AI SDR Pricing 2026: 114 of 264 Publish No Price

Disclosure before anything else. This page sells nothing and takes no commission from any tool named on it. Every count below is computed from our own directory of 264 tools and recomputed on every build. Every price was read off a vendor's own page and carries the date it was read. Nothing here is a measurement. We have not seen anyone's invoice, and a published price is not the same as an achievable one.

Here is the trap. The question "what does an AI SDR tool cost" reads like one question, and it is three. Does the vendor publish a number? Can you buy it without a meeting? Can you leave?

Those three sets overlap far less than anyone assumes, and the gaps between them are where the money is.

The mirror case sits inside this same directory. Deepgram publishes 25 distinct rates to four decimal places on one public page, and Sierra, Decagon and Qualified publish nothing at all. Those are the same underlying technology sold to two different people, and the difference is who is expected to do arithmetic before signing.

What follows: the full census across 16 categories, the three-way overlap, why the price is hidden in the words of people who have hidden it, what four public companies told the SEC about their own pricing models this year, the spread as a multiple, the mechanics of nine pricing pages read on 25 August 2026, a 90-second routine for finding the real floor, and what breaks at renewal.

What AI SDR pricing costs, in 30 seconds

Across the 103 tools here that publish a recurring monthly floor, the median is $44 a month and the range runs from $6 to $2,500.

That is a spread of 417 times for products sold into the same buying committee. Sixty-five of the 103 sit under $50 and only 12 sit above $250, so the distribution has a long thin tail rather than a middle.

That median is not the number to budget against, because the tools that publish are systematically the cheap ones.

In the AI SDR category proper, six of 14 publish a monthly floor and the median of those six is $217.50, which annualises to $2,610. The signed annual contracts we have credible third-party aggregates for in the same category sit at a median near $45,000. That is roughly 17 times the published median, and the vendors on both sides of that gap are selling the same promise.

So the short answer has two halves. If you want a tool you can price and buy today, budget $75 to $90 a month for a finder plus a sender and expect to do the judgement yourself. If you want the thing the category is named after, budget five figures a year, expect a sales process, and read the rest of this page before you enter it.

What counts as a published price here

A tool counts as publishing a price when at least one of three fields could be filled from its own pages: a monthly entry price, a per-seat rate, or a per-minute rate. On that definition 150 of 264 publish and 114 do not.

A free tier does not count as a price, because a free tier prices nothing a growing team will actually buy.

Widen the definition to include vendors who publish only an annual figure or only a one-time figure and the count moves to 156 publishing and 108 not. Exactly six tools live in that gap, and they are worth naming because a monthly-basis comparison silently drops them: Klenty at $600 a year, Warmly at $10,000 a year, Synthflow at $30,000 a year, Genesys Cloud CX at a $900 annual floor, Autobound at $19 once and BookYourData at $99 once.

Dividing an annual figure by twelve to make it comparable would print a monthly price nobody can buy, which is why the schema has a separate field for it. The same discipline applies in the other direction: recording a one-time pack as a monthly figure would invent a recurrence the buyer never agreed to.

The census, by category

Sorted by the share of each category that publishes a monthly-basis price, lowest first. The entry column is the lowest recurring monthly figure a buyer can pay in that category, whether that is a flat plan or a single seat, and the median is the median of those figures rather than of the whole category.

The last column is the one to read twice. "Neither" counts tools that publish no price and have no self-serve path, which is to say tools you cannot evaluate at all without booking a meeting. It is 13 of 18 in Inbound Qualification and 17 of 24 in Vertical Voice Agents, and it is zero across Sequencing, Writing, Enablement and Scheduling.

Voice Infrastructure gets a text entry rather than a number because only one of its 35 tools charges a flat monthly figure at all. The rest bill per minute, per character or per second, which is a real difference in kind rather than a gap in the data. Our component floor for a voice minute is built from four of those published rates: speech recognition at $0.0077, the model at $0.0108, synthesis at $0.0140 and telephony at $0.0140, which comes to $0.0465 a minute.

