Artisan pricing

About

Artisan is an AI sales-automation company whose flagship product is Ava, an autonomous AI Business Development Representative (BDR/SDR). Ava finds and enriches B2B leads, runs deep web research, writes personalized outreach, sends multi-step campaigns across email and phone, handles replies and objections, and books meetings — replacing or augmenting the work of a human outbound rep. The company positions Ava explicitly as a hire (“Pay a fraction of a human BDR”), naming its paid tiers after job seniority levels rather than software seats.

Artisan sells primarily to startups, SMBs, and mid-market sales teams that want to automate top-of-funnel pipeline generation, with a sales-led Enterprise motion for larger accounts that need dedicated implementation, security controls, and custom credit volumes. It competes with both legacy outbound-data tools (Apollo, ZoomInfo, Clay) and the emerging wave of AI SDR agents.

Founded in 2023 by Jaspar Carmichael-Jack (CEO, 23 at the time of the Series A) and Sam Stallings (a former IBM product manager), Artisan went through Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch. It raised a $2.3M pre-seed, an $11.5M seed in September 2024 (led by angel investor Oliver Jung), and a $25M Series A in April 2025 led by Glade Brook Capital, with Y Combinator, HubSpot Ventures, Day One Ventures, and Fellows Fund participating. At the Series A the company reported roughly $5M ARR, around 250 customers, and 35 employees (hiring 22 more). Artisan is best known outside pricing circles for its October 2024 “Stop Hiring Humans” billboard campaign in San Francisco — a deliberately provocative growth play the company credits with lifting its local brand recognition from 5% to 70%.

Pricing summary : How Artisan blends a subscription tier with a usage credit pool

Artisan uses a hybrid model that pairs a fixed monthly subscription tier with a usage-metered credit pool, plus separately-billed sending infrastructure. It has three dimensions:

1. Subscription tier (the “hire”): Free ($0/mo), Intern ($250/mo billed annually or $280/mo monthly), and Employee ($600/mo billed annually or $660/mo monthly), plus a custom-quote Enterprise tier. Each tier unlocks a different feature set (campaigns, CRM syncs, integrations) and a baseline credit allocation.
2. Credit pool (the usage meter): Each tier includes a monthly credit allocation — 300 (Free), 12K (Intern), 30K (Employee), custom (Enterprise). Credits are spent per action: email enrichment costs 2 credits, phone enrichment 10, website-visitor de-anonymization 4, an autonomous reply 2, and a full end-to-end campaign roughly 22 credits per prospect. Customers can buy additional credits instantly when the pool runs low.
3. Sending infrastructure + add-ons (billed in dollars): Mailboxes and phone numbers are billed separately in dollars outside the credit pool, and the human power dialer is an add-on at $67/seat/mo on annual billing ($75/seat/mo monthly).

This is a hybrid pricing model layered on a freemium entry point, with the usage layer expressed as credit-based billing.

What makes this different: Artisan frames the subscription tier as employing an AI worker (Intern → Employee → Enterprise) rather than buying seats, and binds the usage meter to outcomes — every tier advertises an expected range of positive replies per month alongside its credit allocation.

Pricing by product

Ava (self-serve plans)

Ava (Enterprise plan)

Credit costs (the usage meter)

Sales motions across products: PLG / self-serve for Free, Intern, and Employee; sales-led for the contact-gated Enterprise tier.

Hidden costs : what teams actually pay beyond the headline tier fee

The headline tier fee is only part of an Artisan bill. Three things sit outside it: extra credits bought when the pool runs dry, sending infrastructure (mailboxes and phone numbers) billed in dollars, and the per-seat human power dialer. Because an end-to-end campaign runs roughly 20–22 credits per prospect contacted, the included allocation is the real volume cap — and it is easy to under-size.

Archetype 1 — a startup on Intern running cold email at scale. Intern includes 12K credits/mo, which at ~20 credits per cold-outbound (no-phone) prospect covers about 600 prospects. A team that wants to reach ~1,000 prospects/mo overshoots the pool and has to buy more credits, plus mailboxes to send that volume without burning deliverability.

So a team that picked the $250 “Intern” tier on its headline number can land closer to $550/mo once volume and infrastructure are real — more than double the sticker price.

