The short answer
Artisan does not publish a price for Ava.
We loaded artisan.co/pricing in a browser on 1 September 2026 and read the fully rendered page, clicking through both audience toggles, Startups and Businesses & Enterprises. There is no currency figure anywhere on it, in either state. Every tier carries the same line, “Pricing scoped on your plan”, above a Talk to sales button.
We say “in a browser” and “both toggles” deliberately. Pricing pages routinely hide half their content behind a control, and a plain request reads only the visible state. Artisan is not that case. The figures are genuinely absent.
The thing most write-ups get wrong
Artisan is routinely described in per-seat terms. That framing will mislead your budget, and Artisan states the real model plainly in its own pricing FAQ:
Plans are sized to your lead volume, mailboxes, and dialer seats. Request pricing and we’ll build the right plan with you.
Leads first. The only genuinely per-seat item on the entire page is the AI dialer add-on. If you walk into the call planning to buy “three seats of Ava”, you are using the wrong unit and the quote will not resemble what you expected.
This matters more than it sounds. Two teams with identical headcount can land on very different plans. A four-rep team running narrow, high-value ABM into 800 accounts a month sits in a different band from a four-rep team pushing 6,000 contacts. Under a per-seat model those look the same. Under Artisan’s actual model they are not close.
The plan structure Artisan does publish
The tiers are scoped by outbound volume, and the volumes are printed on the page.
| Plan | Leads contacted per month | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| Team | ~2,500 | The full platform, for a first serious outbound motion |
| Scale (most popular) | ~6,000 | Dedicated CSM, CRM setup included, priority support |
| Enterprise | Custom volume | Forward-deployed strategist, full onboarding |
Every plan, including the entry one, includes the whole platform: every campaign type, autonomous replies and meeting booking, 250M+ verified B2B contacts, Salesforce and HubSpot sync, and CSM support with onboarding.
That is unusual and worth noting. There is no feature-gated entry tier here. What you buy more of as you move up is volume and service, not capability. In a category where the entry plan is normally stripped of the thing you actually wanted, this is a point in Artisan’s favour even though the prices are hidden.
What actually determines your quote
From the model Artisan publishes, three variables set the number.
Leads contacted per month. The primary meter. Work out your real monthly contact volume before the call, not your rep count.
Mailboxes. Named explicitly in the pricing model and a common source of quiet expansion. Volume outbound needs sending capacity, and sending capacity is counted.
Dialer seats. The one per-seat element, and an add-on rather than part of the base.
Everything else on the page is included, so these three are the negotiation.
Why we are not quoting a figure
Numbers for Artisan do circulate. We looked at them and they do not agree with each other.
| Source type | 2026 figure in circulation |
|---|---|
| Low-end published estimate | Around $280 a month |
| Mid-range published estimates | $1,000 to $2,500 a month |
| Higher published estimates | $1,500 to $3,000 a month |
| Top-end published estimates | $2,000 to $5,000 a month |
That is a spread of nearly twenty times between the lowest and highest published estimate. Several of those sources also describe Artisan as per-seat, which its own pricing page contradicts, which tells you something about how carefully the figures were gathered.
A range that wide is not a price. It is a guess with a dollar sign in front of it. We would rather give you the structure the vendor actually publishes and let you get a real quote than print a number with a good chance of being wrong by an order of magnitude.
If you receive a quote and are willing to share its shape, we will publish it, attributed and dated.
The questions to ask on the call
Artisan runs a 30-minute demo and scopes a plan with you against your ICP and current stack. Go in with these five.
What lead volume is this quote priced at, and what happens if we exceed it? Volume is the meter, so the overage behaviour is the most important term in the contract.
How many sending mailboxes are included, and what does each extra one cost? Mailboxes are named in the model and are where quotes quietly grow.
Is the AI dialer in or out of this number? It is an add-on and it is per seat, so it scales on a different axis from everything else.
What is the contract term, and is monthly available? The pricing page does not state contract length. Get it in writing rather than assuming.
What does this cost in year two? Ask before you sign, not at renewal.
How Artisan compares on transparency
Quote-only is the norm in the AI SDR category rather than the exception, so Artisan is not an outlier for hiding the number. What separates it from the worst of the category is that it publishes the volume bands and the complete feature list, so you can work out which tier you belong in before you speak to anyone. Several competitors publish neither, which leaves you unable to prepare at all.
