[ verified pricing, august 2026 ]
AI SDR software compared: what an AI sales agent or AI BDR costs in 2026
What the main AI SDR platforms actually charge, checked against their own pricing pages rather than a roundup. Where each one fits, where the category quietly loses money, and the point at which building a custom AI sales agent beats renting one. If you already know you want your own, describe it in the brief on the right.
Last updated August 2026 · Vendor pages cited · No affiliate placements
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the short answer
An AI SDR is software that runs top-of-funnel prospecting end to end: it builds the list, researches each account, writes and sends the outreach, and follows up until a meeting is booked. In August 2026, only two of the four best-known platforms publish a price. AiSDR starts at $250 a month for 200 AI-researched contacts and scales to $2,500 a month for 2,500. Regie.ai publishes $180 per user per month on an annual contract with a 10 seat minimum. 11x and Artisan are quote-scoped, and third-party trackers report annual contracts in the tens of thousands. Buying wins when your motion is standard cold email to a clean list. Building your own AI sales agent wins when the advantage is in data the vendor cannot see, or when per-seat fees stop making sense at your volume.
Every figure below is labeled as either vendor-published or third-party reported, and was checked against the vendor's own pricing page in August 2026. This category changes pricing often, so confirm the current number before you sign anything.
01 / the comparison
AI SDR software compared: real pricing, model and fit
The most useful column here is not the price, it is whether there is a price at all. Half this market will not tell you what it costs until you have sat through a demo, which makes budgeting an outbound program genuinely hard.
| Platform | Model | Published cost | Contract | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AiSDR | Fully autonomous AI SDR, priced by researched contacts | Published. $250/mo Solo (200 contacts), $900/mo Explore (800), $2,500/mo Scale (2,500). 20 percent off annually | Solo is month to month, Explore and Scale are quarterly commitments | Small and mid-market teams that want to test the motion without a sales call |
| Regie.ai | AI agents augmenting human reps, priced per seat | Published. $180/user/mo with a 10 seat minimum, or $499/user/mo with a 5 seat minimum. Mailbox rotation and dialer are paid add-ons | Annual contract on both published tiers | Existing sales orgs that want AI assisting reps, not replacing them |
| 11x | Autonomous digital worker for outbound at scale | No consistent public rate card. Third-party trackers report annual contracts roughly in the $36,000 to $65,000 range, with a reported median near $40,000 | Annual, quote-scoped | Enterprise teams buying full outbound autonomy with a budget to match |
| Artisan (Ava) | AI SDR marketed as an AI employee, bundled with data | Pricing page exists but carries no fixed dollar figure for the core product. Third-party estimates vary widely, which is a signal in itself | Quote-scoped, contact sales | Teams that want data and sending bundled into one contract |
| Human SDR | The baseline you are actually comparing against | Roughly $80,000 to $110,000 a year all-in for a US rep once you count salary, benefits, tooling, management and ramp | Employment, plus 3 to 6 months of ramp before full output | Complex deals, unusual objections, anything needing judgment on a live call |
| Custom AI sales agent | Built to your own workflow, data and CRM | A build cost once, then model and data usage. No per-seat fee, so unit cost falls as volume rises. Botgigs hire fees are published | You own the code and the data path | Proprietary intent data, unusual qualification logic, or strict data-residency rules |
Published figures were read from each vendor's own pricing page in August 2026. Reported figures come from third-party contract trackers and review sites and are not vendor-confirmed. For the wider cost picture on custom work, see the cost to hire an AI developer, or the definitional breakdown in what is an AI SDR.
02 / platform by platform
Best AI SDR tools, and what each one is genuinely good at
Roundups rank these as if one wins outright. They do not compete on the same axis. The real question is whether you want a machine that replaces the prospecting job, one that makes your existing reps faster, or something shaped exactly like your funnel.
[ aisdr ]
Clearest pricing in the category
Publishes three tiers on its own site with contact volumes attached, so you can model cost per prospect before talking to anyone. The Solo tier is month to month, which makes it the cheapest honest way to find out whether the motion works for your offer at all.
[ regie.ai ]
For teams keeping their reps
Prices per seat rather than per contact, and is built around AI agents feeding and assisting human reps. That fits an existing sales org better than a product that assumes you are replacing the function. Watch the seat minimums, they set a real floor on spend.
[ 11x ]
Enterprise autonomy, enterprise price
Positioned as a digital worker that owns outbound rather than a tool your team drives. Reported contracts land in the tens of thousands a year. Worth the call if outbound volume is already large enough that a five-figure platform fee is a rounding error.
[ artisan ]
Bundled data and sending
Sells Ava as an AI employee with contact data and sending infrastructure included, which removes a stack of separate subscriptions. The tradeoff is that the core product is quote-scoped, so you cannot compare it against anything until you are in a sales cycle.
[ build ]
When the edge is your own data
A custom agent is the only option that can read your product usage, support tickets or internal scoring model and act on them. No vendor can price that in, because none of them can see it. This is also the route when legal will not let prospect data leave your systems.
[ hybrid ]
What most teams actually end up running
Platform for volume on the standard segment, humans on the accounts worth a real conversation, and a custom piece where the two meet. It is less tidy than any vendor deck, and it is the shape most working outbound programs settle into by month six.
03 / the honest part
Where an AI SDR quietly loses money
A comparison page that finds no downside is a brochure. Four failure modes account for most of the churn in this category, and none of them are the vendor's fault.
01
The list was the problem
An AI SDR is an amplifier. Pointed at a poorly defined ideal customer profile it sends more wrong messages faster, and you pay per contact for the privilege. If your current outbound is not working with humans, automating it makes the numbers worse, not better.