The closer a tool sits to the buyer, the less it says

Read the top and the bottom of that table together. Voice Infrastructure publishes 86% of the time and Inbound Qualification publishes 11% of the time.

These are the same technology. An inbound qualification agent is speech recognition plus a model plus synthesis plus telephony, wrapped in a workflow. The wrapper is what stops being priced.

Infrastructure sells to an engineer who is going to build a cost model before committing, so a rate card is a competitive advantage. Deepgram's public pricing page carried 25 distinct per-minute rates when we read it on 25 August 2026, from $0.0002 to $0.030, a 150-times range published without a login because the buyer is going to multiply. The application layer sells to a VP who will be shown a figure inside a deck, after a call that establishes what they can afford.

Scheduling is the clean counter-example at the bottom of the table. All five tools publish, because scheduling is a commodity bought by an individual with a card, and a contact form would lose the sale to Calendly before the reply arrived. The same logic runs through Sequencing at 100% self-serve and Enablement at 90% published. Where the buyer can walk in one click, the price goes on the page.

This is not a claim that hidden pricing means expensive pricing. That inference is common and it is wrong often enough to be dangerous. What hidden pricing reliably means is that the price is set per deal, and a price set per deal is a price that can go either way. What it costs everyone is comparability.

Three questions that look like one

Here is the finding that does not survive being summarised. 114 tools publish no price. 108 tools have no self-serve checkout. Only 96 tools are in both sets.

Those two counts are almost identical and the sets are not, which means the obvious shortcut of treating "contact sales" and "no price" as the same flag is wrong 30 times out of 264.

One more cut, and it is the cleanest partition in the whole directory. Seventy tools carry a pricing model recorded as "custom", and zero of those 70 have a self-serve path.

Not one. Where a vendor declines to describe the shape of its pricing, it also declines to let you buy, every single time. That is the only field in this dataset with no exceptions.

The eighteen you can buy without being told the price

Eighteen tools have a working signup and no published price. Intercom Fin, Pylon, Default, RingCentral, Dropcontact, Guru and Voiceflow are among them. The practical consequence is that the price exists inside the product rather than on the marketing site, so the fastest way to get it is to create an account and open the billing screen. That route takes about four minutes and it is faster than any sales cycle. It is also the single highest-yield move in this whole page for anyone building a shortlist, because those 18 tools look identical to the gated 96 from the outside and are not.

The twelve that publish a price you cannot buy

The mirror set is stranger. Twelve tools print a number and still require a meeting: Amplemarket at $600 a month, Common Room at $2,500, Five9 at $119 a seat, Talkdesk at $85, NICE CXone at $110, Chili Piper at $45 a seat with a $1,250 floor, Structurely at $598.80, Regie.ai at $180 a seat, Thoughtly at $500 and Salesforce at $25.

Read that list as good news.

A published number in front of a compulsory meeting is an anchor you own before the meeting starts, and it is the one situation where knowing the list price genuinely shifts the negotiation. The twelve are also disproportionately enterprise contact-centre products, which suggests the number is published for procurement rather than for you.

Why it is hidden, from the people who hide it

The same Ask HN thread runs every few years and never resolves. Thread 33425443 in November 2022 drew 195 points and 168 comments from a poster who wrote: “I have been tasked with finding ballpark pricing for a dozen-item list of enterprise SaaS software … I would like to avoid spending the next month in sales calls.” Nobody produced a source. The best answer was a guess at a range.

The mechanism itself is stated plainly by commenter AdamJacobMuller in that thread: “'contact us' pricing revolves around understanding the customer's use case deeply enough so that you can demonstrate maximum product value to them and then extract the most possible money. I despise it.” That is one person's characterisation, not a finding of fact, but it is the characterisation the sellers in the thread agree with.

Commenter wwkeyboard put the operational version more sharply: “I always assumed 'contact us' pricing meant 'tell us who you work for so we can google their funding level before suggesting a price to you'.” The reply that matters came from indymike, who identifies as a former VP of Sales: “As a reformed former VP of Sales, I can assure that this is exactly how it works, except with much better research than Google.”

