Quick answer: AI SDR vendors publish prices in four units — per seat, per contact researched, per message sent and per credit consumed — and none of them converts into another. At 2,000 contacts a month the cheapest published plan we opened is US$39 and the dearest US$3,750, a 96-fold spread across plans that bundle very different things. None of the nine vendors prices per meeting booked.
We opened nine vendors’ own pricing pages on 22 September 2026: AiSDR, 11x (Alice), Artisan (Ava), Regie.ai, Qualified (Piper), Instantly, Smartlead, Klenty and Landbase. No roundups, no comparison sites, no review aggregators. Every figure below is on the vendor’s own page and linked in the source table at the end. Currency conversions use the Reserve Bank of Australia’s published rate for 22 September 2026.
Why two AI SDR quotes at the same price are not the same purchase
The billing unit decides what the vendor is blind to. That is the whole problem, and it has a shape you can memorise.
The blind-spot rule: each of the four billing units in use is blind to something that moves your bill, and it is never the thing the price is quoted in. Per-seat pricing does not charge for volume. Per-contact pricing does not charge for message volume, sequence length or channel mix. Per-message pricing does not charge for the mailboxes and domains the messages leave from. Per-credit pricing does not charge for outcomes: a credit is spent whether the message lands or not.
11x states the per-contact blind spot on its own pricing page: “We charge per lead, not per send. Whether Alice runs three touchpoints or thirty, the price stays the same.” That single sentence is the conversion problem in miniature. Three touchpoints against thirty is a ten-fold difference in messages sent for an identical invoice — so a per-contact price and a per-message price cannot be lined up in the same column without knowing the sequence length, and no vendor publishes yours.
| Billing unit | What it charges for | What it does NOT charge for | What it silently caps | The cost buyers forget |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Per seat Klenty Growth, Klenty Plus, Artisan dialer add-on |
Each named user, per month | Volume. 200 contacts and 15,000 contacts cost the same per user | Klenty Starter caps 15,000 monthly contacts and 75,000 monthly emails; dialer minutes are capped at 200 on Growth and 1,000 on Plus | Data and enrichment credits (Klenty lists 4,000 phone-and-email credits on Plus only) and the Parallel and Power Dialer add-on at $45 per user/month |
| Per contact researched AiSDR, 11x Alice, Artisan |
Each net-new person the AI finds, qualifies and enriches | Message volume, sequence length, channel mix | Seats and sending infrastructure. AiSDR Solo is 1 user, 1 domain, 3 mailboxes, 1 LinkedIn account. 11x Alice Growth is “Up to 5 End Users” | The contract term. 11x Alice is billed annually by default; AiSDR runs quarterly on Explore and Scale, monthly only on Solo |
| Per message sent Instantly, Smartlead |
Emails despatched per month | The mailboxes and domains the messages leave from. Lead data varies: Instantly bundles a 450M+ contact database into the headline price, while Smartlead sells verified prospect emails as a $59/month add-on on Base and Pro | Uploaded contacts. Instantly Starter allows 5,000 emails but only 1,000 uploaded contacts, so the contact cap binds first | Mailboxes and domains. Smartlead publishes these separately across eight SmartSenders combinations, from $3.99 to $9 per mailbox per month and $13 to $19 per domain per year |
| Per credit consumed Regie.ai, Landbase, Instantly credits |
Individual actions: research, drafting, enrichment, dialling | Outcomes. A credit is spent whether the message lands or not | Expiry. Regie states Pro credits “reset at the start of each billing period rather than carrying over”; AiSDR states unused messages roll over while the subscription is active | The consumption rate. Landbase publishes one — 1 credit per verified email, 10 per verified mobile. Regie’s pricing page names what uses credits but does not publish how many each action takes |
| Per meeting booked | Nothing on the nine pages we read | — | — | The definition of “meeting” and the show rate, neither of which is a software setting |
What each vendor actually publishes, and in which unit
Checked against each vendor’s own pricing page on 22 September 2026. Where a vendor does not publish a figure we write “not published on the pricing page”, because a missing price is a fact about the page and not an accusation.