If published pricing is itself a requirement for your finance team, that rules out most of this category rather than Artisan specifically.
For what the product does, where the CRM depth pays off and where the marketing oversells it, see our Artisan review. For the wider category, see best AI SDR tools.
Artisan has now removed its figures entirely
When we last checked, Artisan published no price and the page pointed you to a call. On 4 September 2026 we loaded artisan.co/pricing again and read the fully rendered page: 5,656 characters, zero currency figures, with the plan cards now reading “Pricing scoped on your plan” and “Custom”.
So the direction of travel is away from disclosure, not toward it. That vindicates the decision not to publish an estimate here, and it is worth stating plainly: any article quoting a specific Artisan price is quoting something the vendor does not publish.
What the page does still tell you
The structure survives even though the numbers do not. Artisan sells a customised plan built around pipeline needs, offers an AI dialer as a per-seat add-on, and includes a white-glove rollout with CSM support and guided onboarding on every plan. That last point has a cost implication: a vendor that bundles rollout support is usually pricing for a longer contract and a higher entry commitment.
Where Artisan sits on the transparency spectrum
This is not a vendor-specific complaint. The category spans everything from full published rate cards to no pricing page at all.
| Vendor | Publishes figures? | What you can work out before a call |
|---|---|---|
| Apollo.io | Yes, all tiers and both cycles | Everything, including credit allowances |
| Lavender | Yes, all tiers | Everything, including free-tier limits |
| Clay | Yes, but on a credit slider | Cost at a chosen credit volume, not a flat tier price |
| Gong | No, model only | The shape of the bill, not the size |
| Artisan | No, and it removed them | Nothing |
| Salesloft | No, no pricing page at all | Nothing |
Artisan now sits at the closed end. Our Cognism pricing analysis covers what you can still work out when a vendor publishes packaging but no price, and Apollo pricing shows what the open end looks like.
What the rest of this market charges, vendor by vendor
A table gives you the number. What decides your bill is the meter behind it and the limit that binds first. Here is each comparable vendor to Artisan, read from their own pricing page on 4 September 2026.
Apollo.io, from $49 per seat, and it publishes the allowances too
Apollo is the transparency benchmark in this category. Basic is $49 per seat per month billed annually and $65 billed monthly, Professional $79 and $99, Organization $119 and $149 with a three-seat minimum, plus a free tier at $0. Crucially it also publishes the credit allowance, 30,000 per seat per year on Basic, which almost nobody else does. That means you can divide the allowance by your real monthly reveal volume and know whether the plan fits before speaking to anyone.
Lavender, from free to $89 a seat, and free for students and jobseekers
Lavender publishes every tier: Basic free forever but capped at five emails analysed a month, Starter $27, Individual Pro $45 and Team $89 per seat, all billed annually. Note the URL, because lavender.ai/pricing now returns a 404 after the company split into two products. It also gives the Email Coach away free to students, jobseekers and bootstrapped founders, which is unusually generous and worth knowing if you hire from a graduate pipeline.
Instantly and Smartlead, published, and metered on sending
Instantly and Smartlead both publish figures openly. For cold email tooling the binding constraint is usually monthly sending or active-lead volume rather than seats, so a plan can look generous per user and still stop you at the volume your campaign needs. Smartlead runs a working monthly and annual toggle that changes every figure, so check which state you are reading.
Clay, published but on a slider
Clay publishes real numbers, but they sit on a credit slider with a monthly and annual toggle marked “Save 10%”, so the figure changes as you move the credit volume. Any article quoting a single flat Clay price has taken one position on that slider and presented it as the price. Always pair a Clay figure with the credit volume it assumes, or it cannot be compared to anything.
Cognism, no price, but it publishes the packaging
Cognism publishes no figure in any currency. It does publish that Standard and Pro both include five seats, which is a floor worth knowing, and that its credits model only spends a credit again if a contact changes jobs. A two-person team should expect to be quoted for five.
Gong, no price, but it publishes the formula
Gong publishes no figure either, but it does publish the model: licences priced per user plus a separate platform fee based on the number of users supported. Two components, both scaling with headcount, which at least lets you model the shape of the bill.
ZoomInfo, Outreach and Salesloft publish nothing at all
ZoomInfo renders over 12,000 characters of pricing page with no currency figure anywhere. Outreach sets out packaging but no numbers, and note the domain moved from outreach.io. Salesloft has gone furthest: its pricing URL now redirects to a page titled “Talk to Sales”, so there is no pricing page at all. Artisan has also removed its figures, its cards now reading “Pricing scoped on your plan”.
