AI SDR Pricing in 2026: Every Plan Compared, $39 to $5,000

AI SDR pricing in 2026 runs from $39 a month to more than $5,000 a month, and the spread has less to do with output quality than with packaging. The cheap end sells software and expects you to bring your own mailboxes and your own judgment. The expensive end sells a managed agent on what third parties report to be a twelve month contract, and the price is usually not on the website.

We make SDRclose, so we compete with every tool on this page. To keep it useful, every number below is labeled official (taken from the vendor's own pricing page, fetched September 2026) or reported (a third party estimate, with the publisher and date). Prices in this category move fast, so re-check the vendor page before you sign.

Key takeaways

• There are three price bands: sequencers at $39 to $94 a month, mid market agents at $250 to $900 a month, and enterprise agents reported near or above $5,000 a month on annual contracts.
• The most expensive products publish the least. 11x and Artisan show no dollar figures at all, and Reply.io's Jason AI is sold separately from its outreach plans.
• Advertised price is not spend. Tomba's comparison estimates real spend at roughly two to four times the list price once data credits, mailboxes and setup are counted.
• A fully loaded human SDR costs $110,000 to $160,000 a year according to SalesHive, against a Bridge Group median SDR on target earning of $80,000, so the real comparison is a hire, not a subscription.
• Per workspace pricing beats per seat pricing the moment a second person logs in, and one reported AI agent tier carries a ten seat minimum.
• Credit design decides your true unit cost: whether credits roll over, what a single prospect consumes, and whether failed lookups still bill.

How much does an AI SDR cost in 2026? The short answer

Most AI SDR tools cost between $39 and $900 a month. Email sequencers with no research layer start at $39 to $47. Agents that source, research and write start around $250. Enterprise agents are reported near $5,000 a month on annual contracts, with implementation fees on top.

That range covers products doing genuinely different jobs. A sequencer sends what you give it. An AI SDR is supposed to pick the prospect, find a reason to write, draft the email, handle the reply and book the meeting. Where a tool sits in the range usually tracks how much of that chain it owns and how much human service is wrapped around it.

AI SDR pricing table: official and reported prices (verified September 2026)

Prices as of September 2026. The official rows come from vendor pricing pages fetched on September 5, 2026: AiSDR, Smartlead, Instantly and Lemlist. Reported rows come from third parties: Apollo's tiers via Warmly, Reply.io via Amplemarket after Reply.io's own page returned an access error, Regie.ai via Cleanlist, and Clay and Salesforge via Swan.

Two rows deserve a closer read. AiSDR is the only agent in the mid band that publishes real numbers: Solo at $250 a month month to month, Explore at $900 a month and Scale at $2,500 a month, both billed quarterly, with 20% off annual and no free trial. Lemlist splits its pricing, so the $69 Email plan is per workspace while Multichannel is $109 per user per month, which changes the math for any team above one person.

Why 11x, Artisan and Reply.io Jason do not publish prices

11x's homepage, fetched September 5, 2026, carries no pricing at all. Every call to action is a live demo request for Alice (outbound) and Julian (inbound phone). The public figures come from third parties: Breakout estimates about $5,000 a month billed annually, a $50,000 to $60,000 first year commitment, implementation fees above $3,000 and no trial, while Landbase reports Starter near $5,000, Growth at $6,500 to $8,500, Enterprise above $10,000 and a Vendr median annual contract around $40,125.

Artisan is similar but less consistent. Artisan does not publish dollar pricing; its own llms-full.txt describes credit based pricing scoped to lead volume, mailboxes and dialer seats. Third party numbers conflict badly: 11x's Artisan guide lists a single Employee tier at $600 a month billed annually with 30,000 credits, while SalesRobot reports Free, Intern at $280 and Employee at $660. When two vendor blogs disagree by a factor of two on the same product, treat every Artisan figure as reported, not fact.

Reply.io hides a different thing. Its outreach plans are published, but Jason, the AI SDR, is a separate purchase at a reported $500 a month on annual billing or $800 monthly, rising to $1,500 to $2,500 on Growth, per SalesRobot. A buyer who budgets from the $49 outreach tier is off by an order of magnitude. That comparison gets its own breakdown in our Reply.io alternative post.

