AI SDR pricing: how the models compare
AI SDR pricing is deliberately hard to compare, because vendors price on different units. Two tools quoting “from $900 a month” can differ by 5× in what you actually get for it. This breaks down the four models in use, what each one incentivises, and the costs that never appear on the pricing page.
The four pricing models
1. Per seat
You pay per human logged in. This is inherited from software that humans operate, and it makes progressively less sense as the software does more of the work itself. A five-person team running an AI that sends 4,000 emails a month pays the same as a five-person team sending 40.
Incentivises: the vendor to sell you logins. Punishes: small teams doing high volume — which is exactly the profile AI SDRs suit best.
2. Per contact or per lead
You pay for records added, enriched or contacted. Predictable, and easy to model against a target list. The catch is that it prices the list rather than the outcome: you pay the same for a perfectly-researched email to an ideal-fit account and a generic blast to a company that was never going to buy.
Incentivises: volume. Watch for: whether you are charged again when the same contact re-enters a sequence.
3. Per meeting booked
Superficially the most aligned model, and the one buyers ask for most. In practice it creates an argument you will have every month about what counts as a meeting — held or booked, qualified or curious, no-shows, reschedules, meetings the prospect cancelled after your own rep was late. Vendors that offer it usually price the risk in heavily.
Incentivises: booking anything that will accept an invitation. Ask: for the exact written definition of a billable meeting, and the no-show policy.
4. Per unit of work
You pay for actions the system performs — a research pass, a personalised draft, an account graded. The honest version publishes the rate for every action so you can model your own spend before you buy. The dishonest version calls them “credits”, refuses to publish burn rates, and lets you discover the exchange rate after you have committed.
Incentivises: the vendor to make each action cheaper and better. The one question: “show me the published cost of one researched, personalised email.” If they cannot, the model is not really this one.
Ask every vendor to price the same concrete scenario: 500 accounts researched, graded and sent a personalised first touch, with two follow-ups, in one month. Insist on a number. The spread between quotes is usually enormous, and the ones who cannot answer without a discovery call are telling you something.
The costs that are not on the pricing page
| Hidden cost | Typical size | How to surface it |
|---|---|---|
| Email infrastructure | £15–£40 per mailbox per month | “How many mailboxes do I need at my target volume, and are they included?” |
| Domains for sending | £10–£15 per domain per year, plus warmup time | “Do I need secondary domains, and who buys them?” |
| Data and enrichment | Often a separate licence | “Is contact data included or do I bring my own provider?” |
| Failed actions | 5–15% of attempts | “Am I billed when a research pass returns nothing?” |
| Annual lock-in | The whole year | “Is the discounted price contingent on a 12-month commitment?” |
| Onboarding fee | £500–£5,000 | “Is there an implementation or onboarding charge?” |
| Your time | The largest line item | “How many hours to first sent email?” |
Modelling it against a human SDR
A UK SDR costs roughly £45,000–£60,000 fully loaded — base, employer NI, pension, tooling, desk, management overhead. That is £3,750–£5,000 a month for someone who ramps over three months and, on category averages, stays about eighteen. The comparison most vendors want you to make is tool-versus-salary, and on that arithmetic every AI SDR wins by an order of magnitude.
It is the wrong comparison. The right one is marginal: what does the tool add to the team you already have, or what does it let you not hire next? Framed that way the question becomes whether it produces enough qualified pipeline to justify a few hundred pounds a month, which is a much lower and much more honest bar.
What to actually budget
For a founder-led team running outbound seriously, expect the platform plus mailboxes plus domains plus data to land somewhere between £150 and £600 a month at 1,000–3,000 sends. Anyone quoting materially less is either bundling nothing or metering something you have not noticed yet. Anyone quoting materially more should be able to explain precisely what the extra buys.
How GTMHack prices
Per unit of work, with the rates published. A GTM Token is one action — a personalised email is 3, a live company research pass is 6, a deep account brief is 25 — at a nominal 1p per token. Plans from £0.99 to £299 a month include a monthly allowance; top-ups run from 1.0p down to 0.5p per token at volume. Failed actions are refunded automatically. Email sends are metered separately by plan rather than by tokens, so a cheap action never quietly consumes your sending capacity. The full burn-rate table is published rather than sitting behind a call.
Model your own spend before you talk to us
Every action rate is on the pricing page. Work out your monthly cost in five minutes, with no demo required.
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