| Vendor (own pricing page) | Published entry price | Unit the tier is scoped in | What the same tier also caps | Currency stated |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AiSDR | $250/mo Solo, $900 Explore, $2,500 Scale; annual $2,400 / $8,640 / $24,000 | AI-researched contacts: 200 / 800 / 2,500 a month | 1 / unlimited / unlimited users; 1 / 2 / 6 domains; 3 / 6 / 18 mailboxes; 1 / 5 / 20 LinkedIn accounts | No — bare “$” |
| 11x (Alice) | Growth “Starting at $3,750 / mo”, billed annually; Pro and Enterprise custom | New Prospects per month: 2,000 / 5,000 / 10,000+ | End Users: up to 5 / up to 10 / unlimited | No — bare “$” |
| Artisan (Ava) | Not published on the pricing page: “Pricing scoped on your plan” | “~2,500 leads contacted/mo” (Team), “~6,000” (Scale) — the tilde is the vendor’s | FAQ states plans are “sized to your lead volume, mailboxes, and dialer seats”; the AI dialer is an add-on charged per seat | Not applicable |
| Instantly | $94/mo Starter, $194 Scale, $555 Agency (10% off on annual billing, all three tiers) | Emails per month: 5,000 / 100,000 / 500,000 | Uploaded contacts 1,000 / 25,000 / 100,000, and Instantly credits 1,500 / 5,000 / 10,000 | No — bare “$” |
| Smartlead | $39/mo Base, $94 Pro, $174 Unlimited Smart, $379 Unlimited Prime | Email sends per month: 6,000 / 90,000 / 150,000 / 500,000 | Contacts 2,000 / 30,000 / unlimited / unlimited; verified prospect emails 2,000 / 30,000 / 50,000 / 170,000, a $59/month add-on on Base and Pro | USD, in the page’s own structured data |
| Klenty | Starter $50 per month billed annually; Growth $70 per user/month; Plus $99 per user/month | Seats, above Starter | Starter: 15,000 monthly contacts and 75,000 monthly emails. Growth 200 dialer minutes, Plus 1,000 minutes plus 4,000 credits | USD, in the page’s own structured data |
| Regie.ai (RegieGO) | Free $0 with 250 one-off credits; Pro $49/mo; Enterprise custom | Credits: 250 one-off / 5,000 a month | Free is single user. Credits do not roll over. Per-action credit cost is not published on the pricing page | No — bare “$” |
| Landbase | $499/mo, $1,999/mo, $4,999/mo; Enterprise custom | Credits: 15,000 / 75,000 / 200,000, at $0.033 / $0.0267 / $0.0250 per credit | Published consumption: 1 credit per verified email, 10 per verified mobile, 0.2 for online AI qualification, search free, misses “$0, never charged” | Yes — the rate table column is headed “USD equivalent” |
| Qualified (Piper) | Not published on the pricing page: three tiers named Premier, Enterprise and Ultimate, each with “Schedule a demo” | No unit published at all | — | Not applicable |
One thing to raise with 11x before you sign: the Alice page shows “Starting at $3,750 / mo” billed annually, while the FAQ lower on the same page says “11x starts at $36,000 per year on the Growth plan”. Twelve months of the monthly figure is $45,000. Ask which of the two your quote is built from. We documented the same gap just over two weeks earlier in our side-by-side of 11x and AiSDR published prices, and it is unchanged.
Worked example: what 2,000 contacts a month costs under each unit
This is the arithmetic the published pricing tables leave to you. Substitute your own numbers; every input is stated and sourced.
Inputs. Volume: 2,000 contacts researched a month. Sequence length: 3 touchpoints and 30 touchpoints — the bracket 11x itself publishes — giving 6,000 or 60,000 messages from the same 2,000 people. Meeting rate: AiSDR publishes “1-3 meetings for each 100 contacts” on its pricing page, so 2,000 contacts produces 20 to 60 meetings a month. Each plan below is the cheapest published tier from that vendor that actually covers the job.
