An AI SDR is software that does the repetitive half of sales development: finding prospects, researching them, writing the outreach and handling the first replies. Published 2026 pricing starts at $40 a month for sequencing tools and $250 a month for autonomous agents. Half the category will not tell you the price at all until you speak to sales.
The term covers two very different products. One is a sequencing and enrichment tool that makes a human sales rep faster. The other is an autonomous agent that runs outbound on its own and hands over a booked meeting. They share a label, differ by roughly ten times in price, and fail in completely different ways.
This page prices six of them against their own published rate cards, read in September 2026, and is direct about which ones publish nothing. We have been deploying conversational systems for Malaysian, Singapore and Hong Kong SMBs since 2019 and now deliver remotely for clients elsewhere, so the failure-mode section comes from deployments rather than from vendor marketing.
What an AI SDR Actually Does
A sales development representative finds potential customers, works out whether they are worth approaching, writes to them, handles the first few replies, and books a meeting for an account executive. An AI SDR automates some or all of that loop.
Four jobs sit inside it, and every tool on this page does a different subset:
(1) Sourcing. Pulling a list of companies and contacts that match your ideal customer profile, from a contact database or from live signals such as hiring activity or funding news.
(2) Research. Reading each prospect’s site, role and recent activity so the message can reference something real rather than a merge field.
(3) Writing and sending. Drafting the email or LinkedIn message, warming the sending domain, spacing the sends so they do not trip spam filters, and following up.
(4) Reply handling. Reading the response, classifying it, answering the easy objections and putting a meeting in the calendar.
Tools that stop at three are assistants. Tools that do all four call themselves autonomous, and that fourth job is where the price jumps and where most of the disappointment lives.
How We Sourced These Numbers
Every figure below was read off the vendor’s own published pricing page in September 2026, in the unit that vendor uses. Where a vendor publishes no numbers we rendered the live pricing page in a browser to confirm that before saying so, rather than inferring it from a homepage. Outbound tooling reprices often, so treat these as the published rate at a point in time. We take no affiliate commission from any tool listed.
The 6 Best AI SDR Tools in 2026
Ordered by published entry price, with the sales-led vendors last because you cannot compare what you cannot see.
1. Salesforge
BEST VALUE FOR EMAIL VOLUME
Salesforge splits the two products cleanly: cheap sequencing tiers for a human rep, and a separate autonomous agent priced ten times higher.
- Pro: $40 a month, 1,000 active contacts, 5,000 emails a month, 1 LinkedIn sender
- Growth: $80 a month, 10,000 active contacts, 50,000 emails, unlimited LinkedIn senders
- Agent Frank: $499 a month billed quarterly, the autonomous tier
- Annual: two months free, roughly 17 percent off
- Trial: 14 days, 50 contacts and 100 emails
At $80 for 50,000 emails a month this is the cheapest high-volume sending on the list by a wide margin.
2. Regie.ai
BEST FREE TIER
Regie.ai has the only genuinely usable free plan here and a single credit currency covering research, drafting, enrichment and dialing.
- Free: $0, 250 one-time credits, full workspace, single user, no card required
- Pro: $49 a month, 5,000 credits refreshed monthly, 17 percent off annually
- Enterprise: custom, adds team workspaces, shared agents, custom CRM sync, SOC 2
- Note: credits do not roll over, and failed enrichment is not charged
One currency across four jobs makes forecasting far easier than tools that meter contacts, emails and enrichment separately.
3. Clay
BEST FOR DATA AND ENRICHMENT
Clay is the research layer rather than the sender. It meters two separate currencies, actions and data credits, which is the detail that catches people out at renewal.
- Free: $0, 500 actions and 100 data credits a month, 200 rows per table
- Launch: from $167 a month, or from $54 a month billed annually, 15,000 actions and 3,000 data credits
- Growth: from $446 a month, or from $185 annually, 40,000 actions and 6,000 data credits
- Enterprise: custom volume
- Annual saving: 10 percent, with expansion tiers to 200,000 actions a month
The gap between $167 monthly and $54 annually on the same tier is the largest annual discount in this comparison, and worth modelling before you commit either way.
4. AiSDR
BEST PUBLISHED AUTONOMOUS PRICING
AiSDR is the only fully autonomous agent here that publishes its numbers, which makes it the reference point for what this category actually costs.
- Solo: $250 a month, 200 AI-researched contacts, 1 user, 3 mailboxes, month to month
- Explore: $900 a month, 800 contacts, unlimited users, 6 mailboxes, quarterly commitment
- Scale: $2,500 a month, 2,500 contacts, 18 mailboxes, 20 LinkedIn accounts
- Annual: 20 percent off, bringing Solo to $2,400 a year and Scale to $24,000
- Trial: none offered
That works out at roughly $1.25 per researched contact on Solo and $1.00 on Scale. Hold that figure next to your cost per meeting before deciding anything.
