When you're considering bringing AI agents into your business, the first question is almost always the same: what's this actually going to cost me, and how does it compare to what I'm doing now?
It's a fair question, and one most AI companies sidestep with "Contact us for pricing" or "Custom quote per business." We don't, because the answer is genuinely simple, and because the comparison against other staffing options is more interesting than the headline number.
This piece breaks down what an AI agent costs, how the pricing logic works, and how it stacks up against the four other ways most small businesses get work done: virtual assistants, full-time employees, software subscriptions, and agency retainers. None of these are villains. Each has a place. The point is to help you choose with both eyes open.
The two-part pricing model
An AI agent has two costs: a one-off setup fee and a monthly hire fee.
Setup is the cost of building the agent. Real human hours from our team go into prompt engineering, brand voice tuning, integrating the agent with your tools, building its knowledge base, configuring escalation rules, and testing every scenario before deployment. The setup fee covers that work. It's a single payment at the start, and it's done.
Monthly hire is the cost of keeping the agent on staff. This covers infrastructure (where the agent runs), API costs (every conversation it has costs us money in model fees), monitoring, security patches, ongoing prompt adjustments as your business evolves, and our support if anything needs a human touch. It's billed monthly, like a salary.
The mental shortcut that helps most people: setup is recruitment, monthly hire is salary. Same logic as bringing on a person.
A single agent at our entry-level Light band costs $399 setup plus $99 a month. A full Sales department of six agents working in coordination costs $2,499 setup plus $1,099 a month - that's roughly $0.25 per agent per hour, available continuously, including evenings and weekends.
Now, the comparison.
Option 1: A virtual assistant
A virtual assistant is the closest comparison to a single AI agent because the work overlaps significantly. Inbox triage, scheduling, lead research, basic data entry, social media drafts - these are the bread and butter of both VAs and AI agents.
What VAs cost varies enormously by region and specialism. Hourly rates in Southeast Asia and Latin America typically sit between $8 and $25, full-time arrangements between $800 and $2,500 a month. Specialised VAs in higher-cost regions can charge $40+ an hour. Agency-managed VAs cost more again because there's a layer of management between you and the worker.
Where VAs win:
- Genuine human judgement. A VA reads context, picks up nuance, and knows when something feels off. AI agents are catching up but still benefit from human oversight on novel situations.
- Relationship work. Some clients prefer to hear a human voice. Some negotiations need a person on the line.
- Flexibility into adjacent tasks. Ask a VA to also book a flight, write a thank-you note, and chase down a missing invoice and they'll do all three. AI agents stay in their defined lane.
- Cultural adaptation. A skilled VA reads regional conventions, tone preferences, and timing in ways that take careful prompt engineering to replicate.
Where AI agents win:
- Always-on availability. No leave, no sick days, no time-zone juggling, no overtime conversations. An AI agent works at 3am if that's when your enquiry comes in.
- Cost efficiency at volume. A Light-band AI agent at $99/mo handles unlimited inbox triage, FAQ responses, or scheduling within its scope. A VA charges per hour.
- Consistency. The agent that drafted today's social post writes in exactly the same voice as the one that drafted last month's. No quality drift, no day-off variance.
- No turnover. AI agents don't quit, don't get poached, and don't need replacing every 18 months.
Where each fits best:
A VA is the right call when the work is judgement-heavy, relationship-led, or genuinely varied. An AI agent is the right call when the work is patterned, high-volume, requires consistency, or needs round-the-clock coverage.
In practice, most small businesses end up running both: a VA for the human-shaped work, AI agents for the volume work, neither replacing the other.
Option 2: A full-time employee
Hiring a permanent employee for the same scope of work is a different category of decision. It's the most expensive option, and also the one with the highest upside if the role is right for it.
A full-time employee in a Western market typically costs $50,000 to $100,000 fully loaded (salary, benefits, taxes, equipment, software access, training time, the lot). In Southeast Asia, the equivalent fully-loaded cost might be $15,000 to $40,000 a year for a comparable role. There are also hidden costs that don't appear on a payslip: recruitment fees, onboarding time, management overhead, and the productivity dip when someone leaves.
Where full-time employees win:
- Strategic ownership. A real person on your team can hold a function, not just execute tasks. A Marketing Manager owns the marketing strategy; a Marketing AI agent executes within it.
- Career investment. People who join your team grow with your business. They learn the customers, the founders, the product nuances over time.
- Compound value. A great hire becomes more valuable every year. AI agents stay roughly the same (we improve them, but they don't develop new instincts about your specific business in the way a human does).
- Trust and discretion. Some work needs to stay between humans. Sensitive personnel matters, customer crises, strategic pivots - these often need a person with full context.
Where AI agents win:
- Cost. A Sales department of six AI agents at $1,099/mo over two years totals $26,376 plus $2,499 setup. Hiring even a single mid-level salesperson for those two years runs $50,000+ in most markets.
- Speed to deployment. AI agents are live in 5-21 business days depending on tier. A new hire is usually 60-90 days from offer to fully productive.
- No personnel risk. No grievance procedures, no resignation letters, no awkward performance conversations.
- Linear scaling. Need ten more agents next quarter? Place the hire. Need ten more humans? You'll need an HR function, a recruitment process, an onboarding programme, and a training curriculum.
Where each fits best:
A full-time hire is right when you need someone to own the work strategically, build relationships over time, or hold context that compounds. An AI agent is right when you need execution capacity that scales without scaling your headcount.
