AI Agent Pricing Index 2026: 16 Platforms, Checked Monthly

Every comparison post in this category quotes a price. Most quote it once, on the day it was written, and never look again. A quarter later the figure is wrong and the post still ranks.

Three of my own posts did exactly that. They quoted prices that had moved within a quarter of publishing, and I only found out when a reader emailed me. The monthly re-read below exists so the correction happens on a schedule instead of by embarrassment.

This page is the repair I wanted for my own writing. One row per tool: starting paid price, free tier, what the meter counts, what the first paid plan includes, and a link to that tool's dated price history. As of 15 September 2026 it covers 16 AI agent and automation platforms.

Every figure was read on the vendor's own pricing page, on that date, at the URL listed in the sources at the bottom. No estimates. No averages.

Behind the table sits a longer record: 314 archived snapshots since January 2024, grouped into 97 distinct price periods. That is how a row can say when a price last moved.

Copy it. That is the point.

The index is licensed CC BY 4.0, so any writer can lift the rows into their own comparison and link back here. I would rather see my numbers in a competitor's post than watch another invented figure spread. For context around them, cheapest AI agent platforms and the glossary sit one click away.

The index

Prices read on each vendor's pricing page on 15 September 2026; annual-billing prices where the page defaults to them. A "page figure" tag means the figure is on the page but the plan mapping is my read; "not published" means the page shows no price. "Last price change seen" is the month the plan-price set changed in the monthly Wayback Machine captures, with how many captures exist and where the archive stops; it links to the dated history with archived sources. Where a vendor prices in euros the figure is kept in euros. Per-seat prices are marked. Tools whose page shows no figure are listed as not published rather than guessed. Lindy's row was re-read on 10 October 2026.

Two labels in that table carry a precise meaning. A row reads not published when the vendor's page showed no figure at all on the date it was read, because the plan sits behind a sign-in or a contact form. A row reads first paid tier on the page when the figure is printed but the vendor does not tie it to one named plan, so the mapping is the reader's to make, not mine. Both labels exist so a gap in the record looks like one.

Each tool's row links to its dated history page in the last column; Make and Gravity have too few captures for one yet.

Voice agent platforms

Voice is the first category added to this index since publication, and it bills on a unit none of the rows above use: the talk minute. Five platforms below, every figure read on the vendor's own pricing page on 4 October 2026. They sit in a separate table and are not counted in the 16, because the unit is different and because none of them has a price history here yet.

That second reason is the honest limit on this table. Every row above carries a month and a capture count because monthly Wayback Machine snapshots sit behind it. These five are a first capture. The last column says exactly that rather than implying a price has held steady. Ask again in November.

One note before the table. ElevenLabs showed a first-month promotion on the day I read it, 83% off, labelled until 18 October. This index records list prices, so the row reads $6 a month.

Prices read on each vendor's pricing page on 4 October 2026 with a desktop user agent. "Not published" carries the same meaning here as in the main index: the page showed no figure. On Synthflow the self-serve section did not render, so its self-serve tiers are unknown rather than absent, and the $30,000 a year figure is the enterprise floor printed on the page. "Last price change seen" reads as a first capture on all five rows, because this is their first appearance in the index and no archived history sits behind them yet. Vapi's figure is a range rather than a price, because the bill depends on which model, voice and telephony you pick; the component rates beside it are the ones printed on the page.

Bundled rate or assembled components

Bland quotes one number that covers the stack. Vapi quotes each piece and leaves the addition to you. For 1,000 minutes a month that is about $140 on Bland's Start rate against about $40 to $87 on Vapi.

The Vapi end of that depends entirely on which model you point it at. The model component alone runs from $0.0077 to $0.0452 a minute on the rates printed on its page, nearly sixfold. Two teams on the same platform, with the same minute count, can land on very different invoices, and neither of them is being overcharged.

Retell sits between the two. The rate is itemised, but its own calculator prints a worked total: $0.11 a minute, made of model $0.04, voice infrastructure $0.055, text to speech $0.015 and telephony at $0.00. A vendor that does the addition for you on its own page is the useful habit in this category.

What Bland says about Vapi and Retell

Bland's own pricing FAQ makes the bundled-versus-assembled argument about its rivals, and it belongs on this page as Bland's claim rather than as a finding of this index. Bland writes: "Their advertised per-minute rate is the platform fee only. Vapi lists $0.05/min and Retell lists about $0.07/min for their voice infrastructure. You then pay separately for the LLM, speech-to-text..."

Two things to hold about that. The structural point matches what the pages show: Vapi does itemise its components, and Retell does price model, voice infrastructure, speech to text and telephony as separate lines. The specific figures did not match my own read. I could not find a flat $0.05 a minute platform fee anywhere on vapi.ai/pricing on 4 October 2026, and Retell's own sample build puts its voice infrastructure at $0.055 a minute rather than about $0.07. A competitor's summary of a rival's price is a lead to check, never a source to quote.