In thread 26144706 from February 2021, the argument was whether this is a dark pattern. Commenter tylerrobinson said no, on the grounds that a dark pattern tricks users into buying something. Commenter flax answered on the same definition: “By that definition it _is_ a dark pattern. The thing people are being tricked into doing is divulging contact info/interest even if they're not going to buy at the eventually revealed price.” Both readings are on the page and we are not going to adjudicate them.

The counter-case has real evidence behind it. In thread 20191005 from 2019, a commenter who says they came from enterprise SaaS explains the deliberate trade: “it's worth losing your business to filter out bad leads”, and later concedes to a small-company buyer, “you're the collateral damage, a good buyer but one whose profile looks like a bad buyer.” That is an honest description of a policy, not a defence of it.

And publishing at the top end demonstrably works for some sellers. In thread 37717689 from 2023 the founder of Keygen, whose published tiers run to $6,000 a month, wrote: “I started using transparent pricing a couple years ago because I was tired of answering the same questions over and over again for enterprise leads … Now the sales cycle is much easier, and can usually be done in an email instead of a series of pointless calls to size each other up.” A FusionAuth engineer in the same thread reports selling a $3,800-a-month enterprise plan by credit card.

The 2004 essay behind the 2026 pricing page

The mechanism is not new and it is not a software phenomenon. The HN commenter VoodooJuJu named the reference in 2021: Joel Spolsky's "Camels and Rubber Duckies", published 15 December 2004, which walks a demand curve to its conclusion. Spolsky's term for it is “the power of segmentation: separating your customers into different groups according to how much they are willing to pay, and extracting the maximal consumer surplus from each customer.”

The essay also names the failure mode, which is the part vendors skip: “as soon as your customers find out you're doing it, they'll lie about who they are”, and “segmentation is just not that easy to pull off” once you account for the erosion of goodwill. Twenty-two years later, 114 of 264 tools in one directory are running the strategy and the buyers on Hacker News have been describing the goodwill erosion continuously since at least 2019.

What the SEC filings say and the pricing pages do not

Four public companies in or adjacent to this category filed 10-Ks this year. Annual reports are a source nobody in this niche uses, and they are the one place a vendor has to describe its own pricing model to a reader it cannot upsell. We read all four off EDGAR on 25 August 2026.

The ZoomInfo class action is an allegation and nothing more. The complaint, filed in the Western District of Washington on 25 June 2026 for a class period of 3 November 2025 to 11 May 2026, alleges that defendants “overstated their confidence in statements related to the Company's projected revenue outlook, the growth of its AI-driven products and its sustained improvement in net revenue retention”. No court has ruled. We cite it because the NRR figure sits in the same filing.

The contrast in that table is worth sitting with.

HubSpot publishes its prices and runs net revenue retention at 103.5%. ZoomInfo publishes none and runs 90%. That is an association across two companies with different products and different customer mixes, not a causal claim, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. But it is the opposite of what the pricing-page argument predicts.

Two public companies are retiring the seat in writing

ZoomInfo's 10-K names a risk it calls seat compression, in language worth quoting because no vendor page says it: “as AI-powered agents become more sophisticated, individual users may become substantially more productive, enabling customers to achieve similar outcomes with fewer seats accessing our platform. This AI-driven seat compression could result in customers reducing seat counts at renewal.”

Five9's filing says the same thing from the other end, warning that it may have to cut prices given “the potential of AI-based solutions to shift the market from agent-based pricing to interaction-based pricing”. Five9 already runs both meters at once: “We charge our customers monthly subscription fees for access to our solution, primarily based on the number of licenses. Our AI solutions are sold to our customers on a consumption or capacity basis.”

That is the credit-meter pattern this directory keeps finding, stated to investors. A category that quotes seats while billing consumption has two prices, and the one on the pricing page is the one that does not move. HubSpot's own numbers show what that does to a headline: its customer count grew from 205,091 to 288,706 across three years while average subscription revenue per customer went $11,384, then $11,343, then $11,414. Forty percent more customers, and an average that moved 0.3%.

The spread, as a multiple

"From $X" is only useful if you know what the distribution behind it looks like. Here is every published meter in the directory expressed as a ratio between its cheapest and dearest member, which is the fastest way to see which comparisons are real.

