In short
- 01"Published entry plans start at $250 a month, mid-tier agents run $900 to $2,500 a month, and the largest vendors are quote-only (vendor pricing pages, August 2026)."
- 02"Four models set the price: flat subscription, per seat, usage-based credits, and a hybrid flat tier gated on a contact allowance."
- 03"The 'AI costs 10 to 20% of a human' figure repeated across this category is attributed to Gartner but names no report, date or analyst. Gartner's actual sales prediction is that fewer than 40% of sellers will say agents improved productivity (Gartner, 28 July 2026)."
- 04"Most 'cost per meeting' figures here are really cost per reply. One LinkedIn identity at a safe pace yields about 10 to 15 replies a month, several steps upstream of a held meeting."
- 05"BeReach is priced per workspace, not per seat: Pro is 99 euros a month billed monthly, or 948 euros a year billed yearly."
Short answer: published AI SDR plans run from $250 a month to $2,500 a month before you reach the tiers that are quote-only. AiSDR lists Solo at $250 a month billed monthly, Explore at $900 a month billed quarterly and Scale at $2,500 a month billed quarterly, per its pricing page in August 2026. Artisan publishes no dollar figures at all, scoping its tiers by leads contacted per month instead.
That range is too wide to budget against, and the reason is that the vendors are not selling the same unit. One charges for the workspace, one for the person, one for the action, one for the contact. Until you know which unit you are buying, you cannot predict next quarter's invoice, and next quarter's invoice is the number that matters.
There is a second problem, and it is worse. Almost every pricing guide in this category settles the cost question by comparing an AI SDR to a human SDR using two figures that do not survive being traced to their claimed source. This page checks both, then rebuilds the comparison on figures that do.
The four pricing models, and how each one scales
Four models cover the category. Flat subscription charges for the workspace and grows only when you cross a tier. Per seat multiplies by headcount. Usage-based draws down credits with every enrichment and send. Hybrid sets a flat price gated on a monthly contact allowance and often asks for a quarter in advance.
Prices read from aisdr.com/pricing, lemlist.com/pricing, artisan.co/pricing and LinkedIn's compare-plans page in August 2026. Figures are quoted in the currency each vendor publishes and are not converted.
The useful thing about this grid is that it predicts the shape of your growth, not just today's cost. A flat plan is flat until it is not, and then it steps. A per-seat plan is a straight line through your org chart. A credit plan is a variable cost you can throttle in a bad month. A hybrid plan is a fixed cost you agreed to a quarter ago and cannot throttle at all.
Where the "AI costs 10% of a human" figure comes from
It comes from nowhere you can check. The claim that an AI SDR delivers comparable output for 10 to 20% of a human's cost appears across vendor blogs and buyer roundups, always credited to Gartner, and never with a report title, a report number, a publication date or a named analyst.
Gartner's actual published research on AI agents in sales points the other way. Its 28 July 2026 press release predicts that by 2028 AI agents will outnumber human sellers by ten to one, yet fewer than 40% of sellers will report that AI agents have improved their productivity. No cost ratio appears in it. Believe the ratio if your own pilot produces it, but do not buy on the belief that Gartner published it.
The companion figure has the same problem. The "fully loaded human SDR at about $84,000 a year" that anchors most of these comparisons is not a loaded cost at all. The Bridge Group's "SDR Models, Motions & Metrics: 2025 Research Report", published 6 February 2025, its tenth edition covering 351 B2B companies, puts median SDR base salary at $55,000 and median on-target earnings at $80,000. So $84,000 is roughly one SDR's OTE, before employer taxes, benefits, tooling, management time or the cost of replacing them. It is an unloaded number wearing a loaded label.
Load it properly and the human costs more than the guides say, which cuts in favour of the software. The direction is not the point. The point is that a purchase justified by figures nobody traced is a purchase you cannot defend at renewal. The true cost of a LinkedIn automation stack runs those numbers to a defensible total.
Read the billing basis, not the number
A plan quoted "from $87" is usually per user, per month, billed annually, which is a twelve-month commitment for a team of unknown size. The same plan quoted "from $109" is the honest monthly number for one person. Compare like for like: unit, interval, and whether it is prepaid.
