AI SDR pricing in 2026: compare the unit, not the headline number

AI SDR pricing in 2026 is no longer a row of seat prices you can line up side by side. AiSDR bills $1.50 per person prospected with no monthly fee, Salesforge rents its agent for $499 a month, Reply.io meters active contacts from $500 a month, and two widely marketed vendors publish no figure at all. The unit matters more than the number.

In our view that is the flaw in most of the cost guides written on this subject: they line up dollar amounts that measure different things. Below is what each vendor's own pricing page said on October 23, 2026, what unit it charges in, and the line items that sit outside the headline price.

AI SDR pricing now comes in four incompatible units

Four metering models are in play, and they reward opposite behavior.

1. Per person prospected. You pay for each human the agent contacts. Research, list building and copy are bundled. Cost scales exactly with volume, and a month with no campaigns costs nothing.
2. Per active contact. You pay for contacts held in a live sequence each month. Cheap if you work a small list hard, expensive if you want breadth.
3. Per seat. The old sales engagement model, still how the human-run tiers of these platforms are sold. It punishes adding teammates, not adding prospects.
4. Per credit. Enrichment, email validation, personalization and LinkedIn actions each draw down a balance, usually on top of a base fee.

A $500 monthly quote means a thousand people reached under one model and a few hundred under another. In our view that is the single question to settle on a sales call before you discuss discounts: what one unit of this price buys, and what happens when you double it.

What the vendors publish today

AiSDR dropped the monthly fee for pay-as-you-go

AiSDR's self-serve pricing is $1.50 per person prospected with no monthly fee, billed daily, cancel anytime, and the page says research, lists and writing cost nothing extra. Its own FAQ is inconsistent about the floor: one answer puts campaigns "from $7.50" and another "from as little as from $3." The Teams plan, aimed at anyone contacting 1,000-plus people a month, is quoted by sales and promises up to 40% lower price per contact, billed monthly on quarterly contracts.

If you have seen AiSDR quoted elsewhere as a $900-a-month platform with tiered plans, that figure is not on its pricing page today. We'd treat any AI SDR price that does not come from the vendor's own page as out of date.

The extras are priced separately: a warmed-up mailbox at $33, a per-campaign managed service at $149 per campaign, and a fully managed service at $2,500 a month. AiSDR lists its product on Upfynd as Ami AI.

Salesforge sells the agent as an add-on to a human plan

Salesforge prices Agent Frank at $499 a month, billed quarterly, and states that 2,000-plus contacts a month works out to $0.25 per contact. The agent sits on top of a Salesforge plan: Pro at $40 a month, or Growth at $80 a month with 10,000 active contacts and 50,000 emails.

Everything that makes outreach work is credited separately on that page: personalization credits, email validation credits and social action credits, each with a base allowance and a paid slider above it. Salesforge's own stack calculator totals a full multi-product setup in the thousands per month. If you want one invoice and one number, we'd look elsewhere.

Reply.io publishes its AI SDR tiers by active contact

Reply.io publishes AI SDR tiers rather than hiding them. Jason AI starts from $500 a month for 1,000 active contacts on annual billing, with the same Starter tier at 2,000 and 3,000 contacts above it, and an AI SDR Growth tier from $1,500 a month at 5,000 active contacts. Paying monthly instead of annually raises the entry figure to $800 for the same 1,000 contacts.

Reply.io also sells the human version: email sequencing from $59 per user per month, with LinkedIn automation at $69 per account per month and calls and SMS at $29. Lined up against the AI tiers, that is in our view the most useful thing on the page: it puts a price on the labor you are handing over.

Instantly and Smartlead price the sending layer, not an employee

Instantly's Starter bundle is $94 a month, or $85 on annual billing, covering 5,000 emails a month, 1,000 uploaded contacts and 1,500 credits; Scale is $194 a month and the Agency bundle $555. The bundle splits into an outreach plan and a credits plan, which is why its own cheapest line reads $47 a month and the real total is double that.