5. Artisan (Ava)
BEST WHITE-GLOVE ROLLOUT
Artisan publishes tiers but no prices. We rendered the live pricing page to confirm that rather than assume it: all three tiers read “Pricing scoped on your plan” with a “Talk to sales” button.
- Team: around 2,500 leads contacted a month, price on application
- Scale: around 6,000 leads a month, adds a dedicated CSM and CRM setup
- Enterprise: custom, adds a forward-deployed strategist and audit logs
- Included on all tiers: 250M+ verified B2B contacts, Salesforce and HubSpot sync, CSM support
- Security: SOC 2 Type II, SSO and SAML
The lead-volume tiers are useful even without prices: roughly 2,500 and 6,000 contacts a month brackets it against AiSDR’s published $900 and $2,500 tiers.
6. 11x (Alice)
ENTERPRISE, SALES-LED ONLY
11x positions Alice as a digital worker rather than a tool. We rendered the site and searched its navigation: there is no pricing page at all.
- Pricing: not published, and no pricing page exists in the site navigation
- Positioning: digital workers sold against headcount rather than against software
- Implication: expect an annual contract and a procurement conversation
Being sold against a salary rather than against a subscription is a deliberate framing. It tends to mean the number starts where a junior SDR’s total cost sits.
AI SDR Tools Compared
Every AI SDR tool above, side by side. All figures as published in September 2026.
| Tool | Entry price | What that buys | Autonomous? | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Salesforge | $40/mo | 5,000 emails, 1,000 contacts | At $499/mo tier | High email volume, low budget |
| Regie.ai | Free, then $49/mo | 5,000 credits/mo | Partly | Testing before committing |
| Clay | Free, then $54-167/mo | 15,000 actions, 3,000 credits | No, research layer | Enrichment under another tool |
| AiSDR | $250/mo | 200 researched contacts | Yes | Transparent autonomous outbound |
| Artisan | Not published | ~2,500 leads/mo on entry tier | Yes | White-glove enterprise rollout |
| 11x | Not published | No pricing page exists | Yes | Replacing headcount |
?How many contacts does one meeting cost you today?
Take last quarter’s outbound: contacts approached, divided by meetings booked. If 200 contacts produce a meeting, AiSDR’s Solo tier at $250 for 200 researched contacts costs roughly $250 a meeting, and you can judge that against your average deal value in one step. If you do not know the ratio, no tool on this page can be evaluated, because every one of them is priced in contacts, credits or emails rather than in outcomes. Measure the ratio first, for one month, by hand if necessary.
What Goes Wrong With AI SDRs in Production
The demo is a well-researched email to a perfect-fit prospect. Real outbound is not that. Five failures account for most of the abandoned deployments.
(1) Domain reputation damage. The fastest way to destroy a sending domain is to let an autonomous agent scale volume before the domain is warmed. The damage lands on your main domain if you did not set up separate sending domains, and it is slow and expensive to undo.
(2) Research that reads like research. An agent that opens with a paraphrase of the prospect’s own about page signals automation immediately. Good outbound references something the prospect would be surprised you noticed. Most tools reference something they would expect any scraper to find.
(3) Reply handling that traps the prospect. Autonomous reply handling is the selling point and the biggest risk. A prospect who asks a specific question and receives a plausible non-answer twice will not ask a third time. Set a rule that hands over to a human after one failed clarification, not three.
(4) Contact data decay. B2B contact data goes stale at roughly 2 to 3 percent a month through job changes alone. A tool billing you per researched contact is billing you for that decay unless it verifies at send time.
(5) Volume masking a positioning problem. The most common outcome we are asked to rescue is not a broken agent. It is a working agent proving, at ten times the previous rate, that the offer does not land. That is useful information delivered expensively.
Buy a Tool, or Have the System Built
For most teams one of the six above is the right answer, and you should start there. Two situations change it.
Buy a tool. Correct when your motion is email and LinkedIn, your CRM is Salesforce or HubSpot, and your data lives somewhere these tools already connect to. Start on a free tier or the $40 to $49 tiers, and prove the contacts-per-meeting ratio before spending more.
Have the system built. Correct when outbound has to read from or write to systems with no off-the-shelf connector, when it must operate across languages in the same sequence, or when a wrong claim in an outbound message carries a regulatory consequence.
The Crunch has been deploying conversational systems for Malaysian, Singapore and Hong Kong SMBs across healthcare, retail, property and education since 2019, with trilingual support across English, Bahasa Malaysia, Mandarin and Cantonese, and a 30-day deployment timeline for mid-tier scope. We deliver remotely for clients outside the region. Engagements start from USD 1,500 to USD 2,000.