What a stack actually costs at three team sizes
Per-seat figures compound faster than people expect. Here is the annual bill for the vendors that publish, at the sizes teams actually buy, using our arithmetic on their own published rates.
| Team size | Apollo Basic, $49 | Apollo Professional, $79 | Lavender Individual Pro, $45 | Lavender Team, $89 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 seats | $1,764 | $2,844 | $1,620 | $3,204 |
| 5 seats | $2,940 | $4,740 | $2,700 | $5,340 |
| 10 seats | $5,880 | $9,480 | $5,400 | $10,680 |
| 25 seats | $14,700 | $23,700 | $13,500 | $26,700 |
Use these as the number a quote-only vendor has to beat
None of the enterprise vendors will give you a figure before a call. Walking in with a published alternative priced at your exact seat count changes the conversation, because it puts a real number in the room that you can verify and they cannot dispute. It also gives you a credible walk-away, which is the only leverage that reliably moves an enterprise quote.
Watch the tier jump, not the entry price
The step from Apollo Basic to Professional is $30 per seat per month, which at ten seats is $3,600 a year. Teams get this wrong in both directions: upgrading early for features nobody requested, or staying on the lower tier while several people work around a gap that costs more in time than the upgrade costs in money. Price the workaround before you refuse the upgrade.
What it costs to leave, which nobody quotes
Switching cost is why teams stay on tools they have outgrown. Three things determine how locked in you are, and all three are answerable during procurement.
Your data, and which parts of it come back
Contact records usually export cleanly. What often does not is the enrichment you paid for, the activity history, custom fields and the sequence performance data that tells you what actually worked. Ask specifically what a full export contains, in what format, and whether revealed contacts remain usable after the contract ends.
Sequences and templates are rebuild work
Cadences, templates, snippets and scoring rules represent months of iteration and rarely transfer between platforms. That is real staff time to rebuild, and it is the cost most often left out of a switching business case.
The integrations multiply the effort
Count every connected system before you sign, not when you leave: CRM, calendar, dialler, enrichment providers, data warehouse. Each one is work to disconnect and reconnect elsewhere, and the count is almost always higher than anyone remembers.
Running the evaluation so the quote means something
Normalise every quote before you compare
Ask each vendor, Artisan included, for the same seat count, the same term, implementation quoted separately, every add-on itemised, and any usage meter stated with its included allowance and top-up rate. A blended annual figure is not comparable to anything and vendors know it.
Bring your own data to the demo
Vendor demos run on datasets chosen because the product handles them well. Ask to load your own: a messy account list, a call on a poor line, a technical conversation full of your product jargon. How a tool performs on your actual data is what decides whether reps adopt it, and it is invisible in a scripted walkthrough.
Test the thing people will do fifty times a day
Dashboards demo beautifully and get opened rarely. The feature that decides adoption is the one used constantly: finding a contact, building a list, locating a moment in a call. Time that specific task during the evaluation and count the clicks.
Agree the expansion price before you need it
Seat creep is the standard overrun in this category. Agree in writing what an additional seat costs, and whether the discount you negotiated applies to seats added mid-term. Discovering it does not is how a good first-year deal becomes an expensive second year.
Cap the renewal in the first contract
At renewal the vendor knows your usage, your dependency and your switching cost, and with no public rate card you have nothing to anchor against. A capped uplift stated as a percentage is worth more than a larger first-year discount, and it is only negotiable while you still have a choice.
How we checked this
We loaded artisan.co/pricing in a real browser on 1 September 2026, waited for the page to render fully, and clicked both audience toggles, because a plain fetch reads only the visible state of a toggled page. We recorded zero currency figures in either state. The tier names, lead volumes, included features and the quoted pricing-model sentence are taken verbatim from that page. The comparison figures above are published third-party estimates, labelled as such, and none of them come from Artisan. This is a pricing page rather than a review of the product, and we did not run a hands-on trial for it.
Written by
FazFaz is the founder of AIToolsBakery. Some tools here are tested hands on. Others are assessed from vendor documentation and pricing verified on the live page, and every review says which one it is. Sponsors can buy a position in a guide. They cannot buy the score, the criticism, or silence about a better option.
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