Nine agent pricing pages read directly

AI agents for small business priced per task and the volume where a custom agent costs less

Q: What are the best AI agents for small business?

On published pricing, the best AI agents for a small business are the ones whose billing unit matches your work. Lindy ($29.99 a user) and Manus ($20) for research, drafting and inbox work; Zapier Agents (1,500 activities for about $33) or Make ($9 for 10,000 operations) for agents that act inside your existing apps; Intercom Fin ($0.99 an outcome) for customer support; and a custom-built agent once a per-conversation meter passes roughly 175 to 354 conversations a month.

Every list of AI agents for small business is written by one of the agents. We are a hiring marketplace, not an agent vendor, so we read the pricing pages of Lindy, Zapier, Make, n8n, Gumloop, Manus, Relevance AI, Intercom and Salesforce, worked out what one unit of work costs on each, and found the volume where subscribing stops being the cheap option.

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the short answer

The best AI agents for small business cost $9 to $200 a month as subscriptions and are cheaper than building one for almost every single-owner business: Make from $9, Manus from $20, Lindy from $29.99 a user, Zapier Agents at about $33, Gumloop from $37. The exception is metered agents. Intercom Fin bills $0.99 an outcome and Salesforce Agentforce $2 a conversation, and a custom agent spread over two years costs about $350 a month, so those meters cross it at just 354 and 175 conversations a month. Below that, subscribe. Above it, or when the agent has to act inside a system no platform connects to, have one built.

The audit

What the best AI agents for small business publish on their own pricing pages

Nine products a US small business would realistically consider, each read from its own pricing page. Where a page hides the number behind a sales call, the row says so, because that is a finding too. Prices change often; confirm on the page before you sign.

Agent	Published pricing	Billing unit	Best small business fit
Lindy	Plus $29.99 a user a month with 3,000 credits, Pro $99.99 with 15,000, Max $199.99 with 35,000. No free tier. Enterprise adds HIPAA and a signed BAA	Credits per task: 2 to 250 for everyday asks, 250 to 1,000 for research and triage, 1,000 to 2,500 for big builds. Service pauses at zero, no overage bill	Inbox, calendar, lead follow-up and research for an owner or a small team
Zapier Agents	Free 400 activities a month. Pro 1,500 activities from about $33.33 a month on annual billing. Team and Enterprise share activities across the account	Activities: each trigger, action, knowledge answer, web search or browse. A single run is capped at 40 activities on paid plans	Owners already on Zapier who want the agent to act in the 8,000 apps it connects to
Make	Free 1,000 credits. Core $9, Pro $16, Teams $29 a month, each shown with 10,000 credits. AI Agents are in beta on every plan with Make as the model provider or your own key	Operations. The page does not say whether an agent step costs more than one operation	The lowest priced way to put an agent inside an existing automation
n8n	Starter 20 euros a month billed annually with 2,500 executions, Pro 50 euros with 10,000, Business 667 euros with 40,000. The page prices in euros. Community edition is free to self-host	Workflow executions, unlimited steps inside each. 5 concurrent on Starter, 20 on Pro	Owners with a builder on hand, or a technical owner, who want the cheapest unit cost
Gumloop	Pro starts at $37 a month with 20,000 credits, unlimited agents and unlimited seats, 14 day trial. Enterprise is custom	Credits, plus an 8 percent orchestration fee when you bring your own model keys	Teams that want several people building agents without paying per seat
Manus	$20 a month with 4,000 credits, $40 with 8,000, $200 with 40,000, annual billing 17 percent less. Free tier with 300 daily refresh credits. Team plan from $20 a seat	Credits per task, scaling with model tokens, virtual machine time and third-party calls. 20 concurrent tasks on paid plans	Research, reports, slide decks and web tasks a person would otherwise do by hand
Relevance AI	The pricing page now shows one tier, Enterprise, with a Talk to sales button and no number	Not published	Companies with a procurement process. Not a small business self-serve buy any more
Intercom Fin	From $0.99 per Fin outcome, charged once per conversation. Helpdesk seats $29, $85 or $132 a month. A Fin-only plan exists for other helpdesks with a minimum monthly commitment	Outcomes: a conversation Fin resolves or hands off as instructed	Support inboxes with a countable ticket volume and a written knowledge base
Salesforce Agentforce	Foundations at $0 to start. $2 a conversation, or Flex Credits at $500 per 100,000 with 20 credits an action. Add-ons $125 a user a month, Agentforce 1 from $550 a user	Conversations or actions, which is $0.10 an action on Flex Credits	Small businesses already paying for Salesforce who want the agent inside the CRM

