What is it
Per-contact pricing is a billing unit where each contact or lead in the database is metered, common in AI sales development and outbound automation platforms.
The contact is a natural billing anchor for outbound and sourcing tools because it represents the prospect the software actually works on — researching, enriching, sequencing, and tracking across email and LinkedIn. Metering contacts ties the bill to the database the customer is building, which tracks pipeline value more closely than raw activity metrics like email sends or API calls. AiSDR, which meters “AI-researched contacts per month,” made exactly this argument when it migrated away from an emails-sent meter in mid-2026: a contact spans both email and LinkedIn touchpoints, so it survives a channel shift that broke the older send-volume unit. Choosing the prospect as the value metric rather than the message or the seat is a textbook case of metering the thing the customer values.
Per-contact pricing shows up in two flavors across the corpus. In the first, the contact is a hard metered allowance — the subscription tier fixes how many contacts the AI can research or engage each period, and upgrading buys more. AiSDR uses this model with tiers at 200 (Solo, $250/mo), 800 (Explore, $900/mo), and 2,500 (Scale, $2,500/mo) contacts per month. In the second flavor, contacts are one capacity dimension bundled into a broader plan. Juicebox folds “contact credits” — each one unlocking a candidate’s email and phone — into per-seat tiers (250/seat on the $139 Starter, 1,000/seat on the $199 Growth). Smartlead caps stored contacts on its lower tiers (2,000 on the $32 Base, 30,000 on the $78 Pro) but deliberately removes the ceiling on its $144 Smart and $315 Prime tiers, inverting the model to sell “unlimited contacts” as a headline.
The practical implication for buyers is that “one contact” is not a stable unit. AiSDR’s contact is a prospect fully researched and engaged by the AI. Juicebox’s contact credit is consumed the moment a recruiter unlocks a profile’s details. Smartlead’s contact is simply a record stored in the account. These are different levels of value, which makes cross-platform price comparison harder than the shared unit name suggests. For the fundamentals of choosing and defending a usage meter like this, see the introduction to usage-based pricing.
How it works
Per-contact billing adds a database-size dimension on top of the flat subscription fee. The platform counts contacts during the billing period — either by action (contacts researched, credits consumed) or by storage (contacts in the account) — and either caps the tier at that ceiling or unlocks unlimited at higher tiers. The three companies in the corpus each implement it differently:
| Company | Contact definition | Contact meter | Upper-limit behavior |
|---|---|---|---|
| AiSDR | A prospect the AI researches and engages across email and LinkedIn | Monthly allowance per tier: 200 / 800 / 2,500 | Hard cap; upgrade tier to raise it |
| Juicebox | A candidate profile whose email/phone has been unlocked | Contact credits bundled per seat: 250/seat (Starter) or 1,000/seat (Growth) | Custom Business tier unlocks unlimited |
| Smartlead | A record stored in the account | Stored-contact cap per tier: 2,000 / 30,000 / unlimited | Unlimited on Smart ($144/mo) and Prime ($315/mo) |
The unit math differs by design. For AiSDR the meter is the whole plan:
Unit math: Monthly bill = tier fee, where the tier fixes the contacts/month allowance. Solo at $250 yields 200 contacts (
$1.25/contact implied); Scale at $2,500 yields 2,500 contacts ($1.00/contact implied). The Solo-to-Explore step is a 3.6× price jump ($250 → $900) for a 4× contact increase, with no intermediate tier.
For Juicebox the contact credit sits inside a per-seat structure:
Unit math: Monthly bill = (seats × seat price) + optional $199/agent add-ons; contact credits are bundled per seat (250 on the $139 Starter, 1,000 on the $199 Growth) rather than billed per credit directly. The custom Business tier unlocks unlimited contact credits.
For Smartlead contacts are one of several bundled meters, and the contact cap binds only at lower tiers. An agency on the $32 Base plan is limited to 2,000 stored contacts and 6,000 sends/month, while a team on the $144 Unlimited Smart plan faces no contact ceiling at all. The contact works as a meter because it is customer-controlled — the buyer decides how aggressively to build the database, so cost tracks intentional usage rather than incidental activity.
