An AI SDR costs anywhere from about $1 per lead on HubSpot's credit-based prospecting agent, through $250 to $2,500 a month on AiSDR's published plans, to $3,750 a month on an annual contract for 11x's entry plan. For that, it finds prospects, researches them, writes and sends outreach, answers simple replies and books meetings.
What it doesn't do is sell. An SDR (sales development rep) is the junior role that fills a salesperson's diary with first meetings, and the AI version stops at the same point: every interested reply ends up with a person. So judge it on cost per attended meeting, not on the monthly fee. Once you add sending mailboxes, data and the hours someone spends checking its work, the licence can turn out to be the smaller part of the bill.
Six jobs an AI SDR does between a list and a booked meeting
Vendors call the product a digital worker, which hides how mechanical the work is. Strip away the branding and every AI SDR runs the same six steps, and each one is a place where quality or cost can slip.
- Build the list. It searches a contact database for people who match your ideal customer profile: sector, company size, job title, sometimes a trigger such as a new hire. 11x bills on new prospects per month and AiSDR on AI-researched contacts, so this step is usually the billing unit.
- Research each contact. It reads the company website, recent news, job adverts and public LinkedIn activity, then picks one reason to write. This is where the AI earns its fee, and where most embarrassing errors start.
- Write the message. Email first, often LinkedIn connection requests and messages as well, all in your rep's name. Artisan's pricing page says its agent sends "in your reps' names, from your own sending domains".
- Send from warmed mailboxes. Volume is spread across several inboxes on separate domains so your main domain isn't put at risk. Warming new inboxes takes weeks; AiSDR's pricing page puts it at 30+ days to get multiple inboxes ready for full volume.
- Handle replies. It sorts each reply (interested, not now, wrong person, unsubscribe, out of office), answers simple questions and follows up. Most tools offer a choice between fully automatic replies and a co-pilot mode where a person approves each one.
- Book and log. It offers slots from a real calendar, books the meeting and writes the activity back to your CRM (customer relationship management system) so nobody else contacts the same person twice.
Everything after the booking stays with you: the discovery call, technical questions, pricing, samples, negotiation and the relationship. If your sales depend on a site visit or a trial order, an AI SDR only buys you the chance to have that conversation. For the wider question of AI prospecting against employing someone, see the cost comparison of AI lead generation and a salesperson; the rest of this tutorial stays with the AI SDR products themselves.
A campaign brief, and what the agent wrote from it
Most tools ask for a brief (some call it a play or a campaign) before the first send. Here is a filled-in one for an illustrative packaging supplier that sells custom-printed mailer boxes to online brands:
Who: Operations or e-commerce managers at online brands shipping
2,000-20,000 orders a month, selling goods that break in transit.
Signal: Hiring a warehouse or fulfilment role in the last 60 days,
OR recent reviews mentioning damaged deliveries.
Offer: Free packaging audit. We look at 3 of their current boxes
and quote a right-sized alternative within 5 working days.
Facts: Minimum order 500 units. Print runs take 10-12 working days.
Never say: "sustainable" unless the board is certified; any price;
any delivery date other than the above.
Tone: Plain, short, no exclamation marks. Under 90 words.
Hand over to a person when: price, samples or a named competitor
is mentioned.An illustrative first email the agent produced from that brief:
Subject: the damaged-parcel reviews
Hi [first name], I noticed a few recent reviews mention glassware arriving chipped, and that you're hiring a fulfilment lead. We make right-sized printed mailers for brands shipping fragile goods. We'd happily audit three of your current boxes for free and quote an alternative within five working days. Worth a look? [rep name]
It is usable, but two things need fixing before it runs unattended. Quoting a brand's own damage complaints back at them reads as pointed, so I'd soften the opener to "brands shipping fragile products". And the agent dropped the minimum order, which means some replies will come from shops sending 200 parcels a month who can never buy. Put hard qualifiers into the targeting and into the email itself, not just one of them.