Two things stand out. First, one of the nine, Relevance AI, has taken its small business pricing off the page entirely, which is the same move Synthflow made in voice, covered in our Synthflow alternatives audit. Second, the nine products bill in six different units: seats, credits, activities, operations, executions and conversations. A dollar figure means nothing until you convert it to the unit your work actually consumes, which is what the next section does.

The unit of work

What one task costs on each AI agent, converted from the published unit

Division on the vendor numbers, nothing else. Where a vendor defines its unit in ranges, both ends are shown. The task is the same on every row: the agent reads one inbound email or ticket, checks a record in your system and sends a reply.

Agent	Price per unit	Units the task consumes	Cost per task
Make (Core)	$9 for 10,000 operations, $0.0009 each	About 3 to 6 operations, if an agent step counts as one	Under a cent
n8n (Starter)	20 euros for 2,500 executions, about 0.008 euros each	1 execution, unlimited steps	About a cent
Gumloop (Pro)	$37 for 20,000 credits, $0.00185 each	Varies by model and steps; tens of credits is typical	A few cents, plus 8 percent on your own model keys
Zapier Agents (Pro)	About $33.33 for 1,500 activities, $0.022 each	Trigger, knowledge answer, one action and a message: about 4 activities	About $0.09
Manus ($20)	$20 for 4,000 credits, $0.005 each	Tens to hundreds of credits depending on browsing and files	Roughly $0.10 to $1.00
Lindy (Plus)	$29.99 for 3,000 credits, $0.010 each	2 to 250 credits for an everyday ask, 250 to 1,000 for triage with research	$0.02 to $2.50 for an ask, $2.50 to $10 for triage
Intercom Fin	$0.99 per outcome	1 outcome	$0.99, plus at least one $29 seat
Salesforce Agentforce	$2 per conversation, or $0.10 an action on Flex Credits	1 conversation, or about 3 to 5 actions	$2.00, or $0.30 to $0.50 on credits
Custom agent (marketplace developer)	Model tokens at cost plus hosting	About 5,000 tokens	Under a cent on a small model, 1 to 8 cents on a frontier model

The spread on one identical task is about 200 to 1. A Make operation is a fraction of a cent, an Agentforce conversation is $2, and both are fair prices for what they include. Make hands you an empty canvas; Agentforce hands you a support agent already wired to your CRM with someone else carrying the model bill. The cheap rows cost more of your time, the expensive rows cost more of your money, and a small business owner's time is usually the scarcer one. The same conversion for a custom build is worked through hour by hour in our AI agent development cost audit.

Match the agent to the job

Which AI agent fits which small business task

Owners do not want an agent. They want the Tuesday afternoon back. Start from the task, then pick the billing unit that stays cheap at your real volume.

Answering the same customer questions

Intercom Fin if you already count tickets and have written answers; it charges only when it resolves one. Under about 30 questions a day, a Lindy or Zapier agent on your shared inbox is cheaper. Past 354 outcomes a month, a custom support agent built on your own knowledge base costs less than the meter.

Chasing unpaid invoices

A Zapier or Make agent that reads QuickBooks Online, finds invoices past due and sends the reminder sequence. Predictable unit cost, a few cents an invoice. Build custom only when the rules are yours: partial payments, retainers, disputed lines, a collections step that must log to the ledger.

Same-day lead follow-up

Lindy for a Gmail and Calendar business, Agentforce if the leads live in Salesforce. The value is speed, not sophistication. If leads arrive by phone, that is a different product: compare the finished options on our AI receptionist page before building anything.

Booking and confirming appointments

Lindy or Zapier Agents against Google Calendar for a solo operator. A clinic, salon or trades business with a practice management or dispatch system usually needs a built agent, because the platform connectors do not reach the booking rules that matter.

