Artisan's AI SDR: What the Pricing Page Publishes Instead of a Price
Artisan prices its AI SDR in contacts per month rather than in currency. That substitution tells you what the company thinks it is selling, and where the risk sits.
Artisan sells an AI sales agent called Ava across three tiers. Its pricing page publishes no currency figure at all, showing approximate monthly contact volumes instead, around 2,500 on the entry tier and around 6,000 above it. Pricing is scoped in a sales conversation and sized on lead volume, mailboxes and dialer seats.
Key takeaways
- Artisan's pricing page carries no price. It publishes approximate monthly contact volumes of around 2,500 and around 6,000 for its two named tiers, with a third tier described only as custom.
- Contact volume measures capacity rather than results, so it cannot be compared directly against an agency retainer or a hire without first defining what a meeting worth having is.
- Artisan's own pages state that Ava sends in your reps' names from your own sending domains, which means the deliverability risk of the volume accrues to the buyer's domains.
- The page publishes SOC 2 Type II certification with SSO, SAML and audit logs, and names lead volume, mailboxes and dialer seats as the variables that size a plan.
Reviewed and updated August 13, 2026
Artisan's pricing page does not contain a price. What it contains instead is a pair of volume numbers: roughly 2,500 leads contacted per month on the entry tier, roughly 6,000 on the tier above it, and a third tier described only as custom. Where a figure would normally sit, the page says "Pricing scoped on your plan" and offers a link to talk to sales.
That is worth pausing on rather than complaining about, because the substitution tells you what the company thinks it is selling. The unit of the deal is contact volume, and everything else about the commercial arrangement is settled in a conversation.
A disclosure before going further. RevenueFlow runs outbound as a service and is paid on attended qualified meetings, so we compete for budget with tools like this one, though not in the same shape. Everything below comes from Artisan's own pages as they rendered on 13 August 2026.
What Artisan sells
Artisan sells an AI sales agent called Ava, which the site describes as an AI BDR. The published pitch is that Ava finds prospects, writes and sends outreach across email and social, handles replies autonomously and books meetings, with human reps stepping in for the live conversations and the calls.
The pricing page organises this into three tiers.
- Described as being for teams running their first serious outbound motion
- Every campaign type
- Autonomous replies and meeting booking
- Salesforce and HubSpot sync
- CSM support and onboarding
- Price shown as scoped on your plan
- Marked most popular on the page
- Everything in Team
- Dedicated customer success manager
- CRM setup included
- Priority support
- Price shown as scoped on your plan
- Everything in Scale
- A forward-deployed strategist who builds the rollout
- Full onboarding buildout
- Advanced security controls and audit logs
- Described as flexible plans
- No figure of any kind
Some concrete things are published across all tiers and are worth having. The platform claims access to more than 250 million verified B2B contacts. It states SOC 2 Type II certification with SSO and SAML support and audit logs, which is the specific set of words an enterprise security review will ask for. An AI dialer is offered as a per-seat add-on. The FAQ says plans are sized on lead volume, mailboxes and dialer seats, which is the closest the page comes to naming its pricing variables.
The page's own approximation, written with a tilde
Marked as the most popular option
Stated as included on every plan
Alongside SSO, SAML and audit logs
Volume is an input, not an outcome
The two headline numbers count people contacted. They do not count replies, meetings or anything a sales leader is measured on, and no published figure on the page bridges that gap.
This matters more for an AI SDR than for a human one, because contact volume is the one thing this category can scale without limit and the one thing that carries the most risk when it goes wrong. Six thousand contacts a month is a substantial sending programme. Whether it produces a good quarter or a burnt domain depends on targeting, on message quality and on how the sending is spread, and those are decisions rather than throughput.
Artisan's own page is unusually direct about where that risk lands. It states that Ava sends in your reps' names, from your own sending domains. That is the right architecture for making the outreach read as human, and it also means the deliverability consequences of the volume accrue to your domains rather than to the vendor's. Anyone evaluating a tool in this category should read that sentence twice, because the same sentence appears in some form on most of them and it is where the liability sits.