Monthly minute buckets punish under-use

ElevenLabs Agents is the one row here that sells minutes in a monthly bucket instead of by the minute. Pro is $99 a month for 1,238 minutes. Finish the bucket and that is $0.080 a minute. Use 250 of it and the same $99 is $0.396 a minute, nearly five times its own full-bucket rate.

The bucket is not the problem. Forecasting is. A per-minute platform charges you for what you used; a bucket charges you for what you planned. Take the bucket when the call volume is already known, and read the minute counts on the page literally, because they are 75, 275, 1,238, 3,738 and 12,375 rather than round numbers.

Two companion posts carry what this section leaves out. AI voice agent runs the full costing of these five platforms, minute by minute, on the same figures as the table above. AI receptionist covers the managed answering services, which are bought as a finished service rather than as a platform. Those services are deliberately not in this index: mixing a per-seat answering subscription into a per-minute table would break the unit semantics the rest of the page depends on.

How to read the units

The number on a pricing card tells you less than the unit underneath it. What the plan counts decides the invoice. A $12 plan and a $16 plan are 33% apart on the card, yet on a four-step flow the cheaper one runs out first: both carry 10,000 credits, and 1,500 runs costs 6,000 Make credits against 1,500 Activepieces credits. Nobody publishes that conversion, so every "cheapest" list in this category is comparing labels.

Three families cover the workflow platforms, and one workload separates them: 1,500 runs a month of a flow with four billable action steps. Voice adds a fourth unit, the talk minute, and it sits at the end of this section.

Zapier and Make count every action

Zapier charges one task per step, and more for AI steps. Make charges one credit per module action. Under both, four billable action steps across 1,500 runs costs 6,000 units a month. Add two steps and the same 1,500 runs cost 9,000. Zapier does not bill the trigger, filter or path steps, so a four-step Zap with a trigger bills three tasks a run (4,500 a month), while Make bills the trigger module too, so its 6,000 stands.

Zapier's Professional plan starts at $19.99 a month on annual billing, on a slider beginning at 750 tasks, so 6,000 tasks sits well above the floor. Make's Core plan carries 10,000 credits on the US list, so the same workload fits inside it. Make is the thinnest row in the index: two archived captures exist, January 2024 and February 2025, and they match. That is absence of evidence, not evidence of stability. Zapier pricing explained unpacks what a task really is.

Per run or execution: n8n, Activepieces, Pipedream

One unit per whole run here, whatever the step count. The same workload costs 1,500 n8n executions, 1,500 Activepieces credits and 1,500 Pipedream workflow executions. Four steps or fourteen, the number is identical.

n8n Starter is €20 a month billed annually and includes 2,500 executions, so the workload fits the entry plan. Activepieces Plus is $16 a month billed yearly for 10,000 credits, then $0.007 a credit. Pipedream's first paid tier on the page is $29 a month, and its credits track compute time, so a slow step costs more than a fast one at the same run count.

What does a seat or a flat plan actually buy?

It buys a person's access, with the usage pooled behind it. Lindy is $29.99 per seat a month for 3,000 credits, or $49.99 for 5,000, depending on which version of its pricing page loads (re-read 10 October 2026), and one task can draw 2 credits or 1,000 depending on the work. Run count barely predicts that bill. Task weight does.

Gumloop is $37 a month for 20,000 credits, drawn down at the list cost of each task's tokens, compute and tool calls, plus an 8% orchestration fee on that cost that rises to 16% when you bring your own model keys. Work that percentage out before you move anything high-volume across.

1,500 runs of a four-step flow is 6,000 node runs against Gumloop's 20,000 credits on Pro. On Lindy the same runs at 2 to 250 credits each land anywhere from 3,000 to 375,000 credits against a 3,000-credit Team seat (5,000 on the $49.99 version), so the credit-per-task range is the number to check before comparing Lindy on price.

Gravity is the flat end of the family: Mini Pilot at $15 a month, or Auto Pilot at $20 a month, with usage included. The first 3 agent runs are free, no card, and you buy more usage if you run out. My product, so read the row with that bias attached: 1,500 runs of a four-step job does not move the invoice.

The same job priced five ways, across per execution, per step, per run and per seat, is in 9 best n8n alternatives. When a vendor here shuts down the same arithmetic decides where its customers go, as the Relay.app alternatives post worked through in September 2026.

Talk minutes: the rate on the card may not be the bill

Voice platforms count talk minutes, and the talk minute is the one unit in this index where the advertised rate is often a component rate rather than the whole charge. Bland folds the model, speech to text and text to speech into a single per-minute number. Vapi prices each of those separately and expects you to add them up. Both are honest. Neither is comparable to the other on the headline figure.

So the question to put to a voice vendor is not how much a minute costs. It is what sits inside the minute. The arithmetic, and where each of the five lands, is in the voice table above.

Change log

A change-log entry is one dated, sourced sentence about a single move: what changed on which vendor's page, in which month, with a link to the archived snapshot behind it. No commentary on why.