Per seat is the model that surprises teams
Per seat looks cheap because you price it for one person, then the team grows and the invoice grows with it whether or not the new people send anything. It also stacks: most LinkedIn workflows assume a Sales Navigator seat underneath, which is a second per-seat line from a second vendor on the same multiplier.
lemlist shows the mechanism cleanly. On its pricing page in August 2026, the Email plan is $69 a month flat with unlimited users, and the Multichannel plan, the one that adds LinkedIn, is $109 per user a month billed monthly, or $87 per user a month billed annually. The plan did not become per-seat because the software got better. It became per-seat because LinkedIn is per-person by design: every send comes from a named human profile, so the vendor prices the profile.
Underneath that sits the data seat. LinkedIn lists Sales Navigator Core at $119.99 a month billed monthly, or $1,079.88 a year, which works out to about $89.99 a month. Advanced is $159.99 a month billed monthly, or $1,799.88 a year, about $149.99 a month, per LinkedIn's compare-plans page in August 2026. Both are per seat. A three-person team on Multichannel plus Core pays two separate vendors on the same multiplier, and neither line appears in the other's comparison table. The true cost of LinkedIn automation breaks the rest of that stack down line by line.
What actually drives the bill
Three things move the number, and none of them is the software. The count of sending identities you run, the contacts you touch each month, and the length of the commitment you signed. Every model above meters one of those three, which is why plans that look unrelated end up costing the same.
Sending identities. LinkedIn outreach comes from a person, so capacity is bought in units of people. AiSDR's tiers make this explicit, moving from 1 LinkedIn account on Solo to 5 on Explore and 20 on Scale, per its pricing page in August 2026. A plan that permits 20 accounts is not 20 times more capable unless you have 20 real profiles and 20 real humans behind them.
Contacts touched. Hybrid and usage plans meter the work itself. AiSDR allows 200, 800 and 2,500 AI-researched contacts a month across its three tiers, and Artisan scopes its tiers at roughly 2,500 and 6,000 leads contacted, both read from their pricing pages in August 2026. Credit systems bill each verified record individually. This is the fairest model when your volume is genuinely variable, and the most punishing when a campaign runs hot.
Commitment length. AiSDR's two upper tiers are billed quarterly in advance, with a further 20% off for paying annually, per its pricing page in August 2026. That is not a feature, it is working capital: you are financing the vendor for three months before you know whether the agent works on your market. Treat the prepay as a cost, because it is one.
The costs that sit outside the sticker price
Five lines recur across almost every vendor in this category: a data seat, mailboxes and domains, verification credits, an AI provider key, and human review time. Together they routinely cost more than the plan itself in the first quarter. The pricing page prices the software. The invoice prices the setup around it.
- The data seat. Sales Navigator Core at $119.99 a month billed monthly, per seat, if the workflow assumes it, per LinkedIn's compare-plans page in August 2026. Some tools work without it, and it is worth checking before you buy rather than after.
- Mailboxes and domains. Vendors count these because email sending requires them. AiSDR's tiers include 3, 6 and 18 mailboxes and 1, 2 and 6 domains respectively, per its pricing page in August 2026. Domains are bought, warmed and maintained separately.
- Verification and enrichment credits. Priced per record, so they scale with list size, not team size. lemlist charges 5 credits per verified email at $0.01 a credit and 20 credits per phone number, per its pricing page in August 2026.
- The model key. Some tools ask you to paste in your own AI provider key and bill you for tokens through a third vendor, which makes your AI cost a variable you cannot forecast.
- The review hours. Somebody reads what the agent wrote before it goes out, or nobody does and you find out later. That hour is real whether or not it appears on an invoice.
The denominator every pricing page invents
Every AI SDR pricing guide ends with a cost per meeting, and every one of them supplies the meeting count itself. Change that number and any plan can be made to look cheap. The honest way to set it is to ask what one sending identity actually produces in a month, and to be strict about the unit.