Published AI SDR prices in September 2026
Few vendors in this category publish prices, and those that do bill in different units. This table shows what each vendor's own pricing page listed when I checked. Confirm on the page before you budget, because this market reprices often.
| Product | Published price | Volume included | Commitment | Per contact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HubSpot prospecting agent | 100 HubSpot Credits per lead recommended for outreach; credits cost $10 per 1,000 | You set a daily limit on new contact suggestions | Runs inside a paid HubSpot subscription; Professional includes 3,000 credits a month | About $1 |
| AiSDR Solo | $250 a month | 200 AI-researched contacts, 1 user, 3 mailboxes | Month to month | $1.25 |
| AiSDR Explore / Scale | $900 / $2,500 a month | 800 / 2,500 contacts, unlimited users | Quarterly contracts | $1.13 / $1.00 |
| Reply, Jason AI SDR Starter | From $500 a month billed annually, $800 billed monthly | 1,000 active contacts | Annual for the lower price | $0.50 to $0.80 |
| 11x, Alice Growth plan | $3,750 a month billed annually | 2,000 new prospects a month, up to 5 users, managed Gmail mailboxes | Annual | About $1.88 |
| Artisan, Ava | Quote only | Team plan about 2,500 leads contacted a month; Scale about 6,000 | Sized by leads, mailboxes and dialler seats | Ask for it |
| Clay (build your own) | Free plan; Launch from $167 a month billed annually | Launch: 15,000 actions and 2,500 data credits a month | Monthly, or annual at 10% off | Depends on your build |
Per contact, the spread is narrower than the monthly fees suggest: most land between 50 cents and $2 for each person researched and contacted. The real differences are commitment and minimum volume. At $3,750 a month on an annual contract, 11x's entry plan is $45,000 before you have learned whether your buyers answer cold email at all, while AiSDR's month-to-month Solo plan lets you find out for a few hundred dollars.
Watch the billing unit, too. "New prospects", "AI-researched contacts", "active contacts" and "leads recommended for outreach" are not the same thing. Ask each vendor one question in writing: if a contact is still partway through a sequence when the new month starts, do they count again? On an active-contacts plan they may, which quietly halves your real volume.
What sits outside the licence fee
The licence is the only cost on the pricing page. These are the ones that turn up in the first quarter.
| Cost | How it is charged | Example figure | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sending domains | Yearly | Reply lists new domains from $6 a year | Keeps cold email off the domain you invoice from |
| Mailboxes | Monthly, per inbox | Reply: from $5 per mailbox a month, or $15 for a pre-warmed one | Volume is spread across several; some plans include them |
| Warm-up time | Weeks of paid licence | AiSDR: 30+ days to ready multiple inboxes | You pay while sending is throttled |
| Extra data | Per credit | Clay sells top-ups at a 30% premium on Launch and Growth | Phone numbers and deep research burn credits fastest |
| CRM seats and onboarding | Monthly plus one-off | HubSpot Sales Hub Professional: $90 a seat a month billed annually ($100 monthly), plus a required $1,500 onboarding fee | Only if you need the CRM to run the agent |
| Your review time | Hours a week | My planning figure: 4-6 hours a week for the first month, 1-2 after | The most underestimated line |
| Meetings | About an hour each, with prep | Multiply by your hourly cost | More meetings means more of the owner's time |
| A damaged domain | Risk | Google asks bulk senders to keep spam complaints under 0.1% and never reach 0.3% | Recovery takes weeks of low sending |
Those Google thresholds come from its email sender guidelines, which also require SPF, DKIM and DMARC authentication and one-click unsubscribe for anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to personal Gmail accounts. A good AI SDR vendor handles the setup, but the complaint rate is yours: it depends on who you target and what you say. The tutorial on cold emails that stay out of spam covers the writing side.
Cost per booked meeting: a spare-parts maker's first quarter
Take an illustrative manufacturer of spare parts for food-processing machinery: conveyor belts, seals, cutting blades. Its buyers are maintenance and engineering managers at food plants, and a new account typically starts with a trial order. The sales manager picks AiSDR's Explore plan at $900 a month on a quarterly contract, which includes 800 contacts a month plus domains and mailboxes.
| Line | Working | Quarter |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | 3 x $900 | $2,700 |
| Review time, weeks 1-4 | 5 hours a week x 4 x $45 an hour | $900 |
| Review time, weeks 5-13 | 2 hours a week x 9 x $45 | $810 |
| Meetings attended | 9 x 1 hour x $45 | $405 |
| Total | $4,815 |
The results line uses assumptions, not industry figures, so replace them with your own from the last campaign a person ran. Say 1% of the 2,400 contacts reply positively (24), half of those book (12) and a quarter of bookings don't show, leaving 9 attended meetings. That is $4,815 divided by 9, or about $535 per attended meeting.
Is $535 good? Work backwards from what a meeting is worth. If one attended meeting in four leads to a trial order, one trial in three becomes an account, and a new account brings $8,000 of gross margin in its first year, each attended meeting is worth $8,000 x 1/4 x 1/3, or about $667. The pilot clears the bar, just. Halve the reply rate and the cost per meeting roughly doubles to over $1,000, and the same quarter loses money on year-one margin. That sensitivity is the reason to run a short, cheap pilot before any annual contract.