1. 27 October 2026: Lindy, the scripted read again saw the $29.99 Team version (3,000 credits) while a browser load of the pricing page showed $49.99 a month for 5,000 credits each, top-ups $10 per 1,000 credits, so the page serves both versions to different loads, as on 10 October; the starting price a browser visitor sees is unchanged, per our 27 October snapshot (source)
2. 22 October 2026: Lindy, the $29.99 Team version and its 3,000-credit tier no longer appear anywhere on the page; Team is $49.99 per user a month for 5,000 credits, top-ups $10 per 1,000 credits (starting price unchanged from 13 Oct), per our 22 October snapshot (source)
3. 22 October 2026: Taskade, the $5, $20 and $50 top-up packs are no longer listed; the page now describes auto top-up of up to $1,000 at a time, and shows yearly totals ($120, $300, $1,200, $3,000) under the $10, $25, $100 and $250 monthly-equivalent prices, per our 22 October snapshot (source)
4. 13 October 2026: Lindy, the page served one Team card on both the scripted read and a browser load: $49.99 a month per user for 5,000 credits, with Free ($50 in credits, 7 days) and Enterprise; the $29.99 for 3,000 credits version seen on 10 October was not served (source)
5. 10 October 2026: Lindy, the Plus, Pro and Max plan names are gone from the page; one paid card, Team, served two versions across 13 loads: $29.99 for 3,000 credits per user, or $49.99 with a credit dropdown defaulting to 5,000. The former $99.99 (15,000) and $199.99 (35,000) price points now sit as dropdown steps on the Team card (source)
6. 6 October 2026: Lindy, free trial restated as $50 in free credits that last 7 days with no card; paid plans unchanged at $29.99, $99.99 and $199.99 a month per user (3,000, 15,000 and 35,000 credits). The pricing page now labels the paid tier Team rather than Plus and lists Free, Team and Enterprise cards (source)
7. 22 September 2026: Taskade, Enterprise lost its published price: the card read $250 a month with a self-serve Get Enterprise button on 1 September 2026 and now reads Custom with a Contact sales button. Free, Pro, Business and Max are unchanged at $0, $10, $25 and $100 a month on annual billing. The page's own Offer structured data still carried the old $250 a month ($3,000 a year) figure when we checked (source) Read the write-up.
8. 14 September 2026: Relay.app, closed for paying customers (free accounts ended 15 August 2026); no longer tracked (source)
9. 1 July 2026: Zapier, the page's plan-price set moved from $13/$33/$66 style annual figures to $13.33/$19.99/$33.33 style figures (monthly-equivalent display), per our July snapshot (source)
10. 1 October 2025: Zapier, annual-billing figures ($13, $33, $66 a month) appeared next to the monthly ones on the page, per our October 2025 snapshot (source)
11. 1 July 2025: Activepieces, the page's plan set changed to $0, $25 and $150 a month, per our July 2025 snapshot; by September 2026 Plus is $16 a month yearly with a per-credit overage (source)
12. 4 April 2025: n8n, a €60 figure joined the page's plan set alongside €20, €24 and €50, per our April 2025 snapshot (source)

The weekly watch finds these by fetching each tracked pricing page, extracting the plan figures on it, and comparing that set with the last one on file. A different set raises a flag. Nothing is logged until somebody opens both snapshots side by side, because a discount ribbon and a price cut look identical to a script.

Method

Here is exactly what produces the table, so you can decide how far to trust it.

The current row comes off the vendor's own pricing page. Every figure was read on 15 September 2026 at the URL listed in the sources. Where a page defaults to annual billing, that is the figure recorded, and the row says so. Euro prices stay in euros, with no conversion applied.

The history comes from monthly Wayback Machine snapshots. Up to one capture per tool per month, wherever the archive has one. That comes to 314 snapshots across the 16 tools, unevenly spread: 32 for Taskade back to January 2024, 2 for Make, and nothing in the last eight months for Make, Bardeen or Voiceflow.

A script does the extraction, not the judgement. It pulls the plan figures printed on each archived page, groups consecutive snapshots that share a figure set into one period, and dates the boundary where the set changes. That produced 97 price periods across the 16 tools.

A person reads every flagged change before it enters the index. That is me, most months. Extractors happily pick up banner offers and unrelated numbers, so an automated diff is a prompt to go and look.

Two things this method refuses to do. It does not guess a price when the page hides one behind a sign-in or a sales form, which is why four rows carry a label where a number would go. And it does not publish average pricing, because the average of four entry plans is a figure nobody is charged.

One honest limit, stated plainly: I read the pages, and nothing here is a test of the products. This index tells you what each vendor charges and what they count. Whether the thing works is a different question.

Use this data

The rows are free to reuse, including commercially, including by companies listed in the table.

If you maintain a comparison post of your own, the history link is the durable thing to borrow. Prices here move two or three times a year. A dated link survives that; a hardcoded $19.99 does not.

Corrections are welcome, and early ones are best. If a vendor's page shows something different from a row here, the fix lands in the next monthly refresh with a change-log line. Corrections: support@gravity.fast, with the vendor page and the date you read it. Gravity's own pricing page is held to the same standard as the other 15.

FAQ

Sources