| Plan (published) | Monthly price | Cost per contact | Cost per message at 3 touches | Cost per message at 30 touches | Cost per meeting at 20–60 meetings |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AiSDR Scale — 2,500 AI-researched contacts | $2,500 | $1.25 | $0.4167 | $0.0417 | $41.67 – $125.00 |
| 11x Alice Growth — 2,000 New Prospects, billed annually | $3,750 | $1.875 | $0.6250 | $0.0625 | $62.50 – $187.50 |
| Instantly Scale — 25,000 uploaded contacts, 100,000 emails | $194 | $0.097 | $0.0323 | $0.0032 | $3.23 – $9.70 |
| Smartlead Base — 2,000 contacts, 6,000 sends (Pro $94 needed at 30 touches) | $39 | $0.0195 | $0.0065 | $0.0016 (on Pro) | $0.65 – $1.95 |
| Klenty Starter — 15,000 contacts, 75,000 emails, billed annually | $50 | $0.025 | $0.0083 | $0.0008 | $0.83 – $2.50 |
Read the spread before you read the ranking. Ninety-six times separates the dearest row from the cheapest — 11x Alice Growth at $3,750 against Smartlead Base at $39 — and the gap is mostly a difference in what the price includes. The two dear rows bundle the research, the managed mailboxes, the domain warmup and the replies. Among the three cheap rows the data is bundled differently again: Instantly’s headline price carries a 450M+ B2B lead database, Smartlead prices verified prospect emails as a $59/month add-on on Base and Pro, and Klenty publishes data credits on Plus only. None of the three carries provisioned mailboxes or domains in its plan price: Instantly’s tiers allow unlimited connected email accounts, Smartlead prices them separately through SmartSenders, and Klenty publishes no mailbox line on its pricing page at all.
Now make the comparison honest by adding what the cheap rows leave out. 11x’s own FAQ puts a fully loaded human SDR at “$8,000 to $12,000 per month in salary, benefits, tooling, and management”. If running the Smartlead route takes a quarter of that person’s month — list building, copy, inbox triage, deliverability — you are adding $2,000 to $3,000 to a $39 subscription, which puts the cheapest row on the table between $2,039 and $3,039 a month: inside the bracket the two dear rows occupy, and above AiSDR Scale at the top of it. That is the crossover, and it is why the published monthly figure answers almost nothing on its own. The same trap appears one unit over in Australian AI phone agent pricing, where the billing unit is a minute.
At what monthly volume does each billing unit become cheapest?
Two thresholds in the table below do real work: 2,500 contacts a month, where the published per-contact rate bottoms out, and just above it, where per-contact prices stop being published at all.
| Contacts researched per month | Cheapest published per-contact plan | Cheapest published per-message plan (3 touches) | Cheapest published Klenty plan (the only vendor publishing seat prices) | What flips at this volume |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 200 | AiSDR Solo $250 — $1.25/contact | Smartlead Base $39 | Klenty Starter $50 | Nothing flips: the $211 gap is the price of research, data and managed mailboxes. Below 200 contacts, per-contact plans have no cheaper published rung |
| 800 | AiSDR Explore $900 — $1.125/contact | Smartlead Base $39 (2,400 sends is inside the 6,000 cap) | Klenty Starter $50 | The per-contact rate improves 10% for a 260% larger bill. AiSDR’s published per-contact rate falls as the tier rises, so a per-contact tier is cheapest at its ceiling, never at its floor |
| 2,000 | AiSDR Scale $2,500 — $1.25/contact | Smartlead Base $39, at exactly both of its caps | Klenty Starter $50 | Buying Scale at 2,000 contacts pays the same $2,500 as at 2,500 and wastes 500 contacts. Per-contact plans punish under-use of the tier you bought |
| 2,500 | AiSDR Scale $2,500 — $1.00/contact | Smartlead Pro $94 (7,500 sends exceeds Base) | Klenty Starter $50 | $1.00 is the cheapest per-contact rate on AiSDR’s monthly prices, and it exists at exactly one volume. Its published annual prices go lower still: $24,000 a year for 2,500 contacts a month is $0.80 per contact |
| 5,000+ | None published. 11x Pro covers 5,000 prospects at “Custom”; AiSDR publishes no tier above Scale | Smartlead Pro $94 — 15,000 sends is inside its 90,000 cap and 5,000 contacts inside its 30,000 | Klenty Starter $50 until 15,000 contacts | The published-price ceiling. Above 2,500 contacts a month, every per-contact vendor we opened moves to a quote, while per-message prices and Klenty’s flat Starter tier stay published far above it — Klenty Starter to 15,000 contacts a month (6×), Instantly Agency to 100,000 uploaded contacts (40×), and Smartlead Unlimited Smart to unlimited contacts |
The quotable version: per-contact AI SDR pricing is published up to 2,500 contacts a month and disappears above it; per-message pricing stays published into the hundreds of thousands; and Klenty, the only vendor publishing a seat price, caps its flat $50 tier at 15,000 contacts and 75,000 emails a month and publishes no volume cap at all on the per-user tiers above it. If your plan is to scale, the unit you choose decides whether you can still see a price at the volume you are scaling to.
