AI SDR tools do the job of a sales development rep without the rep: they find people who might buy, write to them, follow up, answer the first replies and book the meeting. The good ones cost from $49 a seat a month to $36,000 a year. One of them, Explee, charges about $0.04 an email and starts you with $30 of free credits, which is the cheapest honest test of AI outbound I know of.
I have paid for a lot of clicks since 2019. Some of them were even people. So I read every price below on the vendor's own page on 4 November 2026, and I read what independent testers got back, not what the home pages promise. Only then would I tell a one-person business to pay for an AI agent.
The best AI SDR tools by budget and team size
Pick by what you can lose, not by the longest feature list. A solo founder with $30 to spare and a ten-rep team with a yearly budget are reading the same ranking pages, and that is the whole problem with those pages.
| Tool | What it does for you | Price as of 4 Nov 2026 | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Explee | finds leads, writes, sends, follows up, books; email only | $0.04 an email, $30 free credits, no subscription | one founder or a small team testing outbound |
| AiSDR | finds, writes, sends across email and LinkedIn, books | $1.50 per person prospected, pay as you go | small teams that want LinkedIn too |
| 11x (Alice) | the full agent for growth teams, CRM sync, 105 languages on Pro | from $3,750 a month billed annually | funded teams with 2,000 prospects a month |
| Artisan (Ava) | the full agent plus a dialer add-on | not public, talk to sales | mid-market teams with reps to feed |
| Instantly | sequencer with warmup, an AI sales agent on the Starter bundle | Growth $47 a month ($37.60 yearly), Starter bundle $94 | agencies and outbound shops that own domains |
| Smartlead | sequencer, unlimited mailboxes, pre-warmed boxes as add-ons | Base $39 a month ($32 yearly) | volume senders on a budget |
| lemlist | sequencer with LinkedIn, lemAgent, intent signals | Email $55 a month yearly, Multichannel $87 per user | teams that mix email and LinkedIn by hand |
| Apollo | database plus sequences, AI research on Professional | Free, Basic $49 a seat yearly, Professional $79 | reps who want data and sending in one place |
| Hodorak (ours) | finds the buyers already asking in public and suggests the first reply | on our pricing page | service businesses that want warm requests, not cold lists |
How to read the table
Our row has no number because the plan decides it, and the Hodorak plans are on their own page. Every other price is what the vendor showed that day, and three of them had already changed since the ranking pages were written.
If you want to try the cheapest agent in that table today, Explee's $30 of free credits cover about 750 emails. That link also adds $25 to your balance after your first payment.
What an AI SDR does, and what it does not do
An AI SDR is software that runs the top of a sales pipeline on its own. The agent finds companies that match your buyer and a person inside each one. It writes a cold email, sends it from a warmed mailbox, follows up, reads the replies and books meetings on your calendar. Explee describes its own version in seven steps, from reading your website to sending your booking link.
What it does not do is decide what you sell, to whom, and why they should care. Bad data in means bad outreach out, as the monday.com guide puts it, and that is the one line of theirs I would keep. The agent also does not know your customer's bad day.
One Explee tester found the tool had signed an email with a name it invented. Another had it start sending before the lead list was approved. Both are settings you can change. Both bite you if you do not look.
Rule of thumb: an AI SDR replaces the typing, not the thinking. If you cannot write down who your buyer is in one sentence, the agent will guess, and it will guess "local service businesses in the US".
Two kinds of AI SDR software, and who each one is for
The ranking pages mix two different products. Agents do the whole job for a high price. Sequencers do the sending for a low price and leave the setup to you. Knowing which one you are looking at saves you a demo call.
Enterprise agents: 11x, Artisan, AiSDR and Qualified
These are the top AI SDR companies the ranking pages lead with, and they are built for sales teams, not for you and your laptop. Their pricing says so before their features do.
11x sells Alice, an agent that runs multi-channel campaigns across email and LinkedIn, syncs with your CRM and writes in 105 languages on the Pro plan. Its pricing page shows Growth starting at $3,750 a month billed annually, with 2,000 new prospects a month and up to five users. 11x charges per lead, not per send. That is a fine deal for a team with a quota and a nightmare for a freelancer.
Artisan sells Ava, an AI BDR with a dialer add-on and Salesforce and HubSpot sync. Every plan on its page says "Pricing scoped on your plan" and sends you to sales. Not public is not a crime. It is a signal about who the customer is.
AiSDR is the one agent in this group a small team can start without a call: $1.50 per person prospected, research and writing included, cancel anytime. LinkedIn connection requests and InMails are in the box. At 500 prospects a month that is $750, between Explee and the enterprise tier.