We are worth a conversation when the outbound system has to integrate with something awkward or operate across languages. Below that, a subscription from the table above is cheaper and faster and you should take it. For the voice side of the same problem see our guide to the AI voice agent stack; for inbound rather than outbound see AI customer service agents; for the broader sales picture see AI agents for sales; and for wider cost context see AI agent pricing. When you are ready to scope something, request a proposal.
01What is an AI SDR?+
An AI SDR is software that automates the repetitive parts of sales development: sourcing prospects, researching them, writing outreach and handling the first replies.
(1) It builds a list matching your ideal customer profile from a contact database or live signals.
(2) It researches each prospect so the message references something specific.
(3) It writes and sends across email and LinkedIn, managing domain warming and follow-ups.
(4) The autonomous tools also read replies, answer easy objections and book the meeting.
Tools doing only the first three are assistants for a human rep. Tools doing all four cost roughly ten times more.
02How much does an AI SDR cost?+
Published 2026 pricing splits sharply between assistant tools and autonomous agents.
(1) Assistant tier: Salesforge from $40 a month, Regie.ai from $49, Clay from $54 billed annually.
(2) Autonomous tier: AiSDR from $250 a month for 200 researched contacts, rising to $2,500 for 2,500 contacts.
(3) Sales-led: Artisan and 11x publish no pricing at all.
On AiSDR’s published tiers the effective rate is about $1.00 to $1.25 per researched contact, which is the most useful number in the category for comparison.
03Can an AI SDR replace a human SDR?+
It can replace the sourcing, researching and first-touch writing, which is most of the hours. It does not replace judgement on an ambiguous reply, or the relationship work that turns a lukewarm prospect into a meeting.
The teams getting the most from these tools keep a human on reply handling and hand the machine everything upstream of it. The teams getting the least fully automate the reply and lose the prospects who asked a real question.
04Do AI SDR emails land in spam?+
They can, and the cause is almost always volume rather than content. Scaling an autonomous agent before the sending domains are warmed is the fastest route to a damaged sender reputation.
(1) Use separate sending domains, never your primary company domain.
(2) Warm each mailbox gradually before letting the agent scale.
(3) Watch the mailbox count in your plan, since that is the real volume ceiling rather than the email allowance.
05Which AI SDR tool is cheapest?+
Regie.ai and Clay both have genuinely free tiers, so the cheapest way to start is $0. On paid plans Salesforge at $40 a month is the lowest entry point, and at $80 for 50,000 emails a month it is the cheapest high-volume sending in this comparison.
For autonomous outbound, AiSDR at $250 a month is the cheapest published option, because the two cheaper-sounding alternatives do not publish prices at all.
06Why do some AI SDR vendors hide their pricing?+
Because they are selling against a salary rather than against a subscription. A tool compared to other tools has to justify $250 against $40. A digital worker compared to a junior SDR’s total cost has far more room.
That framing is not dishonest, but it does mean you cannot shortlist those vendors without committing to a sales call. If you are evaluating six options in an afternoon, the ones publishing numbers are the ones you can actually compare.
07How long before an AI SDR produces meetings?+
Plan for six to eight weeks before the numbers mean anything, and do not judge it earlier.
(1) Weeks 1 to 2: domain and mailbox warming, during which volume is deliberately low.
(2) Weeks 3 to 4: first sequences at partial volume, with messaging still being tuned.
(3) Weeks 5 to 8: full volume and a large enough sample to calculate contacts per meeting.
Judging at two weeks measures your domain warming, not your offer.
08Does an AI SDR work for small businesses?+
It works when the deal value justifies the cost per contact and the buyer is reachable by email or LinkedIn. At roughly $1.00 to $1.25 per researched contact, a business with a $500 deal value needs an unusually good conversion rate to break even.
Businesses selling into local markets, or where buyers are reached by phone and messaging rather than email, usually do better with inbound capture and call handling than with outbound automation.
09What data does an AI SDR need to work?+
A defined ideal customer profile, a CRM it can read and write, and verified contact data. The third is where most budgets quietly go.
B2B contact data decays at roughly 2 to 3 percent a month through job changes alone. A tool that bills per researched contact is billing you for that decay unless it verifies at send time, which is why enrichment layers such as Clay often sit underneath the sending tool rather than being replaced by it.
10How do I measure whether an AI SDR is working?+
Measure meetings, not activity. Emails sent and open rates tell you almost nothing about whether the system is producing pipeline.
(1) Contacts approached per meeting booked, which is the ratio every tool’s pricing ultimately converts into.
(2) Meeting-to-opportunity rate, to check the agent is booking the right people rather than anyone who will take a call.
(3) Reply sentiment, tracked separately from reply rate, because a rising reply rate made of annoyed responses is a warning.
(4) Sender reputation on each domain, checked weekly rather than after deliverability collapses.
