How much does an AI employee cost for a small business? $15.60 to $3,750

Updated November 11, 2026.

How much does an AI employee cost for a small business?

On the vendor pages read November 11, 2026, a small business pays $15.60 a month for Sintra’s yearly card (250 credits, 12 helpers), $24 a month for Marblism’s yearly base (50 metered hours), or $29.99 per active user for Lindy (3,000 credits), and it pays $0.99 per outcome for Intercom Fin or $1.50 to $2.00 per automated resolution for Zendesk. The outbound product that prints a price starts far higher: 11x lists Alice Growth at $3,750 a month, billed annually, while the FAQ on that same page says the year starts at $36,000.

Those are list prices, read that day. An AI employee here means an agent sold as a role. Artisan’s pricing page prints no dollar. A token bill for a model you call yourself is a different meter, on the AI agent cost calculator.

What the comparison table is actually comparing

Every row is an agent with a role name on it. The role is the label. The pricing model is the bill. A seat that includes “unlimited team members” can still die at 250 credits. A $0.99 outcome can include the moment the customer asks for a person. Read the limit column before the entry price.

Seat prices for a shared ChatGPT or Claude workspace, which are a different product from a named AI employee, are on Best AI agent for small business. The credit-by-credit Agentforce and Copilot Studio reading, checked the day before this page, is Agentforce vs Copilot Studio pricing. The $0.10, $2, $0.04, and 141-credit figures above were on the vendor pages again on November 11.

Which meter are you buying?

Four meters showed up on those pages. They do not convert into each other.

Per seat, with a pool. Sintra sells one workspace price and says team members are included. Lindy bills every active user, then pools the credits. Relevance bills the organization, not each agent. Motion bills the seat and attaches a credit allowance, and it does not sell the role name this query is shopping for.

Per metered hour. Marblism’s help article, read the same day, defines an hour as “an hour of work the agents save you,” then publishes fixed weights: 20 seconds to sort an email, 5 minutes to draft one, 1 minute to contact a lead, 10 minutes to handle a call, 1 hour to write a blog post. Chatting, configuring, and approving are free of that meter. The person’s time is not free. The article says the base plan covers roughly any one of its example workloads, not all of them at once. One of those examples is 80 to 100 drafted replies, not an unlimited inbox.

Per resolution. Fin’s $0.99 is once per conversation, and the definition has three triggers joined by “or”: the customer confirms, the customer does not ask for more help, or Fin completes a Procedure, including a handoff. Zendesk’s $1.50 and $2.00 apply only when the agent finishes the request without a human. Salesforce prints both shapes: $0.10 for one standard action at list price (20 credits times $500 per 100,000 credits) and $2 for a conversation or a Help Agent Resolution.

Per lead, on a contract. 11x says Alice is priced per lead, not per send, so three touches and thirty cost the same. The Growth card and the FAQ do not name the same year. $3,750 times 12 is $45,000. The FAQ says $36,000. That is a $9,000 gap on one page. Ask which number is the order form. Artisan will not show you a number until a demo.

Where the sticker stops being the bill

Credit burn. Lindy’s everyday band is 2 to 250 credits. At 2 credits, 400 drafts are 800 credits and fit inside one $29.99 seat. At 250 credits, 400 drafts are 100,000 credits. The seat includes 3,000, so 97,000 are top-ups at $10 per 1,000, which is $970, plus the seat, $999.99. Same product, same inbox, about 33 times the money. The page does not say which point in the band a reply draft hits.

Model cost, passed through. Relevance says vendor credits cover model and tool use “at wholesale, with no markup,” and that bringing your own API keys bypasses them. The plan text says Pro includes $20 of vendor credits a month. The feature table says 10,000 vendor credits a month. The top-up rate is $20 per 10,000, so $20 buys 10,000 if you divide. Extra Actions are a second meter, $80 per 1,000, and an Action is a tool call. Copilot Studio is explicit about the second meter: a reasoning model bills 10 credits per 1,000 tokens on top of the feature rate. Microsoft’s illustrative follow-up, on Claude Opus 4.7, is 14,100 billed tokens and 141 credits before the feature rates. At the pack price that is $1.128 for the token line alone. The page says the token counts are illustrative.