The pattern is not sinister, it is just sales design. Sales led pricing lets a vendor price by company size, and it costs them nothing to omit a number that would filter out small buyers. It does cost you: a demo, a discovery call and two weeks before you learn the budget does not fit.

The three price bands: sequencers, mid market agents, enterprise agents

Band one: sequencers, $39 to $94 a month

Smartlead at $39, Instantly's outreach Growth plan at $47 and Lemlist's Email plan at $69 buy sending, warmup and analytics. They do not choose targets. As MarketBetter's review notes, reviewers say Smartlead "has absolutely no concept of who you should email" and its analytics stop at open, reply and bounce (MarketBetter, September 2026). That is not a flaw so much as a category boundary, and it is why sequencer buyers also pay for a data tool.

Band two: mid market agents, $250 to $900 a month

AiSDR, Salesforge's Agent Frank and Reply.io's Jason sit here. They add sourcing, research and reply handling, usually with a ramp. The trade is contract shape: AiSDR's two useful tiers bill quarterly with no trial, which is $2,700 up front on Explore.

Band three: enterprise agents, reported above $5,000 a month

11x, and Artisan's upper tiers, are sold as staff replacements with onboarding projects attached. Cleanlist's AI SDR Pricing Index lists Artisan around $1,000 a month sales led and marks 11x and Qualified as not published, and cites a Vendr median of $45,600 a year across 914 Outreach purchases for scale.

What no roundup includes is a fourth band underneath all of it. Artisan's own cost article from July 2026 lists Regie.ai, AiSDR, Salesforge, Jason, 11x, HubSpot Breeze and Agentforce, and does not mention a single tool under $100 a month. We cover that gap in the AI SDR under $100 shortlist.

Hidden costs: data credits, mailboxes, onboarding and minimums

Tomba's AI SDR pricing comparison puts advertised entry automation at $37 to $97 a month against real spend of $150 to $400, mid market at $59 to $259 advertised against $500 to $1,200 real, agentic tools at $750 to $2,000 advertised against $2,000 to $4,000 real, and enterprise at $3,000 plus advertised against $5,000 to $15,000 real, with setup fees of $2,000 to $10,000. It recommends budgeting 40% of spend for data accuracy.

Four line items cause most of that gap.

Data credits. Apollo's credits do not roll over, overages are billed at roughly $0.20 each, and renewal increases of 10 to 30% are flagged by G2 and Reddit reviewers, per Salesforge's Apollo review. Lemlist sells credits at 1,000 for $10, and reviewers cited by DealsFlow (March 2026) report being charged for failed lookups. Artisan's annual credits are also reported not to roll over by 11x's Artisan guide. Credit quality is part of the same line item: Prospeo's accuracy analysis reports real world Apollo email accuracy of 65 to 80% against a claimed 91%, with users seeing 15 to 35% bounce rates, which is spend you pay for twice.

Mailboxes and domains. White Space Solutions counts domains at $10 to $20 a month each and onboarding at $1,000 to $5,000. The Indie Hackers infrastructure playbook puts a realistic setup at $200 to $400 a month for ten inboxes across three domains.

Contract minimums. AiSDR bills its main tiers quarterly. Reply.io reviewers report a three month minimum "that isn't clearly disclosed" (SalesRobot, June 2026). Apollo's Organization tier has a three seat minimum, and Regie's agent tier is reported at ten seats.

Seats. Per seat pricing is the quiet multiplier. Lemlist Multichannel at $109 per user, Apollo at $49 to $119 per user and Reply.io at $49 to $99 per user all scale with headcount, so a five person team pays five times for software that sends the same emails.

What a human SDR costs

The honest benchmark for any AI SDR is not another subscription. The Bridge Group 2025 SDR Models, Motions and Metrics report, covering 351 B2B companies, puts median SDR on target earnings at $80,000 with a $55,000 base, median annual attrition at 40%, average tenure at 1.9 years and ramp at 3.0 months. Only 60% of reps hit quota, the lowest in the report's ten editions.

Salary is not the bill. SalesHive's fully loaded model, updated July 2026, adds benefits and payroll taxes of 25 to 30%, tools at $3,000 to $9,000, management overhead, amortized recruiting and ramp, and turnover costs, landing at $110,000 to $160,000 a year and up to $210,000 in high cost markets. It puts output at about 15 meetings booked and 12 held per month.

