AI agent pricing can combine a subscription, user seats, usage credits, workflow executions and separate tool costs. The headline price is only useful when you know what unit it buys, which work it includes and how much human effort remains.
Start with Artie when the purchase is ongoing responsibility across your company's tools. Artie uses shared workspace credits without seat or AI-employee fees. Compare other models around the same workload, rather than treating every vendor's credit as equivalent.
This guide is published by Artie. The examples below explain different billing models, not a cheapest-product ranking. Public vendor figures were checked on November 3, 2026, and should be confirmed before purchase.
Artie: shared workspace credits for ongoing work
Artie’s Team plan starts at US$100 per month for 10,000 shared workspace credits, with no seat or AI-employee fees. Credits cover model usage, computer time and paid tools. Connected apps may still require separate licenses. The plan buys capacity for the team’s work, not a fixed number of completed assignments.
At that starting plan rate, 100 credits cost $1. Manual top-ups start at 1,000 credits for $13, so the same number of extra credits has a different purchase price. Automatic funding is off by default. Administrators can enable top-ups with a spending limit or automatic upgrades with a maximum plan. Without enabled funding, new paid work pauses when credits run out.
The free offer starts with 1,000 credits and lets you earn up to 13,000 more through onboarding rewards. Those credits do not renew monthly. Check the current signup flow when planning your evaluation.
The important budget question is how much credit the actual work consumes. A short update and a research assignment involving several apps need not have the same usage. Do not turn an illustrative activity charge into a guaranteed price per completed task.
Choose a representative responsibility, define its accepted output and inspect usage over real cycles. Include the team's review effort alongside the subscription. Artie's pricing information describes the workspace model.
Dust: seat prices with usage allowances
Dust Business offers different seat types. Pro is listed at €30 per seat per month on monthly billing, or €24 per seat per month billed annually, excluding VAT. Each Pro seat includes 8,000 credits per month. Monthly allocations reset without rollover.
For four Pro seats, the listed subscription component is €120 per month on monthly billing, or €96 per month at the annual rate. These are subscription calculations, not a complete invoice or a prediction of usage. Business seat allowances should not be confused with Enterprise's workspace pooling. Dust's pricing page
Dust's credits account for model-token and tool-action consumption. The work and model choices affect the allowance consumed, so 8,000 Dust credits cannot be compared directly with 8,000 credits from another vendor. Dust's credit documentation
For this model, count who needs which seat and assess how their expected work fits the relevant allocation. A team may have very different usage across roles.
n8n: workflow executions
n8n's hosted Starter plan lists €20 per month billed annually, including 2,500 monthly workflow executions with unlimited steps. The billing unit is an execution of a workflow, rather than each step inside it. The annual monthly equivalent is not a cancel-anytime monthly quote. n8n's pricing page
An execution allowance is not an allowance of accepted business outcomes. One responsibility might involve several workflow runs, retries or separate processes. Also check model-provider and external-service costs rather than assuming unlimited steps means unlimited third-party usage.
n8n lists Assistant credits separately from workflow executions. Those credits concern assistance while building and should not be added to the execution allowance as though they were the same unit.
This model can suit a team configuring and operating defined workflows. Include the effort to build, maintain and recover those workflows when comparing it with a product that takes on broader ongoing work.
Put the complete cost in one worksheet
For any candidate, separate recurring charges from one-time implementation. Record the currency and billing commitment beside each amount.
Recurring costs can include the base subscription, seats, metered usage, required paid tools and maintenance effort. Setup can include configuration, source preparation, testing and training. Review time belongs in the calculation when it is required to produce an accepted result.
Check whether a cost is already included before adding it again. If a vendor's credit consumption includes a paid tool, do not also assume an identical standalone charge without evidence. If you value employee time, distinguish that economic cost from a new cash payment.
Give each cost item an inclusion field: confirmed, excluded or unknown. That makes uncertainty visible instead of quietly treating missing prices as zero.
Calculate cost per accepted result
Consider this fictional monthly ledger for one setup:
Platform and usage: €500.
Separately billed service required by the workflow: €100.
Review and maintenance effort valued for the month: €200.
Total economic cost: €800.
Jobs started: 200.
Drafts produced: 160.
Results accepted against the agreed standard: 120.
Dividing €800 by 200 gives €4 per job started. Dividing by 160 gives €5 per draft. The cost per accepted result is €800 divided by 120, or about €6.67.
Those are different denominators. The example does not establish that 80 jobs permanently failed. It says 120 results were accepted within the stated month. Keep unresolved work and later acceptance visible when comparing periods.
All figures are invented to explain the method. They are not Artie prices, vendor test results or customer outcomes. Use the same cost categories to record your own evaluation.
Once costs are recorded, compare them with useful capacity or evidenced avoided spending. Review time valued at an hourly rate is an economic cost, not automatically a new cash expense.
Count attempts and repairs against the result they serve
Consider a second fictional example. Ten reporting jobs generate 14 attempts because four need another run. Nine drafts are produced, but only eight results are accepted before the cutoff. Assign every retry and review to a stable job ID so attempts are not mistaken for completed work.
For that workload, suppose allocated subscription cost is $80, metered attempts cost $28, separate services cost $12 and two hours of review and repair are valued at $40 per hour. Total economic cost is $200. Cash expenditure is $120. Cost per accepted result is $25 economically, or $15 in cash, using the same eight accepted outputs.
These invented figures are not a vendor quote. They show why counting every retry as a new result understates the cost. Dividing by 14 attempts would give about $14.29 economically, but the team did not receive 14 accepted reports.
Model participation separately from consumption
Some subscriptions change when another person participates. Lindy’s dedicated pricing page lists Team at US$49.99 per active user per month, with 5,000 credits each pooled across the workspace. Two active users at that starting tier mean $99.98 per month and 10,000 pooled credits. Artie’s starting Team plan is $100 per month for 10,000 shared credits regardless of seat count. These similar totals do not imply equal output capacity because each vendor meters work differently.
Lindy’s pricing page also offers higher credit allowances. Confirm the selected allowance and active-user billing before comparing the total with a workspace-priced plan.
List the requester, reviewer and backup owner before estimating seats. Then run the complete assignment and record usage. Do not assume a buyer who only reviews an exported document has the same billing status as a colleague who directly interacts with the product. Apply each vendor's current participation rules.
Record uncertainty explicitly, including unquoted overage, missing external-service charges and review time not yet observed. A blank number should keep the estimate provisional rather than silently becoming zero.
Check what happens when demand changes
Before committing, ask how the cost changes with more users, longer tasks, more runs or heavier model use. Review the actual plan's handling of exhausted allowances, top-ups, overages and renewal. Do not assume a pause message is a hard spending cap if optional overages are enabled.
Use the same acceptance standard across candidates. A setup that appears cheaper because it produces less complete work is answering a different question. Include access, required features and the people needed to maintain it before deciding that the lowest advertised tier fits.
For a continuing responsibility, track a few representative cycles. Record total cost, accepted outputs, review effort and unresolved exceptions. That provides a basis for the purchase without pretending every future task will consume the same amount.
Choose the model around the responsibility
Artie is our first choice when the team wants AI employees taking ongoing responsibility across its apps, with a shared workspace model. Seat-based and execution-based products can be appropriate when the work and operating model fit those units.
Start with the responsibility, then validate the cost of getting it done to your standard.
