12 of 15 AI employee products print a price (Nov 12, 2026)

12 of 15. That is how many of these AI-employee pricing pages print a dollar on November 12, 2026. Artisan, Synthflow, and Truewind do not.

The other finding is the shape of the bill, not a single “AI employee salary.” Seven products print a fixed subscription. The lowest card on each, sorted, is $15.60, $24, $29.99, $33, $40, $65, and $79. The median is $33. That card is Phonely’s annual starter. It is not the price of a month you can cancel, and it is not the price of a resolution or a prospect.

AiSDR is $1.50 per person prospected, with no monthly fee. 11x Growth is $36,000 a year. Fill the 2,000-prospect cap and that year is also $1.50 a prospect. Contact 100 people and 11x is still $3,000 for the month. The jobs these meters buy, and where each job fails, are AI employee for a small business: 5 jobs (Nov 2026). The November 11 reading of a different mix is How much does an AI employee cost for a small business?. A token bill for a model you call yourself is the AI agent cost calculator. It does not price these seats.

What each of the fifteen pages actually prints

Three vendors per job. The third outbound, phone, and bookkeeping rows are the pages that do not print a dollar. Leaving them out would make “everyone publishes a price” true by selection.

Two more pages were fetched and left out of the fifteen so the set stayed at three per job. Frontdesk is $99 a month, or $79 billed annually, for 200 voice minutes. Voice overage is 25 credits a minute, and the page says 1 credit is $0.01, so the overage minute is $0.25. Pilot Essentials is $99 a month, up to $100,000 in monthly expenses, and the card says AI categorizes, reconciles, and closes monthly. Pilot Core rendered as $0 in the HTML. That is not a price.

The $33 median is seven cards, not fifteen bills

Per-outcome, per-person, and “starts at” prices do not go into a monthly median. Tidio’s $32.50 is a floor for 50 conversations, not a fixed card with a single included bundle you can point at. 11x’s $36,000 is a year. Fin’s $0.99 is a conversation. Folding them into one median would invent a unit.

The seven fixed cards, lowest figure printed:

Sorted lowest cards: $15.60, $24, $29.99, $33, $40, $65, $79. Seven values, so the median is the fourth, $33.

Swap Sintra’s yearly card for the FAQ’s $48.50 and the list is $24, $29.99, $33, $40, $48.50, $65, $79. The median becomes $40. The $33 result depends on treating the promotional yearly card as the price.

The six pages that print a distinct month-to-month dollar, Kick excluded, sort to $29.99, $44, $48.50, $50, $65, $79. The median of six is the mean of $48.50 and $50, which is $49.25. Add 11x as $3,000 a month ($36,000 divided by 12) onto the seven lowest cards and the eight-value median is the mean of $33 and $40, which is $36.50. The contract does not move the middle by much. It changes the left tail, not the buyer who only has 100 prospects.

Where a wage has a number, and where it does not

BLS wages below are May 2025 medians, read November 12, 2026. They exclude benefits, payroll tax, and software. Eighty hours is four weeks of 20 hours. It is a part-time line this page defined so the plans can be set next to a wage. It is not a measured shop.

Goodcall’s pricing page says that at four-minute calls, Starter works out to about 13¢ a minute. The page also says Starter is about 150 calls. One hundred and fifty calls times four minutes is 600 minutes, and $79 / 600 is $0.132. The billed unit is still $0.79 per unique customer ($79 / 100). A caller who phones five times is one customer. A four-minute call at the receptionist wage is 4 × $0.3045 = $1.22. Goodcall’s $0.79 is under that only if you accept one customer as the unit and you do not add a person who has to fix the booking.

Phonely’s minute is the awkward one. $0.25 is 82% of a minute of median receptionist wages ($0.25 / $0.3045). The savings are not “AI minutes are cheap.” The savings are the hours nobody sits by the phone, and the concurrent calls the Starter card marks unlimited. If the comparison table’s 250 included minutes is the real pool, $50 / 250 is $0.20, and the card’s 200 minutes are the number that makes the included minute equal the overage. This note does not resolve the contradiction. A buyer should read the checkout.

HubSpot’s voice price, on the customer-agent page, is $0.50 a minute, which is above the $0.3045 wage minute. Messaging is $0.50 a resolution, and only on Professional or Enterprise. The seat under that resolution is not on the page, so it is not in the median.

Two SDRs print $1.50. Only one of them lets you stop

11x’s FAQ says the company charges per lead, not per send, and that Growth starts at $36,000 a year. Divide the year by 12 and the floor is $3,000 a month. Divide $36,000 by 2,000 prospects times 12 months and the cap price is $1.50 a prospect. That is the same unit AiSDR prints on the door, and AiSDR does not require the year.