When 2,000 prospects a month is more than your whole market
The same spare-parts maker ships to about 1,100 food plants it could realistically serve, with two relevant contacts at each: the maintenance manager and the engineering manager. That is 2,200 people in total. On AiSDR Explore at 800 a month, the whole market has been contacted within three months. On 11x's Growth plan at 2,000 new prospects a month, it's gone in about five weeks, with nearly eleven months of a $45,000 contract still to run.
Once the good list runs out, you either pay for volume you can't use or the targeting gets loosened to fill the quota, which means emailing people who can never buy and pushing your complaint rate up. Do this sum before any demo:
Reachable companies x relevant roles per company = total people
Total people / plan's monthly volume = months until the list runs out
Months until the list runs out < contract length = oversized planFor the spare-parts maker: 1,100 x 2 = 2,200 people; 2,200 / 2,000 = 1.1 months; 1.1 is far less than 12, so 11x Growth is oversized, while even AiSDR's 800 a month suits one quarter, then a pause while replies are worked. Niche business-to-business sellers usually need a slow, careful tool rather than a fast one. Ask the vendor to run your list through their database and tell you how many contacts they can actually reach before you choose a tier.
Four ways an AI SDR embarrasses a small firm
The promise nobody made
An illustrative contract-testing laboratory let its agent answer replies automatically. A food producer asked how quickly results come back, and the agent replied "within 48 hours", lifted from an old page about a different test that takes five working days. The producer sent samples on that basis, and the complaint arrived a fortnight later. The fix is a "never state" list in the brief (prices, turnaround times, accreditation scope) plus a rule that any reply asking about those goes to a person.
The wrong company's news
An import-export business saw its agent congratulate a freight buyer on "your new bonded warehouse". The news story was about a different firm with a similar name. It showed up as two sarcastic replies and a noticeable drop in response from that segment. Require the research note behind every email to cite its source link, and sample 20 notes a week during the first month.
Cold-pitching your own customers
The packaging supplier from earlier synced its CRM, but the agent only skipped contacts whose lifecycle stage was set to customer, and half the real customers had never been tagged. A buyer of five years asked, politely, why she was being introduced to the company. Before the first send, upload a suppression list of every customer domain, every open deal and every competitor, then test it by searching for three known customers in the agent's list.
Not taking "not now" for an answer
This is the reply-handling failure, and it is easy to reproduce in a test. A prospect writes back:
Thanks, but we're tied into our current supplier until March. Try me then.
An illustrative automatic response from an agent left on default settings:
Totally understand, [first name]! Many of our customers switched mid-contract after seeing our pricing. Could we grab 15 minutes this week to compare?
Three faults: it ignores a clear request, it implies a pricing claim nobody approved, and it will likely follow up again next week. What you want is a two-line thank-you, a task in the CRM dated for early February, and no further automated email. Set the agent's reply rules so that "timing" replies create a task for a person instead of a follow-up.
A 30-day trial that tells you whether to keep paying
Run any AI SDR as a pilot with an exit before committing to a long contract. The stages below fit a month-to-month plan, or the first month of a quarterly one.
- Before sending (2-3 days). Count your reachable list, write the brief with its never-say list, upload the suppression list, and set the target cost per attended meeting you worked out above.
- Weeks 1-2: approve everything. HubSpot's prospecting agent calls this setting Review before sending; Artisan describes approving before sending as well. Log every edit and why you made it.
- Week 3: switch one segment to automatic. Choose the segment with the fewest factual corrections and keep a daily cap. HubSpot's version is a daily limit on new contact suggestions for each play.
- Week 4: read the numbers. Spam complaint rate in Google Postmaster Tools, bounces, unsubscribes, positive replies and meetings attended.
- Decide. Continue, change the brief, or cancel. Don't extend a pilot because it was "nearly" working.
A filled-in scorecard for the laboratory after 30 days, with illustrative figures:
| Measure | Result | Threshold set in advance | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Messages reviewed | 410 | At least 300 | Enough to judge |
| Edited for a factual error | 37 (9%) | Under 10% | Just passes |
| Spam complaint rate | 0.04% | Under 0.1% | Passes |
| Positive replies | 6 | At least 5 | Passes |
| Meetings attended | 3 | At least 4 | Fails |
| Cost per attended meeting | About $390 | Under $450 | Passes on a small sample |
The verdict here is one more month in review mode with a sharper offer, not an annual upgrade. Three meetings is too small a sample to scale on.
What to get in writing before you sign
- The billing unit. What counts as a contact or lead, and whether one still in a sequence counts again next month.