The mailbox line that sits outside the comparison
A per-message plan does not provision the mailboxes the messages leave from, and the cost of those mailboxes sits outside the headline monthly figure.
Use AiSDR’s own provisioning as the ratio, since it is the only vendor that publishes a mailbox count against a contact count on the same tiers: Solo is 3 mailboxes for 200 contacts, Explore 6 for 800, Scale 18 for 2,500. That is one mailbox per 67 to 139 contacts a month, and consistently three mailboxes per domain. At 2,000 contacts that implies 15 mailboxes across 5 domains at the generous end, 30 mailboxes across 10 domains at the conservative end.
Smartlead publishes what that costs, on the same pricing page as its plans: $4.50 per mailbox per month and $13 per domain per year through its Google provider, one of eight SmartSenders combinations it lists, whose published rates run from $3.99 to $9 per mailbox per month and from $13 to $19 per domain per year. Taking the Google provider rates:
- Generous end: 15 mailboxes at $4.50 = $67.50/month, plus 5 domains at $13/year = $5.42/month. Infrastructure $72.92/month.
- Conservative end: 30 mailboxes = $135/month, plus 10 domains = $10.83/month. Infrastructure $145.83/month.
Against Smartlead Base at $39, that is 187% to 374% added to the headline. On the cheapest published per-message plan, the sending infrastructure costs more than the software. AiSDR and 11x both bundle this — AiSDR lists mailbox creation and ongoing domain warmup in every plan, and 11x states every plan includes managed Gmail mailboxes with domain setup, warmup, inbox rotation and monitoring, with the FAQ adding that the only thing you bring is your own CRM licence. The mailbox line alone is $73 to $146 a month of the $3,711 gap between the cheapest and dearest rows in the worked example above, and it is invisible in a table of monthly figures.
There is a time cost too. AiSDR’s pricing FAQ states that warmup alone takes 30 days for maximum deliverability and that teams see their strongest results after roughly six weeks; 11x lists onboarding as two weeks on Growth and four on Enterprise. On the two vendors that publish a timeline, budget about six weeks of paying before steady state.
Do any AI SDR vendors charge per meeting booked?
Not one of the nine pricing pages we opened on 22 September 2026 prices by meeting booked. The nearest published thing to outcome pricing is Landbase’s “only pay when we deliver a verified result”, and the result being paid for is a verified email address or mobile number, not a meeting: 1 credit at $0.033 for a verified email, 10 credits at $0.33 for a verified mobile, and “$0, never charged” for a miss. That is outcome pricing for data, not for pipeline.
That is a statement about nine pages, not about the market. But it makes the buyer’s job specific, because the worked example already tells you what a per-meeting quote has to beat. At 2,000 contacts a month and AiSDR’s published 1-3% contact-to-meeting rate, the five plans in the worked example land between $0.65 and $187.50 per meeting — $0.65 to $9.70 on the three cheaper rows, none of which carries provisioned mailboxes in its price, and $41.67 to $187.50 on the two per-contact plans, which bundle both the research and managed mailboxes. A per-meeting quote is only comparable with the second group: below about $42 it beats both of them at that volume, above about $188 it loses to both, and in between it is a straight bet on your own reply rate. Before taking that bet, settle two definitions in writing — what counts as a meeting, and who wears a no-show — because AI-booked meetings show up less often than human-booked ones, and a unit priced on bookings is priced on the number that falls furthest from revenue.
Whichever unit you land on, do not import a vendor’s conversion rate as your own. The reply and meeting rates published across this category are measured on different denominators, over different windows, against different definitions of a qualified meeting — which is why there are no trustworthy AI SDR benchmarks to plug into the arithmetic above. Run the calculation with your own measured rate, and run it again in ninety days.