Archetype 2 — a sales team on Employee adding phone outreach and a dialer. Employee includes 30K credits/mo. Phone-enabled campaigns are heavier (phone enrichment alone is 10 credits/prospect on top of email), and a rep working the dials needs the power-dialer add-on.

The point is the same in both cases: the credit pool and the dollar-billed sending infrastructure, not the tier fee, drive the real bill. (Extra-credit and infrastructure figures above are estimates — Artisan does not publish a public per-credit top-up rate or per-mailbox price.)

Want to estimate your own Artisan bill? Use the Artisan pricing calculator to model your monthly cost based on tier, credit usage, and sending infrastructure.

Pricing evolution : from named-hire tiers to an outcome-anchored credit pool

Artisan’s pricing has swung through three distinct models in roughly two years: public lead-volume tiers, a fully sales-gated catalogue, and now a public credit pool. That is unusually high churn for such a young company, and it tracks the product’s own re-platforming (Ava → Ava 2.0).

Cadence

Tracked range: 2024-03 to 2026-06 (17 Wayback snapshots). Quarters not listed showed no change from the model in force at the time (gated 2024 Q4 through 2026 Q1).

Notable changes

• 2024-03 — Earliest captured rate card: lead-volume tiers Accelerate ($225/mo, $187 annual; 750 leads/~2,250 emails), Supercharge ($450/mo; 1,500 leads, “Most Popular”), Blitzscale ($875/mo; 3,000 leads), Custom (unlimited). Overage $40 per additional 100 leads.
• 2024-08 — Public prices removed entirely; the page became a “Request Pricing” catalogue stating Artisan is “priced based on the volume of leads you are doing outreach to,” split across BDR and AE seats. This gated model held through 2026-01.
• 2024-10 — “Stop Hiring Humans” billboard campaign launches in San Francisco (timed to TechCrunch Disrupt) — a growth event, not a price change, but the moment that defined Artisan’s public profile.
• 2025-04-09 — $25M Series A led by Glade Brook Capital; a site-wide funding banner appears, but pricing stays gated.
• 2026-05 — Ava 2.0 ships and the public rate card returns for the first time since mid-2024, now built on a credit pool with named Intern/Employee tiers and “Get early access” CTAs. Launch credit costs: website-visitor identification 5 credits, end-to-end campaign ~25/prospect.
• 2026-06 — CTAs switch from “early access” to “Start 30-day trial,” the “$300 free credits” trial banner returns, and two credit costs ease (website visitor 5→4, end-to-end campaign ~25→~22/prospect).

The model whiplash in detail

Artisan is a rare case of a company cycling through three pricing philosophies before reaching meaningful scale. The 2024 lead-volume tiers ($225/$450/$875) were a clean, transparent SMB rate card — but Artisan abandoned them within months, hiding everything behind “Request Pricing” as it leaned into a sales-led, lead-volume-negotiated motion. For roughly 18 months the pricing page carried no public number at all, even as the $25M Series A landed. The public credit-pool relaunch in 2026 is effectively a return to self-serve, re-expressed in the credit-based billing vocabulary that has become standard for AI agents. The lesson for buyers: Artisan’s pricing is young and has moved fast, so contract terms captured even a year ago may no longer reflect the current model.

What’s unique : pricing the AI BDR as a named hire

1. Tiers named after seniority, not seats. Artisan calls its paid plans Intern and Employee, reinforcing the “hire an AI BDR for a fraction of the cost” positioning rather than selling software seats.

2. Outcome ranges on every tier. Each plan advertises an expected band of positive replies per month (1–12, 4–30, 50+) alongside its credit allocation, anchoring the usage meter to a sales outcome — a softer version of the value-metric debate playing out across AI products and a recurring theme in usage-based pricing for SaaS and AI.

3. One credit pool absorbs heterogeneous agent work. Rather than separate meters for data, enrichment, personalization, and replies, Artisan collapses all of Ava’s actions into a single credit unit with published per-action costs (email enrichment 2, phone 10, website visitor 4, reply 2, full campaign ~22/prospect). This is the shift from entitlements to credits that lets a fast-changing agent re-price individual actions without re-papering the plan.

4. Sending infrastructure is deliberately unbundled. Mailboxes and phone numbers are billed separately in dollars outside the credit pool. That keeps the credit math clean and lets Artisan pass through volatile deliverability and telephony costs at cost — but it also means the headline tier fee understates the true bill, a tension explored in Hidden costs above.