02
Deliverability was never set up
Volume without domain warmup, SPF, DKIM and DMARC alignment burns your sending reputation, and the damage reaches your normal company email too. Most platforms sell mailbox rotation as an add-on precisely because this is the failure that kills programs.
03
Nobody owned the replies
These systems are good at first touch and follow-up and weak the moment a reply goes sideways. Teams that leave the inbox unattended lose the meetings the machine actually earned. Budget human time for responses, or the pipeline number stays theoretical.
04
The deal was too complex
Multi-threaded enterprise deals with a buying committee, a security review and a procurement cycle do not compress into a sequence. AI SDRs earn their keep on high-volume, lower-complexity motions. Above a certain deal size the human rep is still cheaper per closed dollar.
04 / build or buy
When to buy an AI SDR platform, and when to build your own
Buying is the right default. The exceptions are specific, and they are all about something a vendor cannot see or is not allowed to touch.
| If your situation is | Do this | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Standard cold email to a clean, well-defined list | Buy a platform | This is exactly the motion the products were built for, and rebuilding it yourself buys you nothing |
| Your edge is product usage or internal scoring data | Build a custom agent | No vendor can act on signals that live inside your own systems, and that signal is the whole advantage |
| Compliance forbids sending prospect data to a third party | Build, self-hosted | A per-seat SaaS contract cannot solve a data-residency or regulatory constraint. See AI for financial services |
| Very high volume, per-seat pricing stops making sense | Build, then run it | A custom agent has no seat fee, so unit cost falls with scale instead of rising. Read build vs buy an AI agent |
| You want to know if outbound works at all | Buy the cheapest monthly tier | Find out with a 250 dollar test before you commission a build or sign an annual contract |
| You need voice follow-up, not just email | AI voice agent development | Outbound calling is a separate build with its own compliance and latency problems |
A custom AI sales agent is a mid-sized build, not a research project: list ingestion, enrichment, a drafting step with guardrails, a sending layer and a reply classifier. The engineering risk sits in evaluation, which is why it is worth reading how to evaluate an AI agent before you ship it before anyone writes code.
05 / why botgigs
If the answer is build, this is where you find the people who have built one
01
Selected for AI work, not all work
A general freelance network has to cover design, finance and mobile. This pool covers AI, agents and automation, so a shortlist for an outbound agent is people who have shipped one. Browse it on the marketplace, or hire directly through an AI agent development company.
02
Scoped before you spend
The hire brief turns "we want an AI SDR" into deliverables and an honest effort band, so you can compare a build quote against a platform contract using the same numbers. See how hiring works, or how to write an AI project brief.
03
Priced in public
The hire fee is on the pricing page: free to post at 10 percent, or 7 and 5 percent on the paid plans. Given that half the AI SDR market will not quote you without a demo, knowing the number up front is the point.
04
Buy the agent when it already exists
Some of this is a finished product and paying anyone to rebuild it is waste. When a ready-made agent fits, you hire it instead. When it does not, you can bring in a vetted AI engineer or the wider AI automation services route.
[ Botgigs is in early access. The plans above are the published launch tiers and nothing is billable today, which we would rather say plainly than imply a track record we have not earned yet. ]
06 / questions
AI SDR questions buyers actually ask
What is an AI SDR?
An AI SDR is software that performs the top-of-funnel work of a sales development representative: building a prospect list, researching each account, writing and sending personalized outreach, and following up until a meeting is booked. It runs the repeatable part of prospecting without a person doing each step by hand. It does not replace the judgment a salesperson brings to a live discovery call.
How much does an AI SDR cost?
Published entry pricing starts near $250 a month and mid-market plans commonly land between $900 and $2,500 a month. Seat-based platforms such as Regie.ai publish $180 per user per month on an annual contract with a 10 seat minimum. Enterprise contracts at 11x and Artisan are quote-scoped, and third parties report annual totals in the tens of thousands. Data, domains and mailboxes are extra.
Do AI SDRs actually work?
They work when the offer is simple, the target list is clean and a human still owns replies. In that setup teams report real lifts in volume at a lower cost per qualified lead. They fail when they are pointed at a bad list or asked to carry a complex, multi-threaded enterprise deal. List quality matters more than which vendor you pick.
What is the difference between an AI SDR and an AI BDR?
In practice vendors use the terms interchangeably. Where companies do separate them, an SDR handles inbound leads that already raised a hand and a BDR runs cold outbound to accounts that have never heard of you. Almost every AI SDR product on the market is built for the outbound motion, so by that stricter definition it is really an AI BDR.
Should I buy an AI SDR or build one?
Buy when your motion is standard: cold email to a well-defined list, with a CRM the vendor already integrates. Build when the value sits in something the vendor cannot see, such as proprietary intent data, an unusual qualification rule, or a compliance requirement that forbids sending prospect data to a third party. Building also wins on unit economics at high volume, because a custom agent has no per-seat fee.
Is an AI SDR cheaper than a human SDR?
On paper, yes. A US sales development representative costs roughly $80,000 to $110,000 a year all-in once you include benefits, tooling, management and ramp time, while most AI SDR contracts land well under that. The comparison misleads if you drop the human entirely, because someone still has to own list quality, handle replies and keep the messaging honest.
Which AI SDR software is best?
There is no single best one, because they optimize for different buyers. AiSDR publishes the clearest self-serve pricing and suits small teams testing the motion. Regie.ai fits sales orgs that want AI assisting human reps. 11x and Artisan target full outbound autonomy at enterprise scale and price by quote. A custom build fits teams with proprietary data or strict compliance limits.
Will AI replace SDRs?
Not the role, but a large part of the task list. List building, research, first-touch drafting and follow-up sequencing are genuinely automatable and are being automated now. What stays human is qualification judgment, handling a skeptical or unusual reply, and everything that happens once a real conversation starts. Teams are shrinking SDR headcount, not eliminating the function.
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