The control surface is published too, and it is better than average. The FAQ describes approving messages before they send, locking tone and calls to action, setting banned phrases, and coaching the writing. The page summarises the posture as autonomous by default and adjustable by design. A buyer who intends to use the approval step should confirm that it survives at 6,000 contacts a month, because manual approval and autonomous volume pull in opposite directions and only one of them is the product's default.
What you cannot work out from the page
Three things a buyer needs are not published anywhere on it.
The first is any price at all, so no comparison against a human SDR's fully loaded cost, against an agency retainer, or against a rival tool can be made from public information. The vendor comparison pages the site links, against 11x and against AiSDR, do not resolve this either, since a comparison written by one party is positioning rather than evidence.
The second is what happens to the volume allowance you do not use, or what happens when you exceed it. A number written with a tilde is a sizing guide, and whether it behaves as a cap, a target or a billing threshold is a contract question.
The third is the mailbox count behind the volume. The FAQ names mailboxes as a pricing variable without saying how many the tiers assume, and mailbox count is what determines whether a given monthly volume is sent gently or aggressively. Two programmes sending that monthly volume from very different numbers of inboxes are not running the same risk.
There is a fourth thing, and it is the one that decides whether the purchase works. Nothing on the page defines what a booked meeting has to be in order to count. That is not a criticism of Artisan specifically, since a software vendor is selling capability rather than outcomes and has no business defining your qualification bar. It is a warning about how the buying decision is usually framed. A team that compares an AI SDR against an agency or against a hire is comparing a tool that produces activity against services that produce meetings, and the comparison only means something once somebody has written down what a meeting worth having looks like. Do that first, then price the options against it.
Reading it against the human alternative
The reason the missing price is so awkward is that everyone evaluating this category is implicitly running one calculation: is this cheaper than a person. That calculation is harder than it looks in both directions.
On the tool side, the visible subscription is not the whole cost. Sending infrastructure, the mailboxes the FAQ names as a pricing variable, the domains they run on, and the time somebody spends steering the thing all sit on top of it, and the last of those is routinely assumed to be zero and is not. On the human side, a fully loaded SDR is considerably more than a salary once employer costs, tooling, management time and the ramp period before they are productive are counted, and any honest comparison has to build that number from the buyer's own market rather than from a benchmark found online.
What the tool genuinely changes is the shape of the risk rather than only its size. A hire is a slow, expensive commitment that fails slowly and visibly. A volume-priced agent is a fast, reversible commitment that can fail quickly and quietly by contacting several thousand of the wrong people in your own name before anyone reads the replies. Neither of those is worse in the abstract. They ask for different things from whoever is supervising, and the second one asks for more attention in the first month than most buyers plan for.
- Yes: The actual price, and which of lead volume, mailboxes and seats moves it
- Yes: How many sending mailboxes the quoted volume assumes
- Yes: Whose domains carry the sending reputation, confirmed in writing
- Yes: Whether the approval step is workable at your contracted volume
- Yes: What happens when you go over or under the volume allowance
- No: Buying on contacts contacted, which is capacity rather than an outcome
Where we differ from standard practice
Much of the advice on this page reflects how outbound is commonly run. We run it differently, and since this page sits on our site it is worth saying where the difference is and what it costs us.
- A sequence of messages to each prospect over several weeks
- Later messages often land in the same email thread
- Every contact is reached more than once, so a distracted reader gets another chance
- The later messages go only to people who did not answer the first
- Reputation cost accrues on the sending domain across everything else it sends
- One message, then that campaign is finished for that contact
- No thread replies and no bumps
- A non-responding audience becomes a new campaign with a genuinely different premise, not a reminder
- More of the work moves into targeting and into the one message
- We reach each contact less often, and that is the cost we accept
The reasoning is mechanical rather than moral. A follow-up arrives underneath a message the recipient has already seen and chosen not to answer, so it is delivered to the population most likely to mark it as spam, and the reputation cost of that lands on the sending domain across every campaign running on it. We set that cost against the replies a sequence recovers and decided the trade was not worth it. The full argument, with the numbers from our own campaigns, is in why we stopped using follow-ups.
