things across these tools, and the gap is wider for letters than for CVs. FlowCV gives you one CV and exactly one cover letter, permanently, watermark-free and without a card. resume.io lets you generate for nothing but download only as a text file, which is useless for a Swiss dossier. Kickresume unlocks four matching letter templates but not the AI writer. Novorésumé writes «No Cover Letter» into its free column. And lebenslauf.ch, the most generous free offer among the Swiss tools, writes no letter at all — it expects one as an attachment you produce yourself.

So the useful test is not whether something is free but an action: start a second letter. The first one is free almost everywhere. The second is where you find out whether you are using a tool or a demonstration.

Two free tiers survive that test. ChatGPT writes as many letters as you like on its free plan; what it does not bring is the Swiss form — the subject line naming the exact position, the sender and recipient blocks, one page, the enclosures — and it will need the advert pasted in every time. On our side it is ten letters per rolling month with a free account, and the editor itself opens with no account at all; the money is asked for at the download, not at the writing.

bewerbung.ch belongs in the same paragraph for a different reason: its free standard account includes three BeKI credits, which is three AI-written application letters. No clock, no expiry, just a quantity — the most honest small free tier in this field.

Pay once or pay monthly — and who renews itself

Three vendors here sell something that stops on its own, and all three say so on the page. bewerbung.ch prints «Keine automatische Verlängerung» — no automatic renewal — under both paid packages and sells its credits in the same spirit. cvpics.ch sells its letter tool for CHF 39 once, explicitly for lifetime private use. Novorésumé puts «Pay once. No recurring billing.» above the price table and repeats it below as «There Is No Automatic Subscription».

The other side is just as explicit, and resume.io is the textbook case: «After 7 days, auto-renews to $29.95 billed every 4 weeks». It is on the tile, honestly, in the place nobody reads. Four weeks is not a month — that is thirteen charges a year rather than twelve, and the date walks forward every cycle, which is why a cancellation reminder in your calendar never sits on the first of the month.

We are in the second group, not the first. The seven-day trial is set up through the payment page, so it takes a card, and it becomes CHF 15 a month if you do nothing; you can cancel any time in the account. If that model is one you avoid on principle, bewerbung.ch’s credits or the cvpics.ch one-off are the more honest fit — a genuine advantage of those two that has nothing to do with the quality of the text.

At the top of the market the arithmetic stops. cvpics.ch has a person write the whole dossier, from CHF 380 according to its services list, delivered in four days, and cvswiss.ch opens its own price table by saying a professional CV writer costs CHF 200 to 500. That is the same market seen from the other end: if you will not write it yourself, you pay for someone’s hours. For one decisive application that can be the right expense. For ten a month it is not.

The cost line that is invisible if you read from abroad

A motivation letter belongs in the language of the advert, not the language of the company. In Switzerland that is a live decision rather than a formality: the same employer may advertise in German in Zurich and in French in Lausanne, and English postings are common in both.

This is where the cheapest options quietly drop out for an English-speaking reader. cvpics.ch exists only in German — the tool, the phrase library and the site. lebenslauf.ch runs a German interface. bewerbung.ch is a German interface too, and its pricing page puts documents in English, French and Italian in the paid tier, so the CHF 20 month is an entry price rather than an upgrade if you need a second language. Of the Swiss tools, cvswiss.ch and this site are the ones that work in four.

The second invisible line is the card. Six of these vendors bill in euros or dollars, so between the number on the tile and the line on your statement sit a conversion and, on most Swiss cards, a foreign-currency fee. We convert here at the Swiss National Bank’s August 2026 monthly average so the column is comparable; your rate on the day will differ.

And one convention worth stating for readers arriving from the US or the UK, because no international tool prints it: in Switzerland the document is a Motivationsschreiben rather than a resume cover note, it stays on one page, it carries a subject line with the exact job title, and it travels in a dossier alongside the CV and the Arbeitszeugnisse — the written employer references that follow you from job to job. A generator that produces a fluent American cover letter has still produced the wrong document.

What SwissJobs.app costs, and what stays free

Our own tiers, read out of the code today rather than from the marketing. The editor opens without an account, so a letter can be drafted and read on screen before anyone asks for an email address. A free account keeps the work and allows five letters a day and ten per rolling month — a budget of their own, not shared with the CVs, because one application needs both. The same allowance covers AI edits to the finished letter. After that it is a seven-day trial, then CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year, cancel any time.

The charge falls at the download, not at the writing. That makes us stricter than FlowCV, which hands over its single free letter watermark-free, and more generous than resume.io, whose free download is a text file. Taking the document away as a PDF or a Word file needs the trial or the subscription; neither export carries a watermark.

What the amount buys is the real pricing question. A template gallery gives you a shell to fill in by hand for every job. We start at the advert: the generator reads the posting and writes the letter from it in about a minute, in the language of the advert, and then hands over full editing — change any line by hand, or ask in plain words for a rewrite. The CV works the same way, and both documents hang off the same application.

Then there is the part only a Swiss tool builds: the letter form as it is expected here, four languages with their own pages, and at /arbeitsbemuehungen the official SECO sheet of job-search efforts, filled in from the applications you have tracked. Those efforts still have to be recorded where they legally count — with your RAV, through Job-Room — and we produce the filled sheet, not the recognition.

Who should pay which price

For most people applying to Swiss adverts regularly we recommend SwissJobs.app: CHF 15 a month buys a letter written from the posting, four languages, PDF and Word without a watermark, and the RAV sheet built from your own applications — a combination no other single tool on this list offers.

If you are writing one letter and you already know the Swiss form: ChatGPT on its free plan. That is honestly the cheapest sensible route, and it would be silly to charge you for it.

If you distrust subscriptions and you are applying in German: bewerbung.ch credits at fifty centimes a letter, with no automatic renewal and data on Swiss servers.

If you want to pay once and never think about it again: cvpics.ch at CHF 39, lifetime, seven CV templates included — provided German is enough for you and a questionnaire is an acceptable substitute for the advert.

If you need unlimited letters for a year in an international format: FlowCV at about CHF 48.50 a year is the lowest standing price here, and a reasonable answer for someone applying across several countries rather than only in Switzerland.

And if a single application matters enormously, the right expense is not a generator at all but a person who writes — from CHF 380 at cvpics.ch, in the range cvswiss.ch itself quotes as CHF 200 to 500. No tool on this list, ours included, replaces an hour with someone who takes your career apart in conversation.