Strengths & weaknesses

Billing UX : credit estimator, monthly/annual toggle, and plan comparison

• Pay monthly / Pay annually toggle — switches every tier between monthly and annual rates (annual saves 10%); the page shows “Billed annually, credits upfront” vs “Billed monthly” inline on each card.
• Estimate your credits (credit estimator) — an interactive tool where you pick a campaign type (cold outbound no-phone / with-phone, warm outbound, cross-sell & upsell) and a monthly prospect volume (slider, 100 to 10K+) and it returns an estimated monthly credit usage, an expected positive-reply count, and the recommended plan.
• Compare all plans table — a full feature matrix across Free / Intern / Employee / Enterprise grouped by Lead discovery, Campaigns, Campaign types, Deliverability, Power dialer, Integrations, and Support & security.
• Instant additional-credit purchase — when the credit balance runs low, in-progress sequences continue and new enrollments pause; users can buy more credits instantly to resume or upgrade.
• 30-day free trial banner — a persistent “Hire Ava on trial and get 10,000 free credits worth $300. No credit card required” prompt drives self-serve activation.

Strategic wins : pricing decisions that reinforce the AI-hire narrative

1. Naming tiers Intern and Employee

The seniority-named tiers make the “pay a fraction of a human BDR” pitch concrete and reframe a software purchase as a hiring decision. See usage-based pricing fundamentals for how value-metric framing shapes willingness to pay.

2. A low-friction freemium on-ramp

A $0 Free plan with 300 credits plus a 10,000-credit ($300-value) 30-day trial lets buyers see Ava work before paying, which suits the self-serve PLG motion Artisan runs into the Intern and Employee tiers. See how the shift from entitlements to credits reshapes free-to-paid conversion.

3. Outcome ranges that pre-qualify the tier choice

By printing an expected positive-reply band on every tier (1–12, 4–30, 50+), Artisan lets buyers self-select the credit allocation that matches their pipeline goal, reducing pre-sale back-and-forth. See how to choose the right usage metric.

4. Re-self-serving the pricing without re-papering plans

Returning to a public rate card in 2026 (after ~18 months gated) restored a PLG funnel into Intern and Employee while keeping the credit pool as the elastic layer. Because actions are priced individually, Artisan can adjust a single cost — as it did when website-visitor identification moved 5→4 credits and end-to-end campaigns eased ~25→~22/prospect between the 2026-05 and 2026-06 captures — without touching the published tier prices. That decoupling of headline price from per-action cost is the core advantage of hybrid pricing models.

Areas to improve : where the pricing creates buyer friction

1. Surface the separately-billed sending infrastructure earlier

Mailboxes and phone numbers are billed in dollars outside the credit pool, but the rate card foregrounds only tier fees and credits. Adding indicative infrastructure costs to the credit estimator would reduce bill surprise. See the value metric problem in AI pricing for why hidden meters erode trust.

2. Reconsider annual credit forfeiture

Annual plans grant credits upfront but forfeit any unused balance at term end, which penalizes the seasonal or ramping teams most likely to buy annual. A partial rollover or grace window would soften the downside.

3. Publish an Enterprise price anchor

Enterprise is fully contact-gated with no public number, leaving buyers without a reference point above Employee’s $600/mo. A “starting at” figure or a credit-volume band would set expectations before the demo and improve the sales-led funnel.

Key takeaways

1. Name the value metric after the job, not the software. Artisan’s Intern/Employee tiers turn a SaaS subscription into a hiring decision, which can expand the budget line a buyer maps the spend against.
2. Anchor usage tiers to outcomes. Advertising a positive-reply range per tier gives buyers a concrete yardstick for which credit allocation to choose.
3. Keep the usage meter legible. Pricing discrete actions (2 credits to enrich an email, 10 for a phone) makes the credit pool easy to reason about.
4. A pricing model is not permanent — and re-pricing has a cost. Artisan cycled through lead-volume tiers, a fully gated catalogue, and a credit pool in under two years. The flexibility helped it follow the product, but it also means every old contract and third-party teardown is quickly stale; teams that change models this fast should over-communicate to existing customers.
5. Provocative growth marketing and pricing trust pull in opposite directions. The “Stop Hiring Humans” campaign bought brand recognition cheaply, but pairing a “replace your humans” message with a hidden (“Request Pricing”) rate card during the same period can leave buyers unsure what they are actually committing to — a reminder that pricing transparency is itself a brand signal.