What this costs in Australian dollars
Seven of the nine pages publish a figure at all. Four of those seven — AiSDR, 11x, Instantly and Regie.ai — show a bare “$” with no currency code beside the number. Smartlead and Klenty declare USD inside their pages’ own structured data rather than next to the price, and Landbase heads a rate-table column “USD equivalent”. None of the nine pages publishes an Australian price or an AUD option, so treat every figure as unconverted until a quote says otherwise.
At the Reserve Bank of Australia’s rate for 22 September 2026, 0.7123 US dollars to 1 Australian dollar, the worked example reads: Smartlead Base US$39 is A$54.75, Klenty Starter US$50 is A$70.20, Instantly Scale US$194 is A$272.36, AiSDR Scale US$2,500 is A$3,509.76, and 11x Alice Growth US$3,750 is A$5,264.64 a month, or A$63,176 for twelve months at that monthly figure, before card fees and before settling the $36,000-versus-$45,000 annual discrepancy noted above. GST treatment is a separate question again and none of the nine pages addresses it.
Where Zian sits
Zian AI is in partnership-application beta and publishes no price, so there is no Zian row in the tables above — adding one would break the exact rule this page exists to enforce. What we can put next to the arithmetic is the operating history the platform was built on: outbound acquisition since 2017, a learning engine tracking around 420,000 data points across more than 10,000 leads a day, 50,769+ qualified sales appointments set, and AI booking 40+ meetings a week for many teams. Those are first-party figures about our own campaigns, measured on our own systems.
The reason the unit question matters to us at all is that SmartReach AI orchestrates who, when and where to contact, and PrecisionPitch AI optimises what to say — both of which change the number of messages sent per contact, which is precisely the variable that per-contact pricing is blind to and per-message pricing bills for. Before you compare any two quotes, convert both to cost per meeting at your own volume using the table above.
Apply For Partnership to talk through the arithmetic against your own numbers.
Frequently asked questions
Why do two AI SDR tools quote the same monthly price for completely different work?
Because the number is scoped in a different unit. A $94 plan can mean 90,000 emails sent on Smartlead Pro, or 5,000 emails plus 1,000 uploaded contacts on Instantly Starter. The monthly figure is the last thing to compare, not the first.
How do I compare a per-seat price with a per-contact price?
Convert both to cost per booked meeting at your own volume. Take your monthly contacts, your measured contact-to-meeting rate, and divide the full monthly cost including mailboxes and the time your team spends. A seat price does not move when volume doubles, and a contact price does not move when sequence length trebles, so only the per-meeting figure lets the two sit in the same column.
Do any AI SDR vendors charge per meeting booked?
None of the nine vendor pricing pages we read on 22 September 2026 does. The closest is Landbase, which charges per verified data point rather than per meeting and publishes the rates: 1 credit at $0.033 for a verified email and 10 credits at $0.33 for a verified mobile, with misses never charged. See the Landbase pricing page for the full action-by-action rate table.
What is an AI-researched contact?
It is the vendor term for a net-new person the system finds, qualifies and enriches for you in a month. AiSDR defines it on its own pricing page as the leads actually added to your campaigns, drawn from a much larger pool of raw data. Note that the same page uses contacts in the plan specifications and messages in the rollover FAQ, so ask which noun your contract uses.
Are these prices in Australian dollars?
Almost certainly not. Of the seven pages that publish a figure, four show a bare dollar sign with no currency code beside the price, two declare USD only inside the page structured data, and one labels a column USD equivalent. None of the nine pages publishes an AUD price. At the Reserve Bank of Australia published rate of 0.7123 US dollars to 1 Australian dollar on 22 September 2026, a US$3,750 monthly plan is A$5,264.64 before card fees, and GST is a separate question that none of the nine pages addresses.
What does the mailbox infrastructure cost on top of a per-message plan?
At 2,000 contacts a month, between $72.92 and $145.83 a month, using the mailbox-to-contact ratio AiSDR provisions across its own tiers and the rates Smartlead publishes for domains and mailboxes. That is 187% to 374% on top of a $39 plan, which is why per-message plans look cheaper than they bill.
