Hire an outbound agency or buy an AI SDR?

What is actually being sold

AI SDR tools sell an autonomous prospecting agent. 11x's Alice Growth plan starts at $3,750 a month billed annually for 2,000 new prospects a month, managed mailboxes and up to five users. 11x says it charges per lead rather than per send. AiSDR sells Solo at $250 a month, Explore at $900 and Scale at $2,500 on quarterly terms, covering 200 to 2,500 AI-researched contacts a month across email and LinkedIn. Regie's RegieGO runs from a free tier to a $49 a month Pro plan on credits, with enterprise quoted. Artisan sells credits scoped to lead volume, mailboxes and dialer seats; its pricing page did not render for us. Third parties estimate $2,000 to $5,000 a month. All of them bundle a database and managed inboxes.

Outbound agencies sell people plus process. Across the agencies we have profiled, monthly fees run from about $5,000 (Belkins) to $9,950 per dedicated SDR (SalesRoads) and $11,000 (memoryBlue's stated floor), with Callbox's clients spending $20,000 to $40,000 a quarter. Some guarantee appointment counts. FlowStrata charges a monthly fee plus a fee per qualified meeting.

What the record shows

The most scrutinised AI SDR vendor is 11x. In March 2025 TechCrunch reported that 11x displayed ZoomInfo and Airtable logos as customers without permission, quoted ZoomInfo saying the product performed significantly worse than its own SDR employees and quoted a former employee saying the company was losing 70 to 80 percent of customers, while 11x said retention was 79 percent. Its founder stepped down as chief executive in May 2025. Reviews of other tools repeat a pattern: strong at the first email, weak once a prospect replies with a question, prone to wrong phone numbers and generic voice. AiSDR holds a 4.7 on G2 from 76 reviews by third-party count, with complaints about no trial, a minimum commitment and a 30 to 60 day ramp.

Agencies have their own failure modes, documented on Clutch: missed meeting counts, slow starts, inconsistent lead quality, contracts that outlive results.

The actual comparison

An AI SDR is cheaper if the work it does is the work you needed. Sending personalised first emails at scale is that work. Deciding which 300 accounts out of 30,000 have a reason to talk this month is not yet. Neither is holding a conversation when one of them asks a hard question. Instantly's 2026 benchmark report puts the average cold email reply rate at 3.43 percent with the top decile above 10 percent; the gap between those numbers is targeting and judgement, not send volume.

How to choose

Buy an AI SDR tool if

• You have a proven message and a clean, well-defined list, so the bottleneck is genuinely the number of first emails you can send
• Someone on your team will read every reply the same day
• You can afford to test for a quarter and walk away, so prefer monthly terms over annual

Hire an agency if

• You do not yet know which accounts to target or what to say, because that is the work an agency does first
• Your deal size justifies a human reading and answering every reply
• You want an outcome in the contract rather than a seat licence

Whichever you choose

• Never let either send from your primary domain
• Define a qualified meeting in writing before you compare anyone's numbers
• Ask what happens to your data, domains and mailboxes when you stop paying

How we split the work

We are not against the machines. Our research, enrichment and first drafts run on AI. That is why a small team can research every account instead of blasting a list. The line we do not cross is judgement: a person decides who is contacted, approves every line before it sends and answers every reply. A founder who gets thirty pitches a day can tell within two sentences whether a human is on the other end.

The commercial consequence is the part AI SDR vendors cannot offer: a definition of a qualified meeting in the contract plus a fee that is only charged when a meeting matches it. Our FPC Events case study shows what that produced in a first 90 days.

If you want to try an AI SDR, try one on monthly terms and measure replies that turned into meetings, not emails sent. If you want the meetings without running the experiment, that is us.