Companies using this
Three companies in the corpus meter contacts: AiSDR, the most direct per-contact subscription; Juicebox, which meters contact credits as the unlock inside a per-seat plan; and Smartlead, which caps contacts at lower tiers and inverts to unlimited at higher ones. All three also bill on mailboxes as a second dimension, reflecting the dual infrastructure of outbound — the audience (contacts) and the sender (mailboxes).
| Company | Product | Pricing model | Billing units | Free tier | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6sense | ABM and B2B revenue-intelligence platform — predictive account scoring, buyer intent data, and AI sales/marketing workflows | No | 2026-07-14 | ||
| ActiveCampaign | Marketing automation, email marketing, and sales CRM platform priced by contact count | No | 2026-07-12 | ||
| Adobe Marketo Engage | Enterprise B2B marketing automation platform (lead & account-based marketing, journey orchestration, attribution) | No | 2026-08-06 | ||
| AiSDR | Autonomous AI SDR for outbound email and LinkedIn outreach | No | 2026-06-21 | ||
| Artisan | Ava — an autonomous AI BDR/SDR that finds leads, enriches data, and runs outbound campaigns | No | 2026-07-14 | ||
| Close | SMB sales CRM with built-in calling, email, SMS, and an AI sales agent (Chloe) | No | 2026-07-14 | ||
| Constant Contact | Email and digital marketing platform for small businesses, with a separate Lead Gen & CRM product (ex-SharpSpring) and a bundled AI content assistant | No | 2026-08-06 | ||
| Copper | CRM built natively for Google Workspace (Gmail, Calendar, Drive) | No | 2026-07-23 | ||
| Customer.io | Customer engagement platform combining Journeys (behavioral messaging), an AI Agent, and Data Pipelines (CDP) | No | 2026-07-12 | ||
| HubSpot | AI-native customer platform (CRM) spanning Marketing, Sales, Service, Content, Data and Revenue Hubs, with Agent Hub AI (formerly Breeze) | Yes | 2026-08-04 | ||
| Juicebox | AI recruiting search platform (PeopleGPT) with natural-language candidate sourcing, outreach, and autonomous agents | Yes | 2026-07-21 | ||
| Keap | All-in-one CRM, sales, and marketing-automation platform for small businesses | No | 2026-07-06 | ||
| Klaviyo | B2C marketing CRM for email, SMS, and push, priced on active profiles plus channel volume, with bundled predictive analytics and Klaviyo AI. | Yes | 2026-07-12 | ||
| Mailchimp | Mailchimp (an Intuit company) is an email marketing and automation platform priced by contact count and plan tier, with AI content and optimization (Intuit Assist) bundled into higher tiers. | Yes | 2026-07-09 | ||
| Smartlead | Cold-email outreach and deliverability infrastructure with unlimited mailboxes, warmup, and a unified master inbox | No | 2026-07-14 | ||
| ZoomInfo | GTM / sales-intelligence platform (contact + company data, intent, and the ZoomInfo Copilot AI GTM assistant) | No | 2026-07-06 |
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FAQ
What is per-contact pricing in sales and outbound software?
Per-contact pricing is a billing model where each contact or lead stored or worked in the platform counts against a metered allowance. AiSDR meters AI-researched contacts per month, Juicebox meters contact credits that unlock a candidate's email and phone, and Smartlead caps stored contacts on its lower tiers. The contact is the atom of value the platform enriches, sequences, and tracks.
How does per-contact pricing compare to per-seat pricing for outbound tools?
Per-seat pricing charges by headcount; per-contact pricing charges by the size of the prospect database a team works. AiSDR dropped per-seat billing entirely — every tier has unlimited users — and meters AI-researched contacts instead, arguing pipeline capacity is the real constraint. Juicebox keeps a per-seat base but gates contact credits per seat, and Smartlead uses contacts as one of several bundled meters.
What does one contact cost in AI outbound tools?
It varies by platform because a contact means different things. AiSDR's $250/mo Solo tier implies about $1.25 per AI-researched contact (200/month) and its $2,500/mo Scale tier about $1.00 per contact (2,500/month). Juicebox bundles 250 contact credits into its $139 Starter seat and 1,000 credits into its $199 Growth seat, while Smartlead stops metering contacts entirely on its $144 Smart and $315 Prime tiers.
Which companies use per-contact pricing?
In this corpus, three AI outbound and sourcing platforms meter contacts: AiSDR (AI-researched contacts per month), Juicebox (contact credits per seat), and Smartlead (stored-contact caps on lower tiers). All three also bill on mailboxes as a separate sending-infrastructure dimension.
Related billing units
- Credit-Based BillingA billing unit where customers pre-purchase or are allocated a pool of credits that deplete as they use the product, often at variable rates per feature.
- Token-Based PricingA billing unit common in LLM and AI products, where customers are charged per input and output token processed.
- Per-Seat PricingA billing unit where the vendor charges a fixed fee per named user, regardless of how much each user consumes.
- Per-Resolution PricingA billing unit unique to AI customer-support products, where the vendor charges only when an AI agent resolves a customer issue without escalation.
- Bandwidth-Based PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per gigabyte of data transferred out of the platform.
- Per-Function-Invocation PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per serverless function invocation, often combined with a separate compute-time charge.