Qualified and the account based platforms like 6sense play a different sport: intent signals, website visitors and call analysis for teams that already have reps. No SDR to replace, no need for an AI SDR built for enterprise.
Sequencers with an AI layer: Instantly, Smartlead, lemlist, Apollo
These four are the best AI SDR software for people who like control. You bring domains and mailboxes, you set the sequence, and the AI helps with research, writing and the first sort of replies. They are cheap because you do the setup.
Instantly's Growth plan costs $47 a month, or $37.60 on yearly billing, with unlimited email accounts and warmup and 5,000 emails a month. Its Starter bundle at $94 adds a lead database and an AI sales agent. Smartlead's Base plan is $39 a month ($32 yearly) for 2,000 contacts and 6,000 emails, and it sells pre-warmed mailboxes from $9 each a month.
lemlist's Email plan is $55 a month on yearly billing with lemAgent and intent signals, and $87 per user buys LinkedIn and a dialer. Apollo is free to look around, $49 a seat yearly for Basic, and $79 for Professional with AI research and lead scoring.
Honestly, the catch is the same with all four. Registering a domain, setting up DNS and warming it up for two weeks is the part people quit at. One Explee customer put it well on the company's own home page: with the others "you have to register a domain, set up DNS, warm it up".
These tools are automation built for people who already send cold email. They are best for agencies and outbound shops, not for the first campaign of your life.
Explee: the pay-as-you-go agent at $0.04 an email
Explee is the AI SDR tool the ranking pages skip, and the one most of my readers can afford. You give it your website, and it works out what you sell and who buys it. It pulls matching people from a database of 105 million companies, writes each one a personal email, follows up, and sends your booking link when someone asks for a call.
It sends from Explee's own pre-warmed mailboxes, so you set up nothing.
The money is simple. Finding leads is free, and each email sent costs about $0.04. When you add a card, Explee gives you $30 in credits, enough for roughly 750 emails, and a temporary $1 hold on the card that is released on its own.
There is no subscription, and you set a daily budget the agent cannot pass. Explee quotes a median of $9 per hot lead. It defines a hot lead as any reply that moves the deal forward, such as "send me pricing".
You can start with the $30 of credits here. A disclosure, because you deserve one: that is our referral link. After your first payment your workspace gets $25 in extra outreach credits and ours gets $25 too. The price is the same either way, and I would write this section the same way without it.
What an independent tester got for $20
The most useful review I found was by Theo, who spent about $20 over a month. About 660 emails went out, 7 people replied (about 1%), 1 was a real lead and 0 meetings were booked. Four of the seven replies came from people who had left their company. On the good side, Explee found about 6,000 prospects in his niche where lemlist found about 600, the emails read well, and he rated it 4 of 5 and kept paying.
His complaints match the pattern on Trustpilot, where Explee held 3.5 of 5 from 46 reviews on the day I read it: 52% five stars, 33% one star, almost nothing in between. The one-star reviews are about charges after the free credits ran out, slow refunds and leads in the wrong language. The five-star ones say what one reviewer said best: you need to steer it sometimes, it is no silver bullet.
Where Explee is the wrong choice
It emails from Explee's domains, not yours, so a reply lands in Explee's inbox view first. It runs on autopilot unless you tell it to wait. The dashboard was slow for one tester, and there is no bounce report.
It is email only, with no LinkedIn step. And it works for businesses that sell to other businesses; if you sell to consumers, close the tab.
What reply rates to expect, honestly
Expect about one reply per hundred emails, and be pleased with two. Smartlead's data from 850 million emails in the first half of 2026 puts the median reply rate at 0.74%, one reply per 135 contacts, with the top tenth of senders at 2.63%. Saleshandy's own customers averaged 4.5% in the same months, and it calls 3% to 5% healthy. Plan with the honest end of that range.
The 3% that AI SDR vendors advertise is the ceiling, not the floor. Theo's 1% on Explee is the number a normal person with a normal offer gets in month one. So 750 free emails are a test, not a pipeline: at 1% that is about 7 replies, and perhaps one lead.
Follow ups matter more than the first email. In Saleshandy's data 57% of the positive replies came from a follow up, which the agents do without being asked.
Measure meetings and money, never open rates. Cold email has a reply rate. So does shouting into a well, and the well is cheaper.
Buyers no AI SDR will ever email: the ones already asking
Every tool in the table above writes to people who did not ask. Here is the number that changed how I run my own outbound. In the 30 days to 4 November 2026, the public sources our customers watch held 3,236 posts, and 318 of them were real requests: people asking, in their own words, for a thing a business sells.