One hundred people in a month:

• AiSDR, at the printed rate: 100 × $1.50 = $150.
• 11x Growth, if you are on the floor: $3,000, whether those 100 people were the whole month.

The ratio is 20. It collapses only when you actually use the 2,000-prospect allowance. A shop that sends a few dozen cold emails is paying for a cap it will not touch. 11x also says a fully loaded SDR costs $8,000 to $12,000 a month. That sentence is 11x’s. The BLS related-occupation median for wholesale and manufacturing sales representatives is $76,460 a year, which is $6,371.67 a month of wages if you divide by 12, not a loaded SDR cost, and not this occupation’s job title.

AiSDR’s own page disagrees with itself about the smallest campaign. “Campaigns starting from $7.50” is five people at $1.50. “Campaigns start from as little as from $3” is on a later answer. Two people at $1.50 would be $3. The page does not say that. Treat $1.50 as the rate and $7.50 as the floor the FAQ is willing to repeat. Do not budget $3 until a checkout shows it.

The approval sentence is not on the $1.50 line. It is on the $149 managed-campaign add-on: you review and approve before anything sends. The default feature list says replies go out in 5–10 minutes or in co-pilot mode. Those are different grants. Artisan says you set the guardrails and does not show the price. A guardrail you cannot cost is not a budget.

On November 11 this site’s cost guide recorded an 11x Growth card of $3,750 a month beside an FAQ of $36,000. The HTML fetched November 12 at 07:50 UTC prints “Starting at $36,000 / yr” and the FAQ matches it. The $3,750 string is not in that file. Use $36,000 until a newer fetch says otherwise. The November 11 table remains a record of that day.

What this means if you are the buyer

Pay for a unit you can count, and read the sentence that defines the unit before you connect the tool.

A subscription under $80 a month is a real card for the phone (Goodcall, $79, month to month) and for the books (Digits $65, Kick $40). It buys categorization or call answering inside a cap. It does not buy a reviewer. Kick states the reviewer in the product: confirm the write before it hits the ledger. Digits states it as bill-pay approval and as an optional professional on verified financials. Truewind states the reviewer and withholds the price. If the close is the work you needed, the $40 card is the wrong object.

A support agent is cheap per ticket only inside the vendor’s definition. Fin’s $0.99 can be the moment the customer asks for a person. Zendesk’s $2.00 is the month you avoided that person, and at a full part-time queue of 6-minute tickets it sits within a few percent of the wage. HubSpot’s $0.50 is a resolution that survived 72 hours without a handoff, or a lead the agent qualified, and it assumes a Professional or Enterprise subscription this page did not price.

An outbound agent at $1.50 a person is a meter you can stop. The same $1.50 inside a $36,000 year is a hire. Do not sign the year to “try AI.” Artisan will not tell you which of those two you are buying until the demo.

Before any of them send, write the stop rule down. Lindy already waits on outside actions. The others need the same approval gate. The harness is that loop, the tools, the memory, and the stop. The job title on the invoice is not. A worked example against your own volume is the AI agent ROI calculator. It will not discover a credit band the vendor did not print.

Frequently asked questions

How many of these products publish a price?

Twelve of the fifteen pages fetched on November 12, 2026. The three without a dollar are Artisan, Synthflow, and Truewind. Each of those three still describes a human step. None of them lets you cost it.

Why is the median $33 and not $49?

They answer different questions. $33 is the middle of the seven lowest cards, including yearly rates. $49.25 is the middle of the six month-to-month prices that are printed as their own dollars. A buyer who can cancel this month should use the second figure and then read the cap, because Goodcall at $79 and Digits at $65 are both in that list and they buy different jobs.

Is $1.50 the price of an AI SDR?

It is AiSDR’s printed rate per person prospected, and it is 11x’s rate only if you divide the $36,000 year by a full 24,000 prospects. It is not Artisan’s price, because Artisan does not print one. It is not a wage.

Does a part-time hire still win on the phone?

On the wage minute, barely, for Phonely. $0.25 is close to $0.3045. The software wins when the alternative is a person sitting there for the empty hours, which is the $1,461.60 line, not the minute. It loses when someone has to redo the call, and when post-transfer minutes keep the meter running.

What should you ignore in a vendor’s competitor table?

Prices that vendor prints for other companies’ tools. AiSDR’s page lists “from” prices for products such as Clay and Outreach under “software you’ll no longer need.” Those figures were not checked on those companies’ own pages, so they are not in this dataset.