How much do AI SDR tools cost per month?
AI SDR tools cost anywhere from about $20 a seat a month to custom annual contracts. AI-assisted prospecting and sequencing tools publish prices: Unify starts at $20 a seat, Apollo lists $49 and $99 plans, and Clay starts at $185 a month. Autonomous AI BDR products such as 11x and Artisan quote on request. A human SDR's median on-target earnings are $80,000 a year, about $6,700 a month before overhead. Pick by the job: data and drafting, or a managed agent.
What do AI SDR tools cost per month in 2026?
The market splits into three price bands, and the band tells you more about what you are buying than the logo does.
AI-assisted engagement tools, roughly $20 to $100 a seat a month. Prospect data, sequences and AI-written email, with a person running the motion. Unify and Apollo sit here.
Data and workflow platforms, roughly $185 to $500 a month for a team, plus usage. You build the research and enrichment workflow yourself and pay for data and actions. Clay sits here.
Managed AI BDRs, quote-only. A vendor runs an agent that finds leads, writes, sends and handles replies, sized to your lead volume and mailboxes. 11x and Artisan sit here, and neither publishes a price.
Every price below comes from the vendor's own site, checked 24 October 2026. Prices change often, so confirm before you sign.
If you want a ranked view of the products themselves rather than the money, our list of AI SDR agents for outbound prospecting covers features. This post stays on cost. We make Nagent, whose outbound teammate is NORA; she has her own section further down, kept apart from the vendor list.
What does each AI SDR vendor charge?
Unify
What it is: an AI-assisted outbound platform with signals, enrichment, sequencing and a dialer. Its pages say drafts queue for approval before anything sends.
Best for: teams that want reps in control of every send, with AI doing research and copy.
Pricing (checked 24 October 2026, unifygtm.com/pricing): Free for up to 3 seats with limited credits; Base $20 a seat a month with 800 credits a seat; Pro $60 a seat a month with 2,400 credits a seat and read-only HubSpot and Salesforce sync; Business is custom, billed annually. Managed mailboxes are $25 a mailbox a month.
Limitation: CRM sync is read-only below Business, and credits cap how far a seat goes.
Apollo
What it is: a prospect database with sequences, AI email writing and AI research.
Best for: small teams that need contact data and sending in one place at a low entry price.
Pricing (checked 24 October 2026, apollo.io/pricing): the page's structured data lists Free at $0, Basic at $49 a month and Professional at $99 a month, priced per seat, with Custom by quote. Credits are pooled across the team and do not roll over.
Limitation: the visible page does not state credit amounts per plan, and free plans connect Gmail accounts only.
Clay
What it is: a data enrichment and workflow platform with Claygent research and its own email sequencer.
Best for: teams with an operator who will build research workflows and wants many data providers in one table.
Pricing (checked 24 October 2026, clay.com/pricing): Free with 100 data credits and 500 actions a month; Launch from $185 a month ($167 billed annually) with 2,500 data credits and 15,000 actions; Growth from $495 a month ($446 billed annually) with 6,000 data credits and 40,000 actions; Enterprise custom. Data credits start at $0.05 each.
Limitation: it is a builder. The cost of the person who designs and maintains the workflows is not on the price card.
Artisan
What it is: Ava, an AI BDR that finds leads, writes, replies and books meetings, with a dialer add-on for reps.
Best for: teams that want a managed, mostly autonomous outbound motion with a customer success team behind it.
Pricing (checked 24 October 2026, artisan.co/pricing): no public price. Team is scoped at about 2,500 leads contacted a month, Scale at about 6,000, Enterprise custom. The page says plans are sized to lead volume, mailboxes and dialer seats.
Limitation: you cannot compare cost without a sales call, and the default is autonomous; approvals are a setting.
11x
What it is: AI agents for outbound (Alice) and inbound (Julian) across email, voice, chat, social and SMS, with deep research and managed deliverability.
Best for: revenue teams that want one vendor across many channels and inbound and outbound plays.
Pricing (checked 24 October 2026): no public price. The 11x pricing URL returned a 404, and the site offers only a demo booking.
Limitation: no published price or plan sizes to budget against before talking to sales.
What drives the real bill beyond the sticker price?
The seat or platform fee is rarely the whole cost. Five lines move the total:
Data and credits. Contact reveals, enrichment and research calls are metered. Clay prices data credits from $0.05 each; Unify and Apollo bundle credits per seat or per team. Model your monthly lead volume before you compare.
Mailboxes and domains. Cold email should not leave from your main domain. Budget for secondary domains, mailboxes and warm-up. Unify sells managed mailboxes at $25 each a month; Artisan and 11x size sending infrastructure into the contract.
Dialer and phone seats. Artisan sells a dialer add-on per seat. If your motion needs calls, price them in.
The person who runs it. Someone has to set the customer profile, read drafts, handle replies and fix the data. A builder tool such as Clay assumes that person exists.
Contract shape. Quote-only vendors size plans to volume. Ask whether the price is annual, whether unused volume rolls over and what happens when you exceed it.
How do AI SDR tool costs compare with hiring a human SDR?