The outcome definition. A quiet customer is a bill on Fin. A handoff can be a bill on Fin. A handoff is how you avoid the resolution charge on Zendesk, and you still pay the human seat. Salesforce will not let Flex Credits and conversation pricing share an org, so you pick one meter for the whole company.

What happens at zero. Lindy pauses credit-using actions. Marblism’s help article says scheduled work is cancelled, the phone line pauses, and chat gets an out-of-office reply. Zendesk’s pay-as-you-go line is there so the resolutions continue and the invoice grows. Copilot Studio’s licensing guide says pack credits do not roll over, and pay-as-you-go starts after the pack is exhausted.

Setup and review. 11x says there is no setup fee and that Growth onboarding is two weeks. Intercom says Fin on an existing helpdesk can be set up in under an hour, and still quotes a minimum commitment. Lindy’s page says anything with outside impact waits for approval: a send, a ticket update, a post. Marblism’s hour meter does not charge you for approving. Your calendar does. That approval is a human in the loop at an approval gate. It is the line that keeps a wrong send from becoming the company’s send.

Two pages that disagree. Marblism’s pricing FAQ offers flexible top-ups. The help article says adding hours means a bigger plan and that there is no one-off top-up. Sintra’s cards put $15.60 on the yearly plan, and the FAQ says the price starts at $48.50. Use the order form, not the friendlier of the two sentences.

What a 400-email month costs at these prices

This is an example, not a benchmark. A five-person shop handles 400 customer emails a month that need a reply, about 20 on a business day. A person spends 6 minutes on each draft. That is 40 hours.

The wage is the BLS median for customer service representatives in May 2025: $21.53 an hour, $44,770 a year, from the Occupational Outlook Handbook read November 11, 2026. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $15.27. The highest 10 percent earned more than $30.57. The figure is a wage. It excludes benefits, payroll tax, software, and the owner’s own hour.

Forty hours at $21.53 is $861.20. At $15.27 it is $610.80. At $30.57 it is $1,222.80.

Marblism’s published weights, applied to the same 400 emails: sorting is 20 seconds each, which is 2 hours, 13 minutes, and 20 seconds, and drafting is 5 minutes each, which is 33 hours and 20 minutes. Together that is 35 hours, 33 minutes, and 20 seconds of their meter. The 50-hour base plan holds it and leaves 14 hours, 26 minutes, and 40 seconds, if this inbox is the only metered work. Their own “what the base plan covers” example is 80 to 100 drafts, not 400. The weights still put 400 under the cap. Twelve times $24 is $288 for the year. Spread across these 400 emails, the plan is $0.06 an email, and that $0.06 is carrying the hours the plan does not use. One more draft, while you are under 50 hours, adds $0 of subscription. The 51st hour is a plan change, not a dime.

The human draft is 6/60 times $21.53, $2.153. The subscription is cheaper on this arithmetic only while a person does not re-read the draft for the whole six minutes.

Put 90 seconds of review on each draft. That is 10 hours, $215.30 at the median, plus the $24 plan, $239.30. Against $861.20 of wage, the month is ahead by $621.90, before benefits, and only if every draft is usable. Put the full six minutes back and the plan saves no labor. It adds $24.

Run that case here: 400 emails, 6 minutes, $21.53, 90 seconds of review, $24 platform. The per-task agent price is $0 in that link because the $24 line is the whole plan. The calculator does not know Marblism’s hour weights. A support queue with a different shape is Does a support-triage agent pay back?. That page’s $0.04 is an assumption, not a vendor price.

Lindy does not give you a $0.06. It gives you a band. The cheap end of the band is one seat, $29.99. The expensive end, at 250 credits a draft, is $999.99 for the month. Fin, if all 400 conversations bill, is 400 times $0.99, $396, plus whichever Essential seat the checkout actually charges, $19 or $29. Zendesk pay-as-you-go on all 400 is $800 before the human seat, and the included 5 or 10 resolutions barely move it.