The bottom row is a joke the data plays on itself.

Inbound Qualification has the tightest spread in the directory at 1.1 times, and it is the least informative number on this page, because those two tools are the only two of 18 that publish anything. A narrow range across a 11% sample tells you about the sample.

Sequencing at 2.8 times is the opposite case and the one worth trusting. Ten of 12 tools publish, all 12 sell self-serve, and the prices cluster between $25 and $69. That is what a commoditised, comparison-shopped market looks like from the outside, and it is why sequencing is the only part of an outbound stack where a buyer can genuinely shop on price.

The per-minute row deserves a warning attached. Twenty-one tools publish a per-minute rate and it sounds like the most transparent number here.

It is usually the least, because the advertised rate excludes speech recognition, the model, synthesis and telephony in varying combinations. Millis advertises $0.02 and excludes components listing at $0.0465, so its computed floor is 3.3 times the headline. The same arithmetic reverses the ranking of Vapi and Retell.

Pricing-page mechanics, read on 25 August 2026

We fetched nine pricing pages on the day this was published and recorded what the served page actually contains, as distinct from what it renders. This matters more every year, because a growing share of the price is assembled in the browser and never exists in the document a crawler, an assistant or a saved copy sees.

Apollo ships the template and leaves out the number

Apollo's pricing page returned 435,494 bytes of HTML containing zero plan prices. What it does contain is the string templates that will hold them: “{price}/month billed annually”, “{price}/year billed monthly” and “{label} - {price}”. The only dollar figure in the visible text is $0.025, which appears in a fair-use footnote capping credits at “the lesser of $ Paid / $0.025 or 1 Million credits per account per year”.

That footnote is more useful than it looks. It prices an Apollo credit at $0.025, which lets you convert any plan into a credit ceiling once you know the plan price. The plan price itself arrives after the page loads. The page also carries the line “Introductory pricing, features and pricing may change”, which is a disclosure worth reading before anchoring a budget on whatever number renders.

Five9 prints a price your browser can read and your search cannot

Five9's pricing page shows $119 and $159 monthly per seat, in US dollars, clearly.

Search the served HTML for the string "$119" and you get nothing, because the markup is <span class="dollar-sign">$</span><span class="dollar-amount">119</span>. The currency symbol and the digits are separate elements. The only glued dollar figure anywhere in that document is "$14.5 Million", a Forrester return-on-investment claim.

We are not calling that deliberate. It is ordinary component-based front-end work and it probably surprised nobody who built it. The consequence is real regardless: any tool that reads pages as text, including the assistant a buyer now asks first, sees a marketing figure and misses the price. The page also has 99 display:none rules, and every tier's button says "Get a Quote" rather than "Buy".

The number nearest the plan name is often not the plan's price

Smartlead's comparison strip renders four tiers, Base, Pro, Smart and Prime, with the figure $59 sitting beside all four.

The $59 is a verified-email add-on. The actual plan prices appear further down the same page as $39 and $94. A buyer skimming the strip reads one price for four plans, none of which costs that.

Instantly's page opens on the Bundles tab, where the entry figure is $94 a month. The Outreach tab on the same page prices the Growth plan at $47. The floor is half the number the page opens on, and both are in the served HTML along with annual-basis variants at $37.60, $77.60 and $177.30, so a reader who grabs the first figure is off by two times.

Clay prices one tier five ways. The Launch tier shows a headline of $167 a month, and the same block carries "Starts at $54/mo" on the annual basis and "Starts at $60/mo" on the monthly basis for equivalent volume, then a volume ladder running to $486 a month, all still called Launch. That is a nine-times range inside one tier name and an 11% penalty for paying monthly, both published, neither summarised.

The pages that do this well, so the standard is not theoretical

lemlist ships its entire price ladder as structured data in the page itself, with an explicit field for the undiscounted rate. At 50,000 emails a month the record reads monthly $69, quarterly $62, yearly $55. Its toggle advertises "Save 10%" and "Save 20%", and the arithmetic checks: $62 is 10.1% off and $55 is 20.3% off. At 500,000 emails the same ratios hold to within a tenth of a percent.