The Bridge Group's 2025 SDR Metrics report, from 351 B2B companies, gives the human benchmark:
Median OTE: $80,000, split $55,000 base and $25,000 variable. That is about $6,700 a month before benefits, payroll tax, tools and manager time.
Ramp: 3.0 months on average, so the first quarter is part paid learning.
Tenure: 1.9 years on average, so you rehire and re-ramp about every two years.
Quota attainment: 60% of SDRs are at quota, the lowest in the study's history.
On sticker price alone, every published AI tool above costs less than one SDR. That comparison flatters the tools, though. A human SDR handles a live objection, a referral, a call and a judgement about when not to write. Most AI SDR tools still need a person to approve messages, take the replies and run the meetings. The fair comparison is AI tool plus the time of the person who supervises it, against an SDR plus their tools.
How do you work out the cost per meeting?
Price per seat is the wrong unit. Work it out per qualified meeting:
Add the monthly cost: licence, data and credits, mailboxes and domains, plus the hours a person spends reviewing drafts and replies, at their loaded hourly rate.
Count qualified meetings held, not booked. A booked meeting that no-shows cost the same and earned nothing.
Divide. As a worked example with made-up round numbers: a $1,000 monthly bill plus 10 hours of review at $50 an hour is $1,500. If it produces 6 held meetings, each costs $250. If it produces 2, each costs $750.
Compare against the same sum for a human SDR, using your own salary, ramp and meeting numbers.
Run the test for at least one full sales cycle. A tool that books meetings in month one by burning through your best accounts can look cheap until the list runs out.
What should you ask an AI SDR vendor before you sign?
What is the price at our lead volume, and is it monthly or annual?
Which actions consume credits, and what happens when credits run out mid-month?
Who owns the sending domains and mailboxes if we leave?
Does every email wait for our approval, or is approval a setting that defaults to off?
Where does each personal detail in an email come from, and can we see the source?
What does the agent do when a prospect replies with an objection or an unsubscribe?
Does it write back to our CRM, and in which direction does sync run?
What is the minimum term, and what is the exit?
The answers on approval and sourcing matter as much as price. A cheap tool that sends unverified claims from your domain costs you replies and sender reputation, which takes far longer to rebuild than a budget line.
Where does Nagent's NORA fit, and how is she priced?
NORA is Nagent's AI Outbound Research Lead. She sits on the Sales team under SERA, the AI Sales Chief of Staff, and does the research-heavy part of outbound: she finds companies that fit your customer profile, scores each 0 to 100, researches each into a sourced dossier and drafts the first email. Contact details are revealed only for a company that scores 70 or more. Every claim a draft makes about a prospect must trace to the dossier or the draft is refused. On a new workspace, every send waits for a person.
How the cost works:
No per-agent price. NORA works on the Sales team, and Nagent plans are listed on the pricing page. Agent work is metered in credits, visible in the workspace. As a sense of scale, an AEO page audit is about 10 credits, a campaign build about 40 and a rendered video about 700.
Spend you can see before it happens. Every discovery run states its cost before it starts. A run whose forecast crosses the weekly spend cap waits for a person to approve it. Revealing email and phone on a campaign spends one reveal credit per contact.
Caps on every agent. Research runs against a daily outreach budget and a cost-cap exception queue, and every agent carries a daily and a monthly cap. When the allowance runs out, paid tools pause and nothing is deleted.
What NORA does not do: she sends email only, with no calls, LinkedIn messages or SMS. She does not close deals. Her CRM view reads the workspace's own lead records, and an outside CRM can be connected as a tool, but her pipeline does not sync with it. If you need voice agents or a vendor-managed sending operation, a quote-only AI BDR is the closer fit.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is an AI SDR better than hiring an SDR for a seed or Series A startup?
It depends on the bottleneck. If the founder still runs sales calls and the constraint is research and first drafts, an AI tool with a person approving each send costs far less than the $80,000 median SDR OTE. If the constraint is live conversations, objection handling or calls, hire the person. Many teams start with AI and hire when meetings outgrow the founder's calendar.
Are there free AI SDR tools?
Yes, with limits. Unify has a free plan for up to 3 seats with limited credits, Clay's free plan includes 100 data credits and 500 actions a month, and Apollo has a free plan that connects Gmail accounts only (all checked 24 October 2026). Free tiers are enough to test copy and data quality, not to run a full outbound motion.
Why do some AI SDR vendors not publish prices?
Managed AI BDRs size plans to lead volume, mailboxes, dialer seats and onboarding, so they quote per customer. Artisan says plans are sized to "your lead volume, mailboxes, and dialer seats". Ask for the price at your volume in writing, with overage terms.
What is the cheapest way to start with AI outbound?
Start small and supervised. Pick one customer profile, research 20 to 50 accounts, approve every email by hand and measure held meetings for a month. That costs a low-tier seat or a small credit allowance, and it tells you whether the copy and the data are good before you pay for volume. Our piece on why GTM agents are reshaping the SDR org covers what changes after that.
See NORA research, draft and wait for your approval on your own accounts: book a demo, or read more on NORA's page.