Work it bottom up from platform pacing. One account at the widely reported safe pace of about 100 invitations a week sends roughly 400 a month. LeadRiver's April 2026 review of more than 50,000 connection requests puts typical B2B acceptance at 30 to 37%, so call it 120 to 148 new connections. Belkins' 2026 study of 15.1 million touchpoints puts replies at 7.9% on a cold connect-then-message sequence, and 12.2% when messaging someone you are already connected to. That lands at roughly ten to fifteen replies a month per identity.
Note the unit. Those are replies, and a reply is not a booked meeting. This is where the category's arithmetic quietly breaks: the figure a pricing page calls "cost per meeting" is almost always cost per reply, because replies are what an outreach tool can actually count. Every step between the two, qualifying, scheduling and the prospect turning up, happens outside the software and removes people at each stage.
The human benchmark shows the size of that gap. The Bridge Group's 2025 report, across those same 351 B2B companies, puts the median SDR monthly quota at 10 Stage 0 opportunities held, and the median rep runs 112 activities a day to get there, split 44 phone, 41 email, 19 LinkedIn and 8 text or other. Only 60% of reps hit it. So ten held meetings is a full-time multichannel effort, while ten LinkedIn replies is one identity's month on one channel. Anyone putting those two numbers side by side, which is exactly what the AI-versus-human comparisons do, is comparing a finished outcome with a raw one.
Price the plans against the honest unit and the category rearranges itself.
Assumes ten LinkedIn replies per identity per month, derived from the pacing and benchmark figures above. LinkedIn side only, and software only: it excludes the data, mailbox and review costs in the previous section, and it gives no credit for the email volume the mailbox-heavy tiers also buy. A held meeting costs a multiple of these figures, not the same figure under a different name. Currencies are as each vendor publishes and are not converted.
The failure mode nobody admits is in the fourth column. A tier that permits 20 LinkedIn accounts multiplies your capacity twenty times only if twenty real people are willing to send from their own profiles and to answer what comes back. Most teams who buy a top tier are running three or four identities. They pay the fourth-column price and quote themselves the fifth. To put your own numbers through it, the LinkedIn outreach ROI calculator uses the published benchmarks above rather than flattering defaults.
The tradeoff nobody states. Mailboxes escape the per-identity cap, which is exactly why the hybrid vendors sell them by the half dozen. But LinkedIn's platform average reply rate is 10.3% (Expandi's own 2026 measurement) against 5.1% for cold email (Belkins research, quoted inside that report), so the extra volume arrives at roughly half the response rate and carries domain, warmup and verification costs the LinkedIn side does not have. Buying mailboxes is buying a lower-yield channel to get around a ceiling. Sometimes correct, never free. Belkins has since restated its cold email benchmark at 0.45% on 7.5 million 2025 sends, measured against total sends rather than opens, so treat 5.1% as the 2026-vintage figure Expandi quoted.
Why a bigger plan does not buy more LinkedIn volume
LinkedIn caps what one account can do, so a bigger plan does not buy more LinkedIn throughput. It buys more accounts, more channels or more enrichment. LinkedIn publishes no official figure, but the widely reported safe sustained pace is around 100 connection invitations a week, roughly 15 to 20 on a working day.
That makes any plan promising volume beyond the platform's tolerance a seller of risk rather than capacity. The lever that does move output is relevance, and it costs nothing per send: in the same LeadRiver April 2026 review, trigger-based notes were accepted at 50 to 60% against 15 to 25% for generic ones. Doubling acceptance doubles the denominator in the table above without adding a single identity, which is why connection request limits belong in a pricing conversation and why acceptance rate benchmarks are a budgeting input, not a vanity metric.
What BeReach costs, and on what basis
BeReach Pro is 99 euros a month billed monthly, or 948 euros a year billed yearly, about 79 euros a month. It is priced per workspace, not per seat, with 2 connected accounts. The next tier is 199 euros a month billed monthly, or 1,908 euros a year. A free tier gives 100 monthly credits, with a 3-day trial.
Three things about that basis are worth stating plainly, because they are where the model differs from the table above.