The relevance to this category is direct. A tool sold on contact volume has every incentive to make the volume easy to consume, and the cheapest way to consume it is to reach the same people more often. Whichever tool you buy, decide that question deliberately rather than letting the default decide it, and know which domains absorb the consequence.
Who it suits
The model fits a team that already has a working motion and wants to widen it without hiring, has somebody who will own the output rather than assuming the software owns it, and is buying into a security posture the published certifications actually satisfy. The Enterprise tier's forward-deployed strategist is a real acknowledgement that the software alone does not close the gap, and that is more honest than the category's usual framing.
It fits less well if you are buying it to avoid deciding who your buyer is. Every AI SDR is a machine for executing a hypothesis faster, so a weak hypothesis arrives at more people sooner. It also fits less well if you need a published price to build a business case before you can justify a sales call, because there is not one to build on.
If you are working out where these tools sit against people and agencies, we have written up the category in AI SDR, the job boundaries in SDR vs AI SDR vs GTM engineer, and what the agents do well and badly in AI sales agent. For the human comparison, outsourced SDR pricing has the numbers. Our own terms are on the free campaign page.
Pricing and features verified as of August 2026. Verify current terms with the vendor before relying on them.
Frequently asked questions.
Frequently asked questions- How much does Artisan cost?
- Artisan does not publish a price. Its pricing page shows the phrase scoped on your plan where a figure would sit, and routes you to sales. The FAQ says plans are sized on lead volume, mailboxes and dialer seats, so those are the variables to ask about. No public comparison against a hire or an agency can be built without asking for a quote.
- What is Ava?
- Ava is the AI sales agent Artisan sells, described on its site as an AI BDR. The published capability set covers finding prospects, writing and sending outreach across email and social, handling replies autonomously and booking meetings, with human reps taking the live conversations. Artisan states that Ava sends in reps' names from the customer's own sending domains.
- What does around 2,500 leads contacted a month actually buy?
- It is a capacity figure, not an outcome. It counts people contacted rather than replies or meetings, and no published figure on the page connects the two. Whether that volume produces a good quarter depends on targeting, message quality and how the sending is spread across mailboxes, which are decisions rather than throughput.
- Should we buy an AI SDR instead of hiring one?
- It depends on what you are trying to de-risk. A hire is a slow, expensive commitment that fails slowly and visibly. A volume-priced agent is fast and reversible, and can fail quickly and quietly by reaching thousands of the wrong people in your name. Decide the qualification standard first, then price both options against it.
About the author.
B2B cold email experts helping companies generate qualified leads through done-for-you outreach campaigns.
RevenueFlow Team
Explore more.
Ready to scale your outreach?
We build GTM engines that book real meetings. See the receipts.
Related articles.
SDR Outsourcing Companies: What Each One Publishes About How They Charge
Three of eleven SDR outsourcing companies publish a price per head. None publishes a price per meeting. What each puts on its own pricing page, and why the unit matters.
Cold Calling Sales Training: Diagnose Before You Buy It
Calling results come from the list, the offer and the execution. Training reaches the third, and the third is frequently not the one that broke.
Contract SDRs: When Temporary Capacity Is the Right Shape
Contracting sits between employing a rep and buying a managed outcome, and the defining feature is that the management stays with you. Where that trade is worth making.
The SDR Manager Role: What the Job Owns and When to Hire One
Promoting your best rep fails often enough to be predictable, because the two jobs share a vocabulary and almost no daily work. What the manager owns that the rep cannot.
SDR Meaning: What a Sales Development Rep Actually Does
SDR stands for sales development representative, and the defining fact is that they sell nothing. That explains the comp plan, the metrics and the burnout.
Cold Calling Prospecting: Start From the Coverage Ceiling
One caller covers accounts in the low hundreds a week, not the low thousands. That ceiling decides whether calling is your coverage channel or a sample.