Research, reports and decks

Manus and Lindy are priced for exactly this: a task that would take a person an hour and costs the agent a few hundred credits. Do not build this. The subscription is cheaper than a single hour of a developer, every month.

Receipts, orders and bookkeeping entries

Make or n8n for the pipe, the model for the reading. The unit cost is near zero. What decides build versus buy here is accuracy on your documents, which is a testing job, and a marketplace developer can prove it on 200 of your real receipts before you commit.

If the task is one of the six above and your volume is modest, the honest advice is to subscribe and skip the rest of this page. The small business automation use cases post walks through eight of these jobs with what each one costs to run.

Subscribe or build

The monthly volume where a custom AI agent costs less than the subscription

The build side of the comparison: a single-workflow agent with two integrations is 40 to 170 hours of work on the only published hours table in the category, and marketplace developers who ship LLM agents bill $60 to $150 an hour. We used a $6,000 build, spread it over 24 months ($250 a month) and added $100 a month for model tokens, hosting and monitoring. That is $350 a month. Each row asks how much usage on the subscription costs the same.

Subscription	The arithmetic	Crossover volume	What it means for a small business
Salesforce Agentforce	$350 divided by $2 a conversation	175 conversations a month	About 8 customer conversations a working day. Many small support inboxes are already past this
Intercom Fin	$350 less one $29 seat, divided by $0.99	324 outcomes a month, 354 with no seat	About 15 resolved tickets a working day. A busy ecommerce store crosses it; a local service business usually does not
Lindy	$350 divided by $29.99 (Plus) or $99.99 (Pro) a seat	12 Plus seats, or 4 Pro seats	One owner never crosses it. A team of four heavy users does
Zapier Agents	$350 divided by $0.022 an activity	About 15,900 activities a month	More than 10 times the Pro allowance. Only Team plans share activities, so in practice you hit the plan ceiling first
Manus	$350 divided by $0.005 a credit	About 70,000 credits a month	Almost twice the $200 plan. Research and drafting work does not get there
Gumloop	$350 divided by $0.00185 a credit	About 189,000 credits a month	Roughly 9 times the Pro allowance. You would move to Enterprise long before a build made sense on price
n8n Cloud	350 divided by 0.005 euros an execution on Pro	About 70,000 executions a month	Above the 40,000 Business plan. And the self-hosted edition is free, so n8n never loses on price, only on who maintains it
Make	$350 divided by $0.0009 an operation	About 389,000 operations a month	Not a small business number. Make loses on capability, not on cost

The table splits cleanly in two. The two metered products cross at volumes a small business can actually reach: 175 and 324 conversations a month. The six seat and credit products cross at volumes it will not, so for those the case for a custom agent is never price. It is reach: a point of sale with no connector, a practice management system with an API and no template, an approval rule that has to be exactly yours. That is the moment to talk to an AI agent development company or, cheaper, a developer direct.

One more number worth having. A $6,000 build at the $60 to $150 marketplace range is 40 to 100 hours of work. The same $6,000 buys 200 months of Lindy Plus. If the agent you want is one Lindy already does, the decision is not close. For one user, that is. Lindy charges per seat, so the sum changes with headcount; our Lindy AI pricing breakdown finds the seat count where a team is better off with a build.

How it works

From a task you can name to an agent doing it

BotGigs is where a small business goes when the answer above is "build", or when it is not sure which answer applies. Four steps, and the first one costs nothing.

01

Describe the job in plain words

The form on this page takes the task, the tools it touches (QuickBooks, Google Workspace, your POS, your CRM) and how often it runs. No account needed for the first pass.

02

Get a scoped hire brief

You get back a brief with the effort band in hours, whether a ready-made agent already covers it, and the questions a builder will ask. If a $30 subscription does the job, the brief says so.

03

Pick a ready-made agent or a builder

The agent library lists working agents with their published rates. For anything custom, the brief is matched to vetted developers who have shipped agents on the same tools, with rates and delivery location visible.

04

Launch on your own systems

The build lands in your accounts, on your API keys, with a test set of your real data. You own the prompts, the code and the model bill, which stays at token cost rather than $2 a conversation.

