7 AI Agents for Lead Generation, Priced for One Person

Lead generation has four jobs inside it. Find the companies worth approaching. Find the right person at each one. Work out whether they are worth an email at all. Send the first one, then follow it up.

Every list of AI lead generation tools I read while putting this one together assumed the same buyer: a sales team with a CRM, a data budget and somebody whose job is wiring the two together. That buyer is real, and most of this category is built for them. They are also not the person who usually asks me this question. The person who asks me is running a business on their own, or with two other people, and wants to know what the cheapest honest version looks like.

So the scope here is tight on purpose. Top of the funnel only: sourcing, enriching, qualifying, the first touch and the follow-ups after it. Demos, pipeline hygiene and closing are a different purchase, and the best AI agents for sales teams covers that half of the cycle. If you want the category explained before you shop, what an AI sales agent actually does is the primer.

Every price below came off the vendor's own pricing page in September 2026. The sources list carries the URL and the date I read each one. Prices in this category move quarterly, so treat every figure as a starting point and check the page yourself before you pay for anything.

My own product is on the list, at number one. Discount that accordingly. The comparison table sits right underneath it if you would rather start there.

How I compared them

Five questions, asked of every tool on this page. They separate these products faster than any feature grid, because the feature grids in this category all look the same.

• Which of the four jobs does it own? Sourcing, enriching, qualifying and sending are four different products wearing the same marketing.
• Who does the work? You configure a sequence and keep it alive, or somebody hands you a finished worker and you approve what it sends.
• What does one seat cost? Not the team price, not the enterprise tier. One person, one month, the number on the page.
• Is there a free tier you can finish something on? Most free tiers in this category are demos. A few of them are genuinely enough to prove an idea on two hundred rows of your own data before you spend money.
• What happens when it runs out? Credits, actions, data credits and seats all run out differently, and the difference is where the surprise invoices come from.

I read the pricing pages and the public docs myself, in September 2026, on the dates listed in the sources. I have not run a bake-off between these products and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Where a claim about how a tool behaves comes out of the vendor's own documentation, I say so in the sentence.

Quick comparison

Read from each vendor's own pricing page in September 2026, on the dates in the sources list; Lindy's was re-read on 10 October 2026. Monthly rates unless the row says otherwise. Apollo's Basic figure is the annual-billing rate its page shows by default. Gravity's row is my own product and is marked as such.

1. Gravity: best when you want the first touch done, not designed

This is my product, so weigh it accordingly. It sits first because it is the only entry on this page where the thing you buy is the finished job rather than a place to do the job.

You type the task in plain words. Find twenty-five companies that look like my last three customers, work out who runs marketing there, draft a first email for each. Gravity matches that description to an agent a builder has already made and tested, you sign in to the accounts it needs, you answer its setup questions, and it runs on a schedule.

Anything going out under your name waits for you. Approval is built into the run, so there is no setting you have to remember, and that matters more in outbound than anywhere else. The failure mode here is a hundred strangers receiving something wrong.

The catalogue is the honest limit. Gravity went live in September 2026, so the shelf is still short, and if nobody has published an agent for your exact motion yet, this is not your tool this month.

Who keeps the agent working

When a website changes shape or an API moves, the builder who published the agent fixes it. That is their job. On every other entry in this list, that job is yours, and it arrives on the morning you had planned to do something else.

Best for

A solo consultant or a three-person agency that has been meaning to do outbound for four months and has not started.

Pricing

Free to start, no card. Then Mini Pilot at $15 a month for one automated agent, or Auto Pilot at $20 a month for unlimited automated agents. Buy more usage if you run out. As of September 2026.

Free tier

Yes. Your first 3 agent runs are free, no card.

Verdict

The shortest route from "I should be doing outbound" to something actually going out on Tuesday. If the work you want back is the chase after a call, the sales call follow-up agent is the closer fit.

2. Apollo.io: contact data and sending on one invoice

Apollo is the pragmatic pick for a small team that would otherwise buy three separate things: a contact database, a sequencing tool and an enrichment tool. Basic is $49 per user a month on the annual view its pricing page shows by default, with credits metered on top.