Smartlead's Base plan is $39 a month with 2,000 contacts and 6,000 sends, $32 on annual billing, rising through Pro at $94 and Unlimited Smart at $174. Verified prospect emails are a $59-a-month add-on on Base and Pro and free on the higher tiers.

Both are a fraction of the price of the agent products, and the reason is the scope of what they do. They send what you write to lists you supply, and a person still decides who to contact and what to say. Comparing $39 with $499 only makes sense if you also price the hours.

An active contact is not a prospect

The term does most of the work in these quotes, so it is worth pinning down. Reply.io's pricing page defines active contacts as the contacts you can send one first-step email to each month, with unlimited follow-ups on top, and its AI SDR plans are sized in exactly those units - 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 5,000. Salesforge describes the same line as the number of contacts in an active sequence, and gives 10,000 of them on its $80 Growth plan.

A person you emailed once in March and never touched again is not costing you anything under that model. A list of 5,000 people you drip over six months is, every single month. Importing a large database and letting long sequences run is what pushes that number up, because the meter follows the sequence rather than the send.

The infrastructure bill nobody puts in the quote

Agent pricing assumes you already have somewhere to send from. If you do not, mailboxes and domains are a separate line.

Reply.io sells new sending domains from $6 per domain per year plus $5 per mailbox per month, and pre-warmed domains from $25 per domain per year plus $15 per mailbox per month. AiSDR lists a warmed-up mailbox at $33, with the domain setup and warm-up handled for you. Instantly's outreach plans list unlimited email accounts and unlimited warm-up, and Smartlead includes a warm-up pool in its plan features, which is part of why their headline numbers look low next to an agent subscription.

Budget for domains, mailboxes, warm-up time and a verification tool before you count a single reply. Upfynd lists dedicated warm-up tools such as Warmy.io in Email & Newsletters if your platform does not include it. Spreading sends across more mailboxes is how these tools keep volume up without burning a domain, and every one of those mailboxes is billable.

Two of the loudest names publish nothing

Artisan's pricing page showed no plan figures on October 23, 2026 - the calls to action are demo requests. 11x goes further: there is no pricing page on its site, only a demo booking. Third-party estimates for both are easy to find, and we are not repeating them, because they do not come from the vendor.

Sales-led pricing is not automatically bad. It is how most vendors sell a service with onboarding, deliverability setup and a success manager attached. But it does change what you have to do as a buyer. Before the call, write down your own numbers: prospects per month, how many mailboxes and domains you already own, and the point at which you would cancel. Then ask for price per prospect reached, the contract term, what happens to unused volume, and which add-ons are not in the quote.

Convert every quote to your own volume

Take 1,000 new prospects a month and the published prices resolve like this.

• AiSDR pay-as-you-go: 1,000 people prospected at $1.50 is $1,500 a month, with nothing owed in a quiet month.
• Reply.io AI SDR Starter: $500 a month on annual billing at 1,000 active contacts, or $800 billed monthly.
• Salesforge: $499 for Agent Frank plus a $40 Pro plan, before personalization and validation credits.
• Smartlead Base plus verified prospect emails: $39 plus $59, with your own targeting and copy.

Those are arithmetic on published prices, not quotes, and they ignore the thing that decides the real cost: how many of those 1,000 people are worth contacting. Our view is that at volumes under about 1,000 prospects a month, usage pricing like AiSDR's is the easier commitment to defend, because a bad month costs you nothing; above that, a fixed tier starts to win on predictability, which is the same trade-off we traced through credit-based pricing at GitHub, Notion and Warp.

We'd skip the agent category entirely if your list is under a few hundred named accounts. At that size the bottleneck is research and positioning, which no metering model fixes, and a sending tool plus your own writing is the cheaper experiment.

Where to start a shortlist

Upfynd lists 165 products in Sales Enablement as of October 2026, and we'd open the pricing page before the feature grid on any of them. Check the unit, the contract term, and the add-on list, in that order.

Makers pricing an outbound product have the same lesson in reverse: publishing a unit and a number is, in our view, a differentiator now that several well-funded competitors publish neither. If you run one of these tools and it is not listed yet, you can submit it with its real pricing attached.