AI SDR Pricing in 2026 and Why the Ranges Never Line Up
Published AI SDR prices run from $250 to $5,000 a month, but the units differ. Here is what contacts, seats and meetings pricing each assume about your team.
How much does an AI SDR actually cost in 2026?
Published prices run from $250 a month at the entry end to $5,000 a month per license at the top. AiSDR publishes $250 a month with cancel-anytime terms, and the wider category sits between roughly $250 and $5,000 monthly depending on model and volume. Annualised, that is $3,000 to $60,000.
The spread comes from what the vendor is counting. Four numbers from four different sources, all published in the last year:
Those ranges overlap because the same $1,500 buys 5,000 contacts at one vendor, three seats at another, and an unspecified number of meetings at a third.
Why do so few AI SDR vendors publish a price?
Because the unit they sell is not standard. A per-seat vendor can post a number because a seat is a seat. A vendor charging on contacts, sending accounts or booked meetings has to know your list size and target before the number means anything. Of five vendors one comparison checked, only two published pricing at all.
Gelee is in the unpublished group. There is no self-serve signup and pricing is shared on a demo call. That is a genuine annoyance if you are comparing six tools on a Tuesday afternoon and want to rule things out fast. If you want a number on a page before you speak to anyone, AiSDR and Apollo will give you one today and Gelee will not.
What the call is actually for: how many sender accounts, how many invites a day each one can safely send, and whether the replies come back to your inbox or get handled for you.
What does per seat pricing assume about you?
That you have people. A seat is a licence for a human to log in, write copy and answer replies, so the price only makes sense if the humans exist. Apollo runs this way and starts at a free tier. Per seat is the cheapest sticker in the category and the most expensive once you count hours.
Work it through for one founder. A $99 seat plus 500 invites a month is roughly 25 invites a day. At a 20 to 30% accept rate that is 100 to 150 new connections, and at a 12 to 18% first-message reply rate, 12 to 27 conversations to hold. Say 20 hours a month across writing, sending and replying. At $100 an hour that is $2,000 on top of the $99.
If you already have two SDRs on payroll, per seat is the right shape and the arithmetic flips. The seat makes them faster at work they were doing anyway. Data seats are a separate line, and we compared the two most common in Apollo vs LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
What does per contact or per volume pricing assume?
That your bottleneck is list size. AiSDR prices from $250 to $2,500 a month by contact volume, which reads as a bet that you have a big addressable market and the constraint is how many of them you can touch. It says nothing about what happens after someone replies.
Volume pricing punishes bad targeting twice. You pay for the contact, then you pay again in the reply rate, because a loose list drops your accept rate below the 20 to 30% band and your first messages land on people who were never buying.
Founders with a 400-account ICP get the worst of this model. You will never use the tier you are on. If your list is the problem rather than the sending, the money belongs upstream in enrichment, and we go through the options in Clay alternatives and where Gelee fits downstream.
What does per meeting pricing assume about you?
That the vendor writes the definition of a meeting. Per meeting looks like the safest model because you only pay for outcomes, and it is the model where the outcome is defined by the party being paid. No-shows, unqualified attendees and "discovery calls" with someone three levels below the buyer all count somewhere.
Reverse the published numbers and you get a benchmark to hold any per meeting quote against. At $2,000 a month for 40 to 60 qualified opportunities, that is $33 to $50 each. At $500 a month it is $8 to $12.
Now run it on LinkedIn volume. 500 invites a month at a 3 to 5% overall meeting rate is 15 to 25 meetings. A $1,500 a month tool that delivers that is $60 to $100 per meeting. If a per meeting vendor quotes you $150 and your deal size is $3,000, you are paying 5% of revenue for the first conversation, before the call happens.
What does per reply pricing assume?
That replies are where your cost sits, which for a founder doing this alone is correct. The reply is the part that cannot be scheduled. Someone asks about pricing at 11pm on a Thursday and the answer is worth more that night than on Monday.
The volume is smaller than people expect. From 500 invites, 100 to 150 accepts, 12 to 18% reply to the first message and 5 to 8% to a follow-up. So 20 to 35 threads a month, each running three to six messages. That is not a full-time job. It is a job that has to happen every day, which is a different problem.
| Pricing model | Published range | What it assumes about you | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Per seat | Free tier upward, per user | You have people to fill the seats | Teams with 2+ SDRs already hired |
| Per contact | $250 to $2,500/mo | Your market is large and your targeting is tight | Big TAM, high-volume outbound |
| Per meeting | $500 to $2,000/mo for 40 to 60 opportunities | You accept the vendor's definition of qualified | Teams that can take 40+ calls a month |
| Per reply / done-for-you | Custom | Your bottleneck is conversation handling, not sending | Founders and small teams with no SDR |
| Gelee | Custom | LinkedIn is your channel and nobody has time to answer DMs | Solo founders, agency owners, consultants |
Is an AI SDR cheaper than a human SDR?
On raw cost, usually. A fully loaded human SDR runs about $84,000 a year against $24,000 to $48,000 for an AI SDR, and an in-house rep lands between $80,000 and $110,000 all in. The human also takes about three months to ramp and stays around eighteen.
Where it stops being cheaper: enterprise deals with six stakeholders and a $150,000 ACV. AI SDR platforms are documented as winning on repeatable, high-volume, sub-$150,000-ACV work. Above that, the first conversation is worth enough that a person should have it.
The two also do not cancel out. A human SDR who joins a team already running 500 invites a month starts on warm replies instead of a cold list.
What does no pricing page charge you for?
Your profile, your list and your offer. Every price above assumes those three are already working, and the reply rate benchmarks quoted anywhere in this category collapse if they are not. A weak headline drops accepts below 20% and no pricing model refunds that.
Three things worth fixing before you spend $250 a month on sending:
On a new account, sending caps at 5 to 10 invites a day while you ramp, rising to 20 to 25 once warm. A tool priced for 5,000 contacts a month cannot spend that budget on one account.
Which model should you buy?
If you have two or more people running outreach, buy per seat and keep the humans. If your list is 10,000 accounts and your offer is proven, per contact volume pricing is the cheapest way to touch them. If it is you, alone, and the invites go out fine but the DMs sit unanswered for two days, buy the thing that answers the DMs.
Recruiters sit slightly differently, because candidate replies come in bursts after a role opens rather than steadily, and we covered that in can recruiters use Gelee.
Gelee is the wrong buy if your buyers are not on LinkedIn, if your product sells self-serve without anyone ever taking a call, or if you want to compare a price on a page tonight. Setup takes 15 minutes and pricing comes on the call.