That shape is familiar from every SaaS bill you already pay. The seat buys access and the credits buy work, so the invoice has a floor you can predict and a ceiling you cannot. For a three-person agency, do the multiplication first: three seats on Basic is $147 a month at that annual rate, which is higher than most owners have in their head when they start clicking.

The credit line under the seat price

The free plan carries 900 credits a year. That is 75 a month, and whatever a credit buys at Apollo, 75 of them is an evaluation allowance rather than a working one. If you intend to prospect every week, budget for the paid tier from day one and treat the free plan as a look around.

One practical annoyance is worth knowing before you research this yourself. Apollo's pricing page renders entirely in JavaScript, so the numbers are visible to a person with a browser and invisible to anything reading the page programmatically. In a year when buyers routinely ask an assistant to compare tools for them, Apollo is the one the assistant will get wrong.

Best for

One or two people who want the list and the sending in the same tab, without a second subscription.

Pricing

Basic at $49 per user a month on the annual view, with credits metered separately. Free plan at 900 credits a year. Read 12 September 2026.

Free tier

Yes, 900 credits a year.

Verdict

The most sensible single purchase on this page for a team of one or two, and the first one to get expensive at four.

3. Clay: the research layer everything else drinks from

Clay is a table. Each row is a company or a person, each column can call a data provider or an agent called Claygent, and Claygent goes and finds the thing no vendor sells as a field: whether they just hired a third salesperson, what the careers page implies about budget, whether the founder posts.

Most outbound that works has something like this underneath it, whether or not the person running it thinks of it as agent software. This is the layer that turns a list of companies into a reason to write to one of them.

Clay runs two meters at once. Actions and data credits are counted separately, which means there are two independent ways to run out, and the free plan demonstrates it plainly: 500 actions and 100 data credits a month, with up to 200 rows per table and unlimited seats on top.

That free plan is the most useful thing on this page for somebody working alone. Two hundred rows is enough to find out whether the question you want answered is a question Claygent can actually answer on your kind of company, which is the only test that matters before you pay anybody.

Why one plan shows two prices

Clay's plan card shows Launch at $167 a month on the annual view. Lower down the same page, the pricing FAQ says Launch starts at $185 a month. Both are correct and neither is a mistake: $167 is the annual commitment divided across twelve months, $185 is what month to month costs. Growth starts at $495 a month and Enterprise is a custom annual number.

One tier detail catches people who read 2026 coverage of Clay's account-level agents, because those sit on Launch and above. Sign up on Free expecting them and what you are testing is Claygent alone. I go further into which of Clay's two meters rewards which behaviour in the full write-up of Clay's AI agent and what it spends.

Best for

Anyone whose qualifying criterion is a sentence rather than a filter.

Pricing

Free with 500 actions and 100 data credits a month. Launch at $167 a month on annual billing, or from $185 month to month per the pricing FAQ on the same page. Growth from $495. Enterprise custom and annual. Plan names read 7 September 2026, prices re-read 14 September 2026.

Free tier

Yes, and it is the best one here.

Verdict

Start on Free, build one table of 200 rows, and only upgrade when that table has produced a reply. If it has not, the problem was never the research.

4. Regie.ai: outbound volume you can budget before the demo

Regie.ai earns its place for an unglamorous reason. It publishes a real entry price with a stated allowance attached, which puts it ahead of most of this category before anyone opens a feature list. Pro is $49 a month and carries 5,000 credits.

That works out at roughly one cent a credit, the lowest published per-credit rate among the outbound tools on this page. Credits buy different things at each vendor and do not convert across them, so treat that as a sanity check on your own forecast and nothing more.

The free allowance is 250 credits, given once. Against Pro's 5,000 a month that is five per cent of a single month, which makes it a demonstration rather than a trial. Whether $49 is cheap in practice depends entirely on how many credits your motion burns, and Regie does not owe you that forecast in advance.

It is the wrong tool entirely if your real problem is inbound. Pricing read on 12 September 2026: Pro at $49 a month with 5,000 credits, and a one-time 250-credit free allowance.

5. Lindy: for when the lead problem is actually your inbox

Lindy belongs here even though nobody sells it as a lead generation tool, because a large share of what a solo owner calls their pipeline is really inbox work. Answering the same three questions. Booking the call. Sending the thing you promised on it.