- CPU-Hour PricingA billing unit where customers are charged for the CPU time their workloads consume, typically measured in vCPU-seconds or vCPU-hours.
- GB-Hour PricingA billing unit where customers are charged for the memory their workloads consume over time, measured in gigabyte-hours.
- GPU-Hour PricingA billing unit where customers are charged for GPU time consumed, typically measured per-second or per-hour by GPU type.
- Per-API-Call PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per API request, regardless of payload size or processing time.
- Per-GB Storage PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per gigabyte of data stored on the platform per month.
- Media-Minute PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per minute of audio or video processed — used by speech, voice, and video AI vendors.
- Per-Request PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per request served — the generic meter for inference endpoints, search, scraping, and browser infrastructure.
- Per-Event PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per event ingested — the native meter of observability and billing-infrastructure platforms.
- Vector Storage PricingA billing unit where customers are charged for vectors stored or indexed — the storage dimension of vector database pricing.
- Per-Character PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per character of text processed — the standard meter for text-to-speech and translation.
- Per-Document PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per document processed or generated — common in AI writing, SEO, and document-intelligence tools.
- Per-Page PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per page crawled, parsed, or rendered — the meter for web scraping and document parsing.
- Per-Transaction PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per financial or billing transaction processed — the meter of billing and accounting platforms.
- Active-User PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per monthly or daily active user rather than per provisioned seat.
- Per-Task PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per task an automation or agent executes — Zapier's historical unit, now spreading to AI agents.
- Per-Unit PricingA billing unit used by robotics, hardware AI, and some SaaS companies where the metered object is a physical or abstract 'unit' — a robot deployed, a device sold, or a defined deliverable.
- Workflow Execution PricingA billing unit where each end-to-end workflow or automation run is metered and billed, regardless of the compute steps it contains.
- Per-Message PricingA billing unit where each individual message or reply in a conversation is metered, common in AI chat and voice platforms.
- Per-Invoice PricingA billing unit used by billing infrastructure platforms where each invoice generated or processed is metered as the primary cost driver.
- Per-Action PricingA billing unit where each discrete action taken by an AI agent or automation is metered — common in browser automation and agentic workflow tools.
- Per-Image PricingA billing unit where each AI-generated image is metered, common in image generation APIs and multimodal AI platforms.
- Per-Conversation PricingA billing unit where each complete customer conversation — from first message to resolution — is metered as a single chargeable event.
- Per-Record PricingA billing unit where each data record processed, labeled, or extracted is metered — common in data platforms and web scraping services.
- Per-Word PricingA billing unit common in translation and localization platforms where the metered object is the word count of content processed.
- Per-Video PricingA billing unit where each AI-generated video is metered, common in video generation and synthetic media platforms.
- Milestone-Based PricingA billing unit used in drug discovery and biotech AI where payment is tied to achieving defined research milestones rather than time or compute consumed.
- Per-Outcome PricingA billing unit where payment is triggered by verified outcomes delivered — distinct from outcome-based pricing models, this refers specifically to 'outcomes' as a countable billing unit.
- Per-Datapoint PricingA billing unit where each individual data measurement or signal ingested is metered — common in cloud cost intelligence and ML evaluation platforms.
- Per-Interaction PricingA billing unit where each patient-agent or user-agent interaction is metered, common in healthcare AI and customer engagement platforms.
- Data Licensing PricingA pricing structure where access to proprietary datasets or data assets is licensed separately from the software or services, common in AI training data and clinical data platforms.
- Robot-Hour PricingA billing unit where each hour a robot or autonomous system operates is metered — the robotics equivalent of a GPU-hour.
- Per-Mailbox PricingA billing unit where each connected email mailbox or sending account is metered, common in AI outbound sales and email automation platforms.
- Browser-Hour PricingA billing unit where each hour of headless browser compute time is metered, common in web scraping and browser automation platforms.
- Per-Generation PricingA billing unit where each AI-generated creative asset — image, video, or design — is counted as a 'generation' and metered accordingly.
- Per-Ticket PricingA billing unit where each customer support ticket handled by an AI agent is metered — common in AI customer service platforms.
- Per-Log PricingA billing unit where each LLM request log ingested or stored is metered — common in AI observability and evaluation platforms.
- Per-Trace PricingA billing unit where each distributed trace — a complete record of an LLM request chain — is metered, common in AI observability platforms.
- Per-IP PricingA billing unit where each IP address or proxy endpoint allocated is metered — used by web scraping proxy providers.
- Per-Device PricingA billing unit where each hardware device or endpoint connected to the AI platform is metered.
- Per-Case PricingA billing unit used in legal AI platforms where each case or matter processed by the AI is metered.
- Per-Report PricingA billing unit where each AI-generated report or analysis document is metered as a discrete output.