The AI is included. One model, no picker, no key to paste in and no separate token bill arriving from a third vendor. The AI line on your invoice is the plan.
Most of the work needs no connected LinkedIn account at all. Finding people, qualifying them against your criteria and drafting the message all run on public data. A session is only needed at the send. That matters for cost because you can evaluate the entire research half before you connect anything, and because you are not paying for account infrastructure you do not use yet. The wider category picture is in AI agents for LinkedIn lead generation.
The pace is capped in the product, not left to you. BeReach's base pacing is 300 profile visits a day, paced under 120 an hour, 50 connection invitations a day, and 70 messages a day. Two of those are hard ceilings that no paid multiplier can pass, the invitation cap and the hourly visit cap; the daily visit and message figures are the base a workspace multiplier scales from. Those two hard ceilings are enforced by the system, not targets to aim at, and the planning number is still the roughly 100 invitations a week the market treats as a safe sustained pace. Every message is approved by a person before it sends, which is the part the AI SDR framing usually removes and the part the review-hours line in your budget is actually paying for.
Every viral post is 100+ warm conversations waiting.
Tell your agent who you want to reach. It finds leads, qualifies them, sends personalized outreach, and follows up.
Frequently asked questions
How much does an AI SDR cost per month?
Published plans start at $250 a month and reach $2,500 a month before the tiers turn quote-only. AiSDR lists Solo at $250 billed monthly, Explore at $900 billed quarterly and Scale at $2,500 billed quarterly, per its pricing page in August 2026. Artisan publishes no figures and scopes its tiers by leads contacted per month instead.
Is an AI SDR cheaper than a human SDR?
Per month, almost always. Per outcome, it depends on how many sending identities you actually staff and on which unit you are counting. The Bridge Group's 2025 report across 351 B2B companies puts the median SDR monthly quota at 10 Stage 0 opportunities held, off 112 activities a day across phone, email, LinkedIn and text. One LinkedIn identity at a safe pace yields about 10 to 15 replies a month, which sits several steps upstream of a held meeting. Comparing the two directly, which most cost comparisons do, flatters the software.
What is the fully loaded cost of a human SDR?
More than the $84,000 figure quoted across this category, which is roughly an OTE rather than a loaded cost. The Bridge Group's 2025 research report, its tenth edition covering 351 B2B companies, puts median SDR base salary at $55,000 and median on-target earnings at $80,000. Employer taxes, benefits, tooling, management time and replacement cost all sit on top, and the same report puts average tenure at 1.9 years with 40% annual attrition.
Does a more expensive plan send more on LinkedIn?
No. LinkedIn caps what one account can do, and it publishes no official number, though the widely reported safe sustained pace is around 100 connection invitations a week. A bigger plan buys more accounts, more channels or more enrichment, never more throughput from a single profile. The lever that does raise output is relevance: LeadRiver's April 2026 review of 50,000-plus requests found trigger-based notes accepted at 50 to 60% against 15 to 25% for generic ones.
What does BeReach cost?
Pro is 99 euros a month billed monthly, or 948 euros a year billed yearly, about 79 euros a month, priced per workspace rather than per seat and including 2 connected accounts. The next tier is 199 euros a month billed monthly, or 1,908 euros a year. There is a free tier with 100 monthly credits and a 3-day trial, and the AI model is included rather than billed through a separate provider key.
Bottom line
Ask four questions before you sign anything in this category. What is the unit, workspace or seat or action or contact? What is the billing basis, and is it prepaid? How many sending identities will you genuinely staff, as opposed to how many the tier permits? And where did the vendor's comparison numbers come from, because the two that anchor most of this category do not survive a trace to their source.
The last two questions do the work. Output per identity is set by the platform's tolerance, not by the plan you buy, and the unit a vendor counts is rarely the unit you sell. Price the plan against a denominator you defined yourself, in replies rather than in borrowed meetings, and most of the range in this article collapses into something you can actually decide on.
Reading this in an AI assistant? Hand it the page and let it summarise, so you can ask follow-up questions against the whole argument rather than the part you have read so far.