210 of those were in Facebook groups, 106 on X, and 38 came from private groups you cannot search from outside.
None of those 318 people is in a cold email database with a "buying intent" flag. They wrote "Looking for a web designer for my bakery" on a Tuesday and twelve people replied "DM me". The business that answered the question got the call.
That is the warm side of sales, and it is why we built Hodorak. It watches the Facebook groups, subreddits, X searches and LinkedIn posts you choose, and shows you only the posts where someone asks for what you sell, with a suggested first reply you send yourself. For B2B sellers, the LinkedIn lead generation page shows how that works where your buyers post.
In one 72-hour window in mid-October 2026 we read 2,018 posts for HVAC companies and found 101 requests, about 990 a month across 13 sources. An AI SDR cannot touch those. A person who replies first can.
Where Hodorak is the wrong tool: your buyers never ask in public because you sell through tenders, or you need two clients a year and already have them. Then skip us and run outbound. Where it is the right tool, run it first, because a warm reply costs you ten minutes, and keep the AI SDR for the months when nobody asks.
Still deciding which channel to build first? Our list of nine places people ask for help is the place to start.
How to run a fair AI SDR test in 7 days
A week is enough to learn whether AI outbound fits your offer. Here is the plan I would follow with Explee or any pay-as-you-go agent.
- Day 1: one offer, one buyer. Write a single sentence: who you help, with what, and what happens next. Fix your website's first screen so it says the same thing, because the agent reads it.
- Day 1: set the daily budget low. $5 a day is a little over a hundred emails. You can raise it on day 5.
- Day 2: read the lead list before anything sends. Remove competitors, customers, wrong countries and companies too big to answer email.
- Day 2: read three draft emails. Check every claim against your real offer. Invented features are the fastest way to a one-star reply.
- Days 3 to 6: read every reply yourself. The agent sorts them, but you decide what "interested" means. Pause the segments that get out-of-office and "I left the company" replies.
- Day 7: count meetings, not opens. One real conversation per 300 emails is a pass for a first week. Zero replies on 500 emails means the offer or the segment is wrong, not the tool.
- Day 7: compare with the warm side. Count how many people asked for your service in public that same week. If that beats the meetings the agent booked, you know where the next hour goes.
A freelancer running this next to a marketplace should read our note on platforms like Upwork first. Outbound and marketplaces fail for different reasons.
Frequently asked questions
What is an AI SDR tool?
An AI SDR tool is software that does a sales development rep's outbound work. It finds companies and people who match your buyer, writes a personal cold email, sends it, follows up, reads replies and books meetings. Some add LinkedIn messages and calls. You still own the offer, the targeting and the conversations that matter.
AI SDR pricing: how much does an AI SDR cost?
AI SDR pricing runs from pay as you go to enterprise contracts. On 4 November 2026 Explee charged $0.04 an email with $30 free, AiSDR $1.50 per person prospected, Instantly from $47 a month, Apollo from $49 a seat, and 11x from $3,750 a month billed annually. Artisan does not publish prices.
Is AI replacing SDRs?
It is replacing the typing part of the job: list building, first drafts, follow ups and calendar links. It is not replacing judgement about who to target or how to answer a hard reply. Teams that let the agent run with no approvals are the ones leaving one-star reviews about wrong-language leads and invented claims.
Is there a free AI SDR?
Not for long. Explee gives $30 of credits with a verified card, about 750 emails, and Apollo has a free plan with 900 credits a year and two sequences. Instantly, Smartlead and lemlist offer trials with no card or a 14-day window. A free month of any agent is a test, not a sales channel.
Do AI SDR tools send from my own domain?
It depends on the tool. Explee sends from its own pre-warmed mailboxes with SPF, DKIM and DMARC set, so your domain's reputation is never at risk and you set nothing up. Instantly, Smartlead, lemlist and Apollo send from mailboxes you connect, so you buy domains, set up DNS and warm them for about two weeks.
Can I approve every email before it goes out?
Partly. Explee runs on autopilot by default, and a tester reported it sent before the leads were approved, so review the list and the drafts and lower the daily budget first. Sequencers like Instantly and lemlist let you edit the whole sequence before launch. No agent asks you to approve each reply it sends.
What to do today
Pick a lane for this month. If nobody asks for your service in public, the cheapest of the AI SDR tools is the place to start. Open Explee with the $30 credits, set a $5 daily budget and run the 7-day test above. If people do ask, and for most service businesses they do, start tracking the requests with Hodorak and reply to three of them tonight.
Worst case, you spend $0 and learn that strangers in your city have strong opinions about who should fix their roof.