The Plus plan I read on 11 September 2026 is gone. On 10 October Lindy sold one paid plan, Team, per seat, and the page served two versions of it: $29.99 a month for 3,000 credits, or $49.99 for 5,000. Lindy's own pricing page describes runs metered in credits, and an everyday ask costs a fraction of what a research job costs, so the same allowance feels generous for a light user and thin for a heavy one. Every seat adds its credits to one shared pool, which is the detail that decides whether adding a colleague is cheap or expensive: two seats at the entry price is $59.98 or $99.98 a month.

What it will not do is source. Lindy works on what arrives, so if your problem is that nothing arrives, buy from higher up this page first and come back here when the replies start landing faster than you can answer them.

For the narrower job of getting what was said on a call into your CRM without you typing it, the meeting notes to CRM agent is the same idea with a smaller blast radius.

6. Artisan: the AI SDR you cannot price from the website

Artisan sells Ava, an AI SDR that sources, writes and sends. It is the shape of product most people picture when they hear the phrase "AI agent for lead generation": one hire, no seat count, does the whole loop while you do something else.

Its pricing page carried no entry rate when I read it on 12 September 2026. Third-party write-ups quote anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars a month, and a spread that wide is not evidence of anything except that the number comes out of a sales call sized to the buyer in front of it. I am not going to pick a figure out of that range and present it to you as research.

What to ask before the demo

Ask for a flat monthly figure and a stated volume allowance, in writing, before the call ends. Then hold that answer against Regie's $49 with 5,000 credits attached, which is the cheapest published comparison point in the same job. If what comes back is a range rather than a number, you are the variable being priced.

7. 11x: no published price, and a history worth reading first

11x sells Alice, also an AI SDR, and I cannot price this one either. 11x.ai/pricing returned an HTTP 404 on 12 September 2026, so there is not even a page on which to hide a number.

There is also a reporting history you should know before you book anything. TechCrunch reported in March 2025 that 11x had been claiming customers it did not have; the article includes the company's response, and the fair thing is to read both and form your own view. Ask for references you can actually call.

For a business at this size the practical position is short. A vendor that publishes no floor is not courting a three-person agency, and reading that as a signal and moving on costs you nothing.

What the whole prospecting loop costs one person

Here is the part the other lists skip. Take one person doing outbound seriously for a month: a hundred target companies, a contact found at each, enough research to write something that is not obviously templated, and a first email with two follow-ups. One workload, six routes through it, September 2026 prices.

Built from each vendor's published rates and allowances as read in September 2026. The $216 and $234 figures are my own arithmetic on Clay's two published Launch rates plus Apollo's annual Basic rate; Apollo's month-to-month rate is not one I read. Your own volumes will move every row.

Read the third column before the fourth. The distance between the zero row and the $216 row is not capability, it is how much of the research you buy instead of doing yourself, and how much an afternoon a week is worth to you.

The free stack is genuinely viable for one person, which is not something I would say about most software categories. It works because you ration. Apollo's 75 credits a month and Clay's 500 actions will not carry a hundred rows, so you spend them on the twenty accounts that actually matter and do the rest with a browser and a coffee. Anybody telling a solo owner they need a $200 stack to send fifty emails is selling something.

The arithmetic changes shape the moment a second person joins. Seat-priced tools multiply and meter-priced tools do not. Agencies running this loop on behalf of clients have a third problem again, and AI agents for marketing agencies covers the multi-account version of it.

Following up without burning the list

The fourth job, send the first email and then follow it up, is the only one on this page that can do lasting damage. The follow-ups go to strangers under your name, usually from the same domain you use for everything else. A tool that finds the wrong company wastes an afternoon. A cadence that ignores replies and opt-outs can cost you the inbox placement you need for everything else. The rules below hold whichever tool on this list does the sending, mine included.

Cadence and stop rules

A defensible default is three touches across roughly two weeks: day 0, day 4 and day 11. A fourth touch rarely earns its keep, and its cost lands on your sender reputation rather than on the lead. What matters more than the count is that the triggers are fixed rules the agent reads off the lead record, not judgement calls it makes in the moment:

• A reply of any kind stops the sequence and hands the thread to you. Even a one-word reply. Especially a one-word reply.
• A click on a tracked link pauses it. The lead is warm now, and the next message should come from you, not from step three of a template.
• An opt-out ends it permanently. "Unsubscribe", "remove me", "stop emailing me": the address goes on a do-not-contact list and never comes back.
• A bounce marks the address invalid. Never retry it.