Outbound is a different job. 11x’s FAQ says a fully loaded SDR costs $8,000 to $12,000 a month. That sentence is 11x’s, not a survey. The same BLS handbook, in its related-occupations table, lists wholesale and manufacturing sales representatives at a 2025 median pay of $76,460 a year. Dividing by 12 is $6,372 a month of wages, not a loaded cost, and the occupation is not titled SDR. Alice Growth’s card, $3,750 a month, sits under both of those figures and buys a cap of 2,000 new prospects. A five-person shop that sends a few dozen cold emails is paying for a floor it will not use. Artisan will not tell you the floor until you book a demo.

What this means for a five-person shop

Buy the meter that matches a job you can count. A named helper at $15.60 is a bargain when 250 credits cover the drafts you actually send, and a toy when a video or a website build eats the month. The page does not say which. Marblism’s $24 plan pays back on the inbox above when review stays near 90 seconds and the other six roles stay quiet. It stops paying back when you are the reviewer and your hour is worth more than $21.53, or when review takes as long as writing.

Skip the outbound contract until you have the prospect volume in the plan. $3,750 a month is a salary line. $36,000 a year, the other number on 11x’s page, is still a salary line. A shop without 2,000 new prospects a month is renting a cap.

Before you connect the inbox, check four things:

1. Evals. A set of your own tickets, with a written pass rule, run before the agent is allowed to send. Relevance keeps Agent Evaluations on the custom plan. The $19 plan does not include them. Bring your own. The method is a behavioral evaluation.
2. Approval gates. Lindy waits on sends. Make every other product wait too. A draft in a folder is a safe default. A send is a different grant.
3. Handoff. Decide the sentence that pulls a human in, and read whether that sentence is billed. Fin can charge it. Zendesk uses it to avoid the resolution charge and then you pay the person.
4. Data access. Lindy’s page lists MCP. Relevance lists custom APIs, and Salesforce, Snowflake, and Zendesk triggers on Enterprise. A tool you did not connect is a tool the agent should not have. The harness is the loop, the permissions, and the stop. The role name is not.

The AI agent ROI calculator will take your task count, your minutes, and your wage. It will not discover the credit band for you. If the band is unpublished, the sticker is not a budget.

Frequently asked questions

What is an AI employee?

A label for an agent given a recurring job. Vendors also say digital worker. The software uses tools and returns work for a person to review. It is not on payroll, and a mistake is still the company’s. The longer definition is What is an AI employee?.

Are AI employees worth it for a small business?

When the work is repetitive, countable, and still checked by a person. The 400-email example is $861.20 of median wage and $239.30 with Marblism’s $24 plan plus 90 seconds of review. It is worth nothing off the labor line if the review takes the original six minutes. An outbound agent at $3,750 a month is worth it only if you will use the 2,000-prospect cap. Best AI agent for small business compares shared workspaces, which are a different purchase.

What is the difference between an AI employee and an AI agent?

The agent is the system. The employee is the pitch. You are still paying for tool use, context, and a stop rule. A chatbot that only answers in the thread is neither.

How does an AI employee compare with a virtual assistant on cost?

The assistant is a person at a wage. At the May 2025 customer-service median, 40 hours is $861.20 before benefits. Sintra at $15.60 a month is the lower sticker and an unknown credit burn. Marblism at $24 publishes the weights, so you can see the cap before you buy. A person does not run out of credits at email 401. A person also does not work the hour for $0.06.

What is the cheapest AI employee?

Sintra’s yearly card, $15.60 a month, is the lowest recurring price on the pages read November 11, 2026. Marblism is $24 yearly for a defined hour pool. Lindy’s paid seat is $29.99 after $50 of credits that last seven days. Artisan has no public price. Motion’s pricing page does not offer an AI Employees tier.

Do unused credits roll over?

Lindy’s monthly credits reset. Top-ups stay until you use them. Marblism’s hours reset, including on a yearly plan. Relevance’s vendor credits roll over while you remain subscribed, and the Action allowance resets. Salesforce Flex Credits die at the end of the term. Copilot Credit packs die at the end of the month.

Does a handoff to a human still cost money?

On Fin, it can. Completing a Procedure, including a handoff, is one of the three ways Intercom counts an outcome, and you pay once for the conversation. On Zendesk, the automated-resolution charge applies when no human is escalated to. You then pay the agent seat for the person who takes the ticket. Read that sentence in the contract before you turn the agent on.