The honest version

Where BotGigs fits, and where a $30 subscription beats us

BotGigs does not sell an agent subscription and does not bill per conversation. It is a marketplace: a library of ready-made agents you can hire, and vetted developers who build custom ones. Buyers pay $99 a month on the Growth plan to keep a job on the board, with no hire fee, and agree the rate with the specialist directly. That is a good deal when the agent has to do real work inside your systems, and a bad one when Lindy or Zapier already does the job for the price of lunch.

So the rule we give owners is the crossover table. Metered support agents past a few hundred conversations a month, anything that has to write to a system without a connector, and any workflow where a wrong action costs real money: build, and build with someone who has done it on your exact tools. Everything else: subscribe, measure for a month, and come back if the volume or the rules outgrow it.

If you are weighing a build, read what the published guides get wrong about AI agent development cost, see how a business agent gets scoped and built, and check what hiring an AI developer costs by role. If you would rather pick a finished agent, the agent library lists working ones with their rates.

Questions

Questions owners actually ask about AI agents for small business

What are the best AI agents for small business?

On published pricing, the ones whose billing unit matches your work. Lindy ($29.99 a user) and Manus ($20) for research, drafting and inbox work; Zapier Agents (1,500 activities for about $33) or Make ($9 for 10,000 operations) for agents that act inside your existing apps; Intercom Fin ($0.99 an outcome) for customer support; and a custom-built agent once a per-conversation meter passes roughly 175 to 354 conversations a month.

How much do AI agents cost for a small business?

Between $9 and $200 a month for a subscription agent at small business volume, on the vendors own pages: Make from $9, Manus $20 to $200, Lindy $29.99 to $199.99 a user, Gumloop from $37, Zapier Agents about $33. Metered agents cost $0.99 an outcome on Intercom Fin and $2 a conversation on Salesforce Agentforce. A custom agent built by a marketplace developer runs about $3,600 to $18,000 one time plus $50 to $150 a month to run.

What is the best AI agent platform for small business?

For a non-technical owner, Zapier Agents or Lindy, because both connect to the apps a small business already pays for and bill in a unit you can predict. For an owner comfortable with a builder, n8n (2,500 executions for about 20 euros a month, or free self-hosted) and Gumloop ($37 a month, unlimited seats) give more control per dollar. Relevance AI no longer publishes a small business price at all.

How can AI agents help small businesses?

By finishing the work that piles up between customers: answering the same twenty questions, chasing unpaid invoices, following up leads the same day, booking and confirming appointments, and turning receipts and orders into bookkeeping entries. The test is whether the agent can act inside your tools, not just chat. An agent that reads a QuickBooks invoice and sends the reminder saves hours; one that only drafts the email saves minutes.

Should a small business buy an AI agent or have one built?

Buy first, unless the meter or the integration says otherwise. A built agent costs about $350 a month once you spread a $6,000 build over 24 months and add running costs. Intercom Fin crosses that at about 354 outcomes a month and Agentforce at 175 conversations. Seat and credit tools rarely cross it for one owner, so the reason to build there is a system the platform cannot reach, not price.

Do I need a developer to set up an AI agent for my business?

Not for Lindy, Manus, Zapier Agents or Make, which are built for owners to configure. You usually do for n8n and Gumloop past a template, and always for anything that has to write to a point of sale, a practice management system or an accounting file with rules your business depends on. That build is typically 40 to 170 hours, and a marketplace developer at $60 to $150 an hour is cheaper than an agency for it.

Are AI agents worth it for a small business?

Yes when the agent replaces a recurring task you can name and count, and rarely when it is bought to explore. A $30 a month agent that saves two hours a week pays for itself at any wage above $3.75 an hour. The failures are agents nobody scoped: no defined task, no system to act in, no number to check after a month.

Which AI agents work with QuickBooks and Google Workspace?

Zapier Agents and Make reach QuickBooks Online and Google Workspace through their existing connectors, Lindy connects to Gmail and Google Calendar natively, and n8n and Gumloop reach both through nodes or your own API keys. Intercom Fin and Agentforce work inside their own helpdesk and CRM. For anything with custom rules, a developer builds directly against the QuickBooks and Google APIs.