Where every figure on this page comes from
| Figure | Who published it | Link | Date read |
|---|---|---|---|
| $250 / $900 / $2,500 monthly and $2,400 / $8,640 / $24,000 annual; 200 / 800 / 2,500 AI-researched contacts; 1 / 2 / 6 domains and 3 / 6 / 18 mailboxes; 1 / 5 / 20 LinkedIn accounts; +$149/campaign and +$2,500/mo managed service; 1-3 meetings per 100 contacts; 30-day warmup and ~6 weeks to strongest results; message rollover; definition of an AI-researched contact | AiSDR | aisdr.com/pricing | 22 Sep 2026 |
| “Starting at $3,750 / mo” billed annually; 2,000 / 5,000 / 10,000+ New Prospects; up to 5 / 10 / unlimited End Users; “We charge per lead, not per send… three touchpoints or thirty”; “$36,000 per year on the Growth plan”; managed Gmail mailboxes with domain setup, warmup, inbox rotation and monitoring; “$8,000 to $12,000 per month” fully loaded SDR; 2-week and 4-week onboarding | 11x | 11x.ai/products/alice/pricing | 22 Sep 2026 |
| “~2,500 leads contacted/mo” and “~6,000”; “Pricing scoped on your plan”; plans “sized to your lead volume, mailboxes, and dialer seats”; AI dialer add-on charged per seat | Artisan | artisan.co/pricing | 22 Sep 2026 |
| $94 Starter / $194 Scale / $555 Agency; 5,000 / 100,000 / 500,000 emails monthly; 1,000 / 25,000 / 100,000 uploaded contacts; 1,500 / 5,000 / 10,000 credits; 10% annual discount; "Database of 450M+ B2B Leads" bundled into the headline price; unlimited email accounts and warmup on every tier | Instantly | instantly.ai/pricing | 22 Sep 2026 |
| $39 Base / $94 Pro / $174 Unlimited Smart / $379 Unlimited Prime; 6,000 / 90,000 / 150,000 / 500,000 email sends; 2,000 / 30,000 / unlimited contacts; 2,000 / 30,000 / 50,000 / 170,000 verified prospect emails; eight SmartSenders combinations at $3.99–$9/mailbox/month and $13–$19/domain/year, of which the Google provider is $13/domain/year and $4.50/mailbox/month; USD in structured data | Smartlead | smartlead.ai/pricing | 22 Sep 2026 |
| Starter $50 per month billed annually with 15,000 monthly contacts and 75,000 monthly emails, the only tier with a published volume cap; Growth $70 per user/month; Plus $99 per user/month with 1,000 minutes and 4,000 credits; Parallel and Power Dialer add-on $45 per user/month; USD in structured data | Klenty | klenty.com pricing | 22 Sep 2026 |
| Free $0 with 250 one-off credits; Pro $49/mo with 5,000 credits; credits do not roll over; what uses credits, with no per-action rate published | Regie.ai | regie.ai/pricing | 22 Sep 2026 |
| $499 / $1,999 / $4,999 per month for 15,000 / 75,000 / 200,000 credits at $0.033 / $0.0267 / $0.0250; 1 credit per verified email, 10 per verified mobile, 0.2 for online AI qualification, search free, “$0, never charged” for a miss; “USD equivalent” | Landbase | landbase.com/pricing | 22 Sep 2026 |
| Premier, Enterprise and Ultimate tiers for Piper with no price and no unit published | Qualified | qualified.com/pricing | 22 Sep 2026 |
| 0.7123 US dollars to 1 Australian dollar, 4.00 pm Eastern Australian time, 22 September 2026 | Reserve Bank of Australia | RBA exchange rate feed | 22 Sep 2026 |
| Cost per contact, per message, per meeting; the 15-30 mailbox and 5-10 domain estimates; $72.92-$145.83 infrastructure; the $3,711 spread between the cheapest and dearest worked-example rows; the $2,039-$3,039 loaded cost of the Smartlead route; A$ conversions; the 2,500-contact published-price ceiling | Zian AI, arithmetic on the published inputs in the rows above | This page | 22 Sep 2026 |
| 50,769+ qualified sales appointments set; 40+ meetings a week for many teams; around 420,000 data points across more than 10,000 leads a day; outbound since 2017 | Zian AI, first-party measurement of our own campaigns | zian.ai | 22 Sep 2026 |