Calendly publishes something rarer still: an enterprise floor.

"Starts at $15k/yr. Starts at 50 seats. Available in USD only." That works out to $25.00 per seat per month, against $16 for the Teams tier on the annual toggle the page opens on. The rate is 1.6 times, but the commitment is $15,000 against nothing, and the commitment is the actual price of that tier.

Publishing a price and publishing a meter are two questions

The census above is generous, because it treats any number as a price. Several vendors publish a figure that cannot be turned into a bill, and the difference between the two is the sharpest single distinction on this site. Lusha publishes both halves: a price, and the meter underneath it. A phone number costs five credits against one for an email, so a buyer can compute what their own motion will consume before paying. Warmly publishes a price and never defines the credit it bills against. Cognism publishes neither. Only the first of the three lets anyone compute a unit cost before signing.

The mobile-number multiplier is where this bites hardest, and it is published often enough to compare. Across data tools we read in August 2026, a mobile costs one credit at UpLead, five at LeadMagic and Lusha, and ten at Prospeo, Persana, FullEnrich and BetterContact. Priced per contact with a verified email and mobile, that produces a 5.5-times spread, and by email alone the spread is 23.8 times with the ranking inverted.

Intercom is the cleanest published meter in the inbound category and worth borrowing as a template. Every tier carries "From $0.99 per Fin outcome" alongside the seat rate, which means the two meters can be compared directly: at $85 a seat on the Advanced tier, one seat costs the same as 86 resolutions a month. Whether that is cheap depends entirely on your ticket volume, which is the point of publishing it.

The cheapest things you can actually buy today

Filtered on three conditions rather than on features: a published monthly price under $50, buyable without a sales call, and a free tier or trial substantial enough to test the meter before paying. All read first-hand on the dates shown.

What $35 does not buy

Every tool in that table does one layer of the motion. Hunter and Snov.io find addresses. Woodpecker, Smartlead, Saleshandy and Instantly send sequences and manage deliverability. Not one of them decides who to contact, writes something worth reading, or handles a reply that goes off script. That is the part the category is named after and none of these do it.

So the honest entry cost is not $35.

It is a finder plus a sender, which is $75 to $90 a month at list, plus your own time on the judgement. The full-stack agents that do attempt the whole motion start at AiSDR's published $250 a month and, on third-party procurement aggregates, sign considerably higher.

The second cost is the meter rather than the plan. Sending tools bill by mailbox or by contact, finders bill by credit, and a list of 5,000 contacts consumes credits at a rate the plan page does not model. Read what one credit buys before you compare two entry prices, because the entry price is the least variable part of the bill.

Monthly billing, and the eight tools that allow it

Eight tools here bill monthly or quarterly with no annual minimum required to reach a usable tier: Lavender from free, Instantly at $47, Apollo at $69 a seat, lemlist at $69, Clay at $185, AiSDR at $250, plus Autobound and Meetz which publish no recurring entry price at all. All verified between 6 and 12 August 2026 on the vendors' own pages.

The reason to care is not the money. Outbound takes six to eight weeks to produce a signal, and an annual contract asks you to commit four times that before you have one, on a channel that may not work for your market at all. Vendors who bill monthly are telling you they think their product survives the test.

Paying monthly usually costs 20 to 30% more than the annual rate, and the exact premium is checkable per vendor. lemlist's is 20.3%. Clay's is 11%. Calendly's Teams tier saves 20% annually and its Standard tier saves 17%, both stated on the page. Intercom's Essential tier shows $29 struck through and $19 shown, which is 35% off, except the $19 is a new-customer promotional rate on the annual basis and therefore neither the monthly price nor the renewal price.

The 90-second routine that finds the real floor

This is the procedure we run before writing any price into this directory. It takes about 90 seconds per vendor, needs nothing but a browser, and it caught errors in roughly half of the 96 listing prices re-read in a single sweep here on 12 August 2026. Three of those had no vendor origin at all.