UBP implications

1. Credit pools can wrap multi-action AI agents. A single credit unit absorbs heterogeneous agent work (research, enrichment, replies), letting one meter cover many underlying costs. As the agent’s per-action economics shift, the vendor re-prices one action rather than the whole plan.
2. Outcome bands soften pure-usage anxiety. Pairing a credit allocation with an expected-reply range reduces the metering uncertainty buyers fear in usage-based models, nudging AI pricing toward outcome framing without committing to true outcome-based billing.
3. Unbundle volatile pass-through costs from the usage meter. Artisan keeps mailboxes and phone numbers out of the credit pool and bills them in dollars, isolating the credit math from telephony/deliverability volatility — a pattern AI products with real infrastructure costs can borrow to keep their core meter stable.

Sources

• Artisan pricing page (accessed 2026-06-05)
• Artisan credit estimator (accessed 2026-06-05)
• Artisan compare plans (accessed 2026-06-05)
• Artisan request a demo (Enterprise) (accessed 2026-06-05)

Bottom line

Artisan prices Ava like a hire — Free, Intern, then Employee — and meters the work underneath with a credit pool anchored to expected positive replies, while keeping Enterprise behind a demo form. The model is transparent and legible for self-serve buyers, with the main hidden cost being separately-billed mailboxes, phone numbers, and the per-seat power dialer.

Want to compare Artisan against other AI sales-automation pricing? Browse the pricing blueprint.

Pricing timeline : Major events on a vertical axis

Each milestone below corresponds to a public pricing change, product launch, or material adjustment. Major events use a filled marker; minor adjustments use a faded one.

Public credit-pool rate card with $300 trial reinstated

Jun 2026

Live public pricing: Free ($0, 300 credits/mo), Intern ($250/mo annual or $280 monthly, 12K credits), Employee ($600/mo annual or $660 monthly, 30K credits), custom Enterprise. CTAs moved from 'Get early access' to 'Start 30-day trial'; the end-to-end campaign rate eased to ~22 credits/prospect and website-visitor identification to 4 credits; the '10,000 free credits worth $300' trial banner returned.

Ava 2.0 — public credit-pool pricing returns (early access)

May 2026

Artisan re-published a public rate card for the first time since mid-2024, tied to the 'Ava 2.0 is here' launch. Three named tiers (Free / Intern $250 / Employee $600) plus custom Enterprise, each with a monthly credit allocation and an advertised positive-reply band. Credit costs at launch: email enrichment 2, phone enrichment 10, website visitor 5, autonomous reply 2, end-to-end campaign ~25/prospect. CTAs read 'Get early access'.

Still fully sales-gated

Feb 2026

Pricing page remained a 'Request Pricing' feature catalogue with no public numbers, stating Artisan is 'priced based on the volume of leads you are doing outreach to.' The public credit-pool rate card had not yet shipped.

$25M Series A banner; pricing still gated

Apr 2025

A 'We've raised a $25M Series A' banner appeared site-wide (round led by Glade Brook Capital, announced 2025-04-09), but the pricing page stayed fully sales-gated with 'Request Pricing' CTAs and the lead-volume FAQ unchanged.

Public prices removed — pivot to sales-gated 'Request Pricing'

Aug 2024

Artisan pulled all public tier prices and replaced them with a per-capability 'Request Pricing' feature catalogue. The FAQ stated pricing was now lead-volume-based and split across BDR and AE seats, and referenced 'new pricing packages' for existing customers. This gated model persisted through at least 2026-02.

Original public lead-volume tiers (Accelerate / Supercharge / Blitzscale)

Mar 2024

Earliest captured rate card used lead-contact volume tiers, not credits: Accelerate ($225/mo monthly or $187/mo annual, 750 leads/~2,250 emails), Supercharge ($450/mo, 1,500 leads/~4,500 emails, 'Most Popular'), Blitzscale ($875/mo, 3,000 leads/~9,000 emails), and a Custom tier with unlimited leads. Overage was $40 per additional 100 leads.