September 16, 2026. The question every founder asks before buying an AI SDR is what it costs. The category has quietly made that question unanswerable, and the fix is to stop asking for a price and start asking for a cost per contacted lead.
Most of the category publishes no price
Artisan, which sells an AI business development rep called Ava, publishes tiers without figures. Its Team plan is described as roughly 2,500 leads contacted per month and its Scale plan as roughly 6,000, with an Enterprise tier above them. Every tier carries the same two lines in place of a number: pricing scoped on your plan, and talk to sales. The platform inclusions are published in full, including access to a contact database the site describes as 250 million or more verified B2B contacts, Salesforce and HubSpot sync, and an AI dialer sold as a per seat add on. The volume is public. The money is not.
That is the structural fact that matters. Artisan meters in leads contacted. Apollo, the tool an AI SDR usually displaces, meters in seats and credits. Those units do not convert, which is why buyers cannot compare the two categories.
The advertised number is the annual rate
Where prices are published they are almost always the annual commitment expressed as a monthly figure. Apollo lists Basic at 49 dollars, Professional at 79 and Organization at 119, and every one of them is labelled per seat per month, billed annually. Its free tier is 0 dollars with 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, while the paid tiers grant credits upfront for the year: 30,000 per seat per year on Basic, 48,000 on Professional and 72,000 on Organization.
Read that carefully and Apollo is not a monthly product at all. The credit grant is annual, so a team that churns in month four has already consumed a year's allocation of nothing and paid for twelve months of seats. The same pattern runs through the supporting stack: Google Workspace lists its Starter tier at 6.30 dollars per user per month against a standard 7 dollars, the lower figure being a 10 percent discount for 12 months on an annual plan.
What the seat price does not cover
An AI SDR seat buys software that writes and sends. It does not buy the thing that decides whether the sending works. Sending domains, inboxes at roughly 7 dollars per user per month at list price, warmup time, verification and the data credits behind every contact are all separate lines, and they scale with volume rather than with headcount. A tool that contacts 6,000 leads a month needs the inbox capacity to do it without burning the domain, and that capacity is bought from somebody else.
This is the line item that turns a tidy per seat quote into a real monthly number, and it is why email infrastructure tends to be the constraint rather than the software. We have priced the human comparison separately in cold email versus SDR cost, and the tool landscape in the best AI SDR tools.
What it means for operators
Ask every vendor on your list two questions and do one division. What is the all in monthly price including any required annual commitment, and how many unique leads will actually be contacted in a month on that plan. Divide the first by the second and you have cost per contacted lead, the only figure that compares an AI SDR against a seat based platform against an agency retainer.
Then ask the second question that the per seat quote hides: does that price include inboxes, domains, warmup and verification, or do those arrive on a different invoice. If a vendor will not give you a contacted lead volume, treat that as the answer. The ones that decline to publish a price still publish the volume, which means the division is available to you whether or not they want it to be.
If you would rather buy the outcome than the tool, that is what our cold email and lead generation engagements are, and the same arithmetic applies to us: ask for the contacted lead volume and divide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Most vendors in the category do not publish a figure. Artisan, for example, publishes plan volumes of roughly 2,500 and roughly 6,000 leads contacted per month but replaces the price with pricing scoped on your plan and talk to sales. Where prices are published they are usually per seat and annual: Apollo lists 49, 79 and 119 dollars per seat per month, each billed annually.
It is the all in monthly price divided by the number of unique leads actually contacted in that month. It matters because AI SDR vendors meter in leads contacted while seat based platforms meter in seats and credits, and the two units do not convert. Cost per contacted lead is the only figure that lets you compare an AI SDR, a seat based tool and an agency retainer side by side.
Usually not. Sending domains, inboxes, warmup, verification and data credits are typically separate and scale with sending volume rather than headcount. Mainstream business email starts around 7 dollars per user per month at list price, and a tool contacting several thousand leads a month needs enough inbox capacity to do it without damaging the sending domain.
Because it looks smaller. Apollo labels its plan prices per seat per month, billed annually, and grants paid tier credits upfront for the full year rather than monthly. The practical consequence is that the commitment, the credit grant and the cancellation exposure are all annual even though the number on the page is a monthly one.