Run that against a $69 workspace and the comparison is stark, but it is also not apples to apples. A human handles objections, calls, referrals and judgment that software does not. The useful framing is capacity: software takes the mining, research and drafting off the calendar so the humans you already have spend their hours on conversations rather than list building.

Credit math: what 7,500 credits actually buy

Credit systems only look complicated because vendors rarely publish the per action cost. Ours are flat: mining a lead costs 3 credits, researching a prospect costs 3, and each email or auto reply sent costs 1. A prospect that is mined, researched and worked through a four step sequence therefore costs about 10 credits.

Our prices as of September 2026.

Compare that with published alternatives at the same date. AiSDR Solo at $250 a month includes 200 researched contacts, which is $1.25 per contact before any add on. Artisan's reported Employee tier at $600 a month with 30,000 credits and an estimated 20 to 25 credits per prospect works out near $0.40 to $0.50 per prospect, and those credits are reported not to roll over.

One design detail matters more than the rate. Monthly plan credits reset each billing cycle, but purchased top up credits carry over and are drawn only after the monthly allowance, which is the opposite of the expiring credit model Reddit users complain about across Apollo, Instantly and Clay (r/coldemail). If you are comparing credit systems, ask three questions: what does one prospect consume, do unused credits expire, and are failed lookups billed?

Cost per booked meeting: how to compare plans honestly

List price per month is the wrong unit. The unit that matters is cost per meeting held, and you can estimate it before you buy. Gong's study of 28 million cold emails found the average rep sends 344 cold emails to land one meeting (Gong), so take a plan's monthly sending capacity, divide by 344, and divide the price by that.

Worked through: 7,500 credits covers roughly 750 prospects at about four emails each, which is around 3,000 sends, or about 8 meetings at Gong's average. That puts the software cost near $5 per meeting. AiSDR Solo's 200 contacts at four emails each is about 800 sends, or a bit over two meetings, near $110 per meeting in software. A reported $5,000 a month enterprise agent would need roughly 1,000 meetings a month to match the $5 software cost per meeting of a $39 plan producing 8, which is why the enterprise case has to rest on deal size and service, never on unit cost.

Three caveats keep this honest. Gong's 344 is an average across reps and offers, so your ratio depends far more on list quality and message than on tooling. The number excludes mailboxes, domains and human time, which are real. And meetings held, not booked, are what finance counts, so apply your own show rate before you compare anything to the SalesHive figure of about 12 held meetings a month per rep.

How to choose by team size and budget

Solo founder or a two to ten person team. Buy per workspace, keep sending on mailboxes you already own, and refuse annual lock in until you have seen replies. Total software under $100 a month is achievable, and the rest of the budget belongs in domains and list quality. Our own lead mining and research steps are priced into the same credits for exactly this reason.

Ten to fifty people with an SDR team. Per seat tools start to bite here, and the question becomes which work you want automated versus assisted. Sequencers plus a data subscription plus a research tool routinely beat an all in one on features and lose on total bill.

Enterprise with staff to run it. Managed agents make sense when you have an operations person to own the deployment, a defined ICP, and enough pipeline value that a $40,000 to $60,000 first year commitment is a rounding error. That is a genuine buying case, not a strawman.

When paying $250 to $5,000 a month makes sense

Pay up if you need LinkedIn, SMS and a dialer in the same sequence, if you want a vendor to run campaigns for you as a service, if you need inbound phone answering alongside outbound, or if procurement requires a named account team and a signed SLA. AiSDR's managed service at $149 per campaign, Lemlist's Multichannel tier and 11x's Julian all exist because those needs are real. Roundups also increasingly agree that the human in the loop model, where the software drafts and a person approves, outperforms fully autonomous sending (Autobound), which is worth weighing against any premium priced autonomy claim.

Where we land: a review queue on by default, sending from your own mailboxes, per workspace pricing at $39 or $69, and no contract to escape. If that is the shape you want, the sibling comparisons go deeper on each vendor, including 11x alternatives, Artisan AI alternatives and AiSDR alternatives, and the full cost of running cold email beyond software is broken down in how much cold email really costs. You can see our plans on the pricing section or start a 7 day trial at signup and compare the credit math against your own list.