- Term and exit. 11x lists annual billing; AiSDR runs Explore and Scale on quarterly contracts and Solo month to month. Check notice periods and auto-renewal dates, which the tutorial on auto-renewals and notice periods covers in detail.
- Domains and mailboxes. Who owns them, and whether you keep them, warmed, if you leave.
- Data source. Where contacts come from, how recently they were checked, and what happens to bounced addresses.
- Controls. Approval mode, banned phrases, daily caps and hand-over rules. Artisan's page lists approve-before-send, locked tone and calls to action, and banned phrases.
- Opt-outs. How an unsubscribe is recorded, and whether it syncs back to your CRM and every other sending tool you use.
- Export. Every message, reply and research note, in a file you can open, if you cancel.
- References. A customer of your size who sells something similar. Checking an AI vendor's customer references gives the questions to ask them.
Cheaper routes when the sums don't work
If your cost per meeting comes out too high, you don't have to drop AI from prospecting altogether. An illustrative import-export business with one salesperson built its own lighter version instead:
- Clay's Launch plan for list building and AI research: $185 a month on monthly billing ($167 billed annually).
- A sequencing tool to send and track emails, for example Reply's Email Volume plan from $59 per user a month on monthly billing.
- Two new sending domains at about $6 a year each and three mailboxes at $5 a month each, both from Reply's own price list.
- ChatGPT Plus at $20 a month for drafting and rewriting the brief.
That comes to roughly $280 a month, plus six to ten hours of someone who is comfortable building a table of prompts and filters. Nothing sends on its own, which suits a business where every message still needs a person's judgement about the buyer. If you already run HubSpot, its credit-based agent is the other low-commitment option, at about $1 a lead with no separate contract; the tutorial on HubSpot's AI agents for small teams covers which ones are worth switching on.
My rule of thumb: pay for a full AI SDR only when three things are true. Your reachable market is at least several times the plan's monthly volume, you already know which message gets replies because a person has sent it, and someone has the hours to take the meetings it books. Missing any one of those, start with the cheaper routes above and move up once the numbers justify it.
More questions about paying for an AI SDR
Can an AI SDR send emails without anyone checking them?
Yes. Most let you choose. HubSpot's prospecting agent has a Review before sending option and a Send automatically option, and Artisan says you can approve messages before they go. Start in review mode for at least the first few hundred messages, count how many you had to correct, and only switch a segment to automatic once corrections are rare.
Does an AI SDR need its own email domain?
For volume sending, yes. Dedicated vendors such as 11x and AiSDR set up separate sending domains and mailboxes, warmed up over several weeks, so that complaints about cold email don't land on the domain your invoices and customer replies come from. Ask who owns those domains, and whether you can keep them if you cancel.
Is an AI SDR cheaper than hiring a person to do outreach?
Per contact, usually. Per won customer, it depends on your deal size and how much your sales rely on relationships and visits. Compare the two on cost per attended meeting, using your own reply and conversion rates, and remember that someone on your team still has to take every meeting the AI books.
Is cold emailing with an AI SDR allowed?
Rules on unsolicited email differ between countries and between business and consumer recipients. At a minimum, say who you are, give a working opt-out, honour it promptly and keep a suppression list. Ask a data-protection adviser to check your plan before you send at volume, especially to individuals rather than company roles.
Further reads
- Best AI Lead Generation Tools for Small Businesses (2026) — The wider set of prospecting tools, grouped by the job each does.
- How to Find B2B Prospects With AI Research Tools — Do the research step yourself before paying an agent to do it.
- How Much Does an AI Agent Cost a Small Business? — How other kinds of AI agent are priced, from credits to outcomes.
- How to Automate Sales Follow-Ups With AI Without Being Pushy — Follow-ups for warm leads, where AI is cheaper and safer.
- How to Evaluate an AI Software Vendor: A Small Business Scorecard — A scorecard for comparing any two AI vendors side by side.
- Is HubSpot Worth Paying For Just for Its AI Features? — Whether HubSpot's agents justify the subscription on their own.
- Can AI Make Outbound Calls for Your Business? Costs and Rules — What AI calling platforms charge per minute, what 300 confirmation calls a month really cost, and the consent, disclosure and calling-hours rules to check.
- AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.
Sources: 11x Alice pricing page; Artisan pricing page; AiSDR pricing page; Reply pricing page (Jason AI SDR, domains and mailboxes); Clay pricing page; HubSpot Sales Hub pricing page and HubSpot Knowledge Base, 'Set up and use the prospecting agent'; Google Workspace Admin Help, email sender guidelines. All checked September 2026.