• Check the billing toggle's default state, 10 seconds. Click the toggle and watch the number. If it moves, the page opened on one basis and you must record which. Calendly and Intercom both open on "Billed yearly". Instantly opens on Bundles rather than on components. Pass condition: you can state the basis of the number you wrote down.
• Look for a currency selector, 10 seconds. Usually a globe or a country code in the header or footer. Calendly's served page carried euro and pound markers alongside dollars. A vendor with geo-pricing serves a different page to your finance team than to you, so record the currency alongside the number or the comparison is meaningless.
• View source and search for the price, 20 seconds. Ctrl-U, then Ctrl-F for the digits without the currency symbol. If the digits appear and the symbol is in a separate element, you are looking at a Five9-style split. If the digits do not appear at all, the price is rendered client-side, as with Apollo, and any saved copy or assistant summary of that page is unreliable.
• Search the source for display:none, 20 seconds. Koncert's pricing table suppressed a five-column price row with a single display:none rule while leaving bare integers in the markup. Hunter ships a $49 tier the same way. Pass condition: no price-shaped number is hidden, or you know what the hidden one is.
• Open the checkout and compare, 30 seconds. This is the step that pays for the other four. Lead411's public pricing page never uses the word "seat" and every figure on it is per seat, which only the checkout states. If the checkout total differs from the pricing page by anything at all, the pricing page is marketing and the checkout is the price.

The pass threshold is blunt: if the number you first saw and the number at checkout are not identical, the headline is not the price, and you should record the checkout figure with the basis and date attached. That single rule has moved more numbers on this site than every other check combined.

One correction this routine produced while writing this page. Our record for Intercom Fin carries no published price, and reading intercom.com/pricing on 25 August 2026 found "From $0.99 per Fin outcome" on every tier plus seat rates of $19, $85 and $132. So the Inbound Qualification figure of 2 of 18 is a floor rather than a fact, and the record is being corrected rather than the count quietly adjusted. Where sources disagree, we publish the disagreement.

Which of the three questions to ask first

Sequence matters more than any individual answer. Ask "can I buy this alone" before "what does it cost", because the first question is free to answer and it eliminates 108 of 264 tools in about a minute of clicking. The 18 that sell self-serve without publishing a price will tell you the number inside the product, and that is faster than any email exchange.

Ask about the meter second, before the price. A per-seat rate with an undefined credit underneath it is not comparable to anything, and the tier a phone motion needs is reliably the first one without a price on it. Amplemarket's published tier grants 600 phone credits per user per year against 13,500 for email; the tier that fixes that is Custom. Lusha charges five credits for a phone number against one for an email.

Ask about the exit third, and treat it as a price rather than as terms. On our own churn model, a contract you cannot leave costs 2.00 times sticker per useful month at a 50% cancellation rate failing in month four, and that multiplier is independent of contract size. A three-month break clause collapses the premium to zero.

The counter-case is required here, because the arithmetic cuts both ways. A break clause beats a 20% discount only above a 30.0% cancellation probability, computed as $9,000 saved by the discount against $30,000 stranded on a $45,000 deal. 11x's own published 79% retention implies 21% churn, which is below that line. If you genuinely believe the retention number, take the discount.

When the unpublished price arrives at renewal

The renewal is where a price that was never published stops being an abstraction. Commenter duncan-donuts described the mechanism in thread 33425443: “Then your renewal comes up and you've already spent another million in salaries and bespoke shit to make it work for you and the sales guy hits you with 500k again because you're in too deep.”

That is one person's characterisation and the same thread contains its opposite. Commenter scrapcode wrote: “Your initial 'subscription' is generally going to be more than your renewal, sometimes way more.” Both patterns are real and which one you get depends on your switching cost, which the vendor can estimate better than you can. Nobody publishes a distribution.

The quantified version sits in third-party procurement aggregates for two vendors in this directory, and it is the price of not publishing, expressed as a number. Observed annual contracts for 11x run $39,750 to $65,640 with a median near $45,000, a 1.7-times spread. Artisan runs $9,000 to $57,000 with a median near $21,000. That is a 6.3-times spread on the same product, between buyers who differed in negotiating position rather than in what they bought.