For the first few weeks, have the agent draft rather than send. You approve in batches of ten or twenty, which takes a fraction of the time writing them would, and the batches show you the mistakes worth fixing in the instructions: the lead who said "try me next quarter" and got a follow-up the next week, the name spelled wrong every time. Once a run of batches goes through without edits, let one narrow path send on its own and keep the rest on approval. How to limit agent actions covers that graduation in more detail.

Five guardrails that are not optional

1. A hard cap on touches per lead, counted across every campaign, so nobody gets a sixth email because they sat on two lists.
2. Pause on any reply, with no exceptions for short or ambiguous ones.
3. Opt-out detection on every inbound message, not a weekly sweep.
4. No automatic adds from scraped or bought lists. Imports go through a person before anything is sent to them.
5. A do-not-contact check on every single send, because that list grows after the campaign was set up.

Opt-outs and the legal basics

Cold email is legal in many places if you follow the rules, and the rules apply to an agent exactly as they apply to you. This is the short version, not legal advice; check the law where your recipients are.

• United States (CAN-SPAM). The FTC is explicit that the law makes no exception for business-to-business email. Sender details must be accurate, the subject line must not deceive, every message must carry a valid physical postal address, and opt-outs must be honoured within 10 business days. Each email in violation can draw a penalty of up to $53,088.
• Canada (CASL). Canada's anti-spam law prohibits sending commercial electronic messages without the recipient's consent, which is a stricter starting point than the US.
• European Union (GDPR). Recital 47 says direct marketing "may be regarded as carried out for a legitimate interest", so B2B cold email can have a lawful basis if you document it. Article 21 gives every recipient the right to object to direct marketing at any time, and once they object, their data can no longer be used for it. That is the legal version of the opt-out rule above.

Reputation is the other rulebook, and mailbox providers enforce it on engagement rather than paperwork. Google's sender guidelines ask senders to keep the spam rate reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.10% and never reach 0.30%, and anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail accounts must support one-click unsubscribe on marketing mail. One person sending fifty emails a day is nowhere near the bulk threshold, but the spam-rate ceiling is the right number to watch anyway. Keep the volume small, and set the campaign to pause itself when bounces or complaints climb. My guide to cold email software prices the sending tools and sets out what Gmail and Yahoo ask of a cold emailer.

What the first month tends to show

Plan for three adjustments once real drafts start coming back. The tone will be off, either too clever or too generic, and both fail; tune it toward what you would write with thirty seconds to spare: short, specific, one concrete next step. Personalisation will work when the agent has a real fact to use and fall apart when it does not, so tell it to skip the personal line rather than invent one, because "hope you are well" reads worse than nothing. And sends should be scheduled for the recipient's working hours in their own time zone, not fired at whatever moment the run finishes.

Which one should you choose?

Start from which of the four jobs you are actually bad at. Most people shopping for a lead generation agent already have a list and no time to research it, or plenty of research and no discipline to send anything. Those are different purchases and buying the wrong one feels like the software failing.

If the missing piece is contact data and somewhere to send from, Apollo is the pragmatic answer at one or two seats. Watch the credit meter for the first month and watch the seat count after that.

If the missing piece is research, buy Clay and start on the free plan. Two hundred rows will tell you inside a week whether the questions you want answered are the questions Claygent can fill on your kind of company.

If you are running outbound at real volume and need a figure you can put in a forecast, Regie.ai publishes the clearest one on this page at $49 for 5,000 credits.

If the bottleneck is your own inbox, buy one Lindy seat for one month and decide at the end of it.

If a budget line and a procurement conversation are involved, Artisan and 11x are built for exactly that meeting. Get the floor in writing before it ends.

And if you would rather the job simply happened, that is the option I built, so treat this paragraph as an advertisement. You describe the task, an agent somebody already built and tested runs it, and your first 3 agent runs are free. It is the wrong choice when your motion is unusual enough that nobody has published an agent for it, which is a real limit in a catalogue that went live in September 2026.

Owner-operators fitting this in around everything else should start at AI agents for small business, which is the wider version of this question with less outbound in it.

FAQ

Sources