Seat minimums, discovered late

A seat minimum converts a per-seat rate into a floor and it is rarely on the tier card. Calendly is unusually clean about this: "Starts at 50 seats" sits directly under the $15k figure. Chili Piper's $45 seat rate carries a $1,250 monthly floor in our record, which is 28 seats before the rate means anything. Intercom bundles 20 free Lite seats on Advanced and 50 on Expert, which is a minimum expressed as a gift.

The failure mode is the same in each case.

A team of six prices itself at six seats, signs, and discovers the invoice is written against the minimum. Ask for the minimum in writing before signing and ask what happens to it at renewal, because a minimum that ratchets with headcount is a different contract from one that does not.

The annual-only trap

Some vendors have no monthly option at any tier. Lusha is one: no monthly billing exists on any paid tier, and its discount badges leave the seat charge identical on the struck-through and discounted prices, so the sale excludes seats. Genesys Cloud CX prices per user per month, billed annually, with a $900 annual floor. In both cases the monthly-looking number is an annual commitment divided by twelve.

lemlist offers a variant worth knowing about, listed on its own comparison table as "Monthly/Quarterly billing of annual plan". That is cash-flow relief and not optionality, and confusing the two is how a team ends up believing it can leave in month three. Read the commitment term separately from the payment schedule, always.

The auto-renewal clause is where buyers actually get hurt, and the regulators have counted it. A review by the FTC with ICPEN and the Global Privacy Enforcement Network covering 642 apps and websites in July 2024 found 81% of reviewed sites auto-renew, 70% omit how to cancel and 67% omit the notice timeline. The same body of work puts 76.0% of SaaS companies using at least one dark pattern and 66.8% using more than one. Those figures reached us through secondary coverage rather than the primary release.

The practical instruction is small and it works. Notice periods are commonly 30 to 60 days in writing. Diarise the date the day you sign, ask whether "written" means email or post, and ask who owns the sending domains. If the vendor registered them, your sending reputation does not leave with you and rebuilding it costs weeks of warmup on top of the notice period.

What this census cannot see

Nine vendors could not be read at all on the last sweep: their sites return a firewall challenge to our crawler, or their robots file names it and disallows it. Those rows are recorded as unverified rather than assumed to be hiding something, because a bot policy is not a pricing policy and conflating the two would be the exact inference this page exists to argue against.

Of the 264 records, 152 carry a verification date in August 2026, concentrated on three days of sweeping: 68 on the 12th, 38 on the 7th and 26 on the 11th. Of the 156 rows carrying a price, 118 have a date and 38 do not. Twenty-two of those 38 are voice-infrastructure rows recorded at zero because the only live question is whether the free tier still exists.

Six entries are recorded as unreachable products rather than as unread pages: Persana AI, Air.ai, Layercode, Vocode, PlayHT and Edify. An entry that is wrong about whether a product exists is worse than no entry, so those render as unreachable and their prices are frozen at the last figure we saw.

What to do with all of this

Start with the 138 tools that both publish a price and sell self-serve. That is 52% of the directory and it is enough to build any outbound stack that does not involve an enterprise contact centre. Every one of them can be priced, started and cancelled without a meeting, and the entry prices cluster tightly enough that a genuine comparison is possible.

Add the 18 that sell self-serve without publishing, because the price is four minutes away inside the product. That takes the buyable population to 156 of 264, and it is the single largest expansion of a shortlist available from this page.

Enter a sales process for the remaining 96 only when you have a specific reason that the buyable set cannot serve, and enter it with a number already in hand. The Vendr founder, who ran enterprise sales at InVision and SMB sales at HubSpot before building a company to negotiate these contracts, put the structural point on Hacker News in 2019: “As long as 'Contact Us for Enterprise Pricing' exists, pricing will be variable.”

Then check this page's arithmetic. Pick any five tools in Inbound Qualification and open their pricing pages; the claim is falsifiable in about six minutes. Every row carries the date it was read, so a vendor that has since published a price can be corrected and re-dated rather than argued about, and we would rather hear it from you than not.