The honest truth is that AI agents and human employees aren't competing for the same role. AI agents free your humans to do the work that humans should be doing.
Option 3: A software subscription
This is where comparisons get tricky, because most AI agent products are sold as software. Lindy, Zapier with AI, alfred_, MartinAI - they all sit somewhere on the DIY-software spectrum and they price like software too: $25 to $100 a month for a self-serve tool.
Where DIY AI software wins:
- Lowest price point. $25/mo is genuinely cheap.
- Self-serve speed. Sign up and start in minutes, no proposal, no discovery call.
- No vendor relationship. You don't have to talk to anyone if you don't want to.
Where managed AI agents win:
- Setup work is done for you. The configuration that makes the agent actually useful - prompt engineering, integrations, voice tuning, knowledge base, escalation logic - is hours of work. With self-serve software, that's your time. With a managed agent, it's done before you log in.
- The agent works on your business specifically. Self-serve software ships generic templates. A managed agent is configured against your tone, your tools, your workflows, your customers.
- Ongoing maintenance is included. When the platform you're integrated with changes its API, when a model deprecates, when your knowledge base needs an update - that's our problem to solve, not yours.
- Real support. A human responds when something needs attention.
The honest comparison: self-serve software is excellent if you have the time and skill to configure and maintain it. Most small business owners don't, which is why managed AI agents exist as a category.
The price difference between $25/mo and $99/mo on a single agent is the cost of not having to learn prompt engineering yourself.
Option 4: An agency retainer
Marketing agencies, sales-as-a-service firms, and operations consultancies are the human-led version of what an AI agent department does. They take on a function and run it for you.
Agency retainers typically start at $2,000 a month and scale up to $20,000+. The work is excellent when the fit is right, and you're paying for senior strategic thinking plus execution capacity.
Where agency retainers win:
- Senior strategic input. A good agency brings deep expertise and outside perspective. AI agents execute strategy; agencies help shape it.
- Network effects. Agencies see what works across many clients in your industry. That cross-pollination is genuinely valuable.
- Accountability. A real account manager you can call when things go sideways. Agencies are answerable in ways that software products aren't.
Where AI agent departments win:
- Cost. A full Customer Success department at $999/mo is the price of two hours of senior agency time per week. The AI department works 24/7.
- Execution capacity. An AI agent can draft 50 personalised outreach emails an hour. An agency executive drafts maybe ten.
- Dedicated focus. AI agents are working on your business specifically, not balancing your account against twelve others.
- Predictable cost. Agency retainers expand in scope creep. AI agents have a fixed monthly hire fee.
Where each fits best:
An agency retainer is right when you need senior strategic thinking plus execution. An AI agent department is right when the strategy is clear and what you need is reliable, scalable execution at a sensible cost.
Many of our customers run both: an agency or in-house lead handling strategy, AI agents handling execution underneath.
So, what's the right answer for your business?
There isn't one. The right mix depends on what work you're trying to get done, how repeatable it is, and where you most need human judgement.
A useful filter is to ask: does this work need a human, or does it need to be done by something?
Work that needs a human - relationship building, sensitive conversations, strategic ownership, novel situations - belongs with humans. Pay them well, treat them well, and don't try to replace them.
Work that needs to be done - inbox triage, lead qualification, follow-ups, scheduling, reporting, FAQ responses, content drafting - is where AI agents earn their keep. They're cheaper than employees, cheaper than agencies, more capable than self-serve software, and free your humans to do the work that needs them.
The goal isn't replacement. It's separation: humans on human work, AI on patterned work, both running in parallel.
A worked example
A solo founder running a small B2B services business spends roughly 15 hours a week on what we'd call patterned work: triaging inbound leads, drafting outreach replies, scheduling demos, updating their CRM, sending follow-ups, drafting proposals from templates.
Their options:
- Hire a VA for that work. $1,200-$2,000 a month for 15 hours a week of competent execution.
- Hire a junior salesperson. $3,500-$6,000 a month fully loaded for someone who'll do the patterned work plus take on more strategic responsibility over time.
- Use self-serve AI software. $50-$150 a month total across the tools, plus 5-10 hours a week of their own time configuring and maintaining everything.
- Hire a managed AI Sales department. $1,099 a month for six coordinated agents handling all of the above, configured by us, ready in 14-21 business days.
None of these is universally right. The VA gives the founder human flexibility. The junior salesperson is an investment in future capacity. The DIY software keeps costs minimum if the founder has the technical skill. The AI department gives the founder back 15 hours a week of their own time at a fixed, predictable cost.
The right answer depends on the founder's bottleneck. If it's cash, DIY software wins. If it's time, the AI department wins. If it's strategic capacity, the human hire wins. If it's relationship work, the VA wins.
How our pricing actually works
If you decide an AI agent or department is the right fit, here's exactly what you'd pay.
A single agent ranges from $99/mo (Light band, things like Calendar Manager or FAQ Agent) to $399/mo (Heavy band, things like AI Sales Agent or AI Customer Success Agent). Setup ranges from $399 to $1,499 depending on band.
A team of two or three agents is priced as the sum of the individual fees, with a 10-15% discount on setup because we configure shared infrastructure once.
A full department is priced as a flat bundle: Operations at $1,999 setup + $749/mo, Customer Success at $2,499 + $999/mo, Sales at $2,499 + $1,099/mo, Marketing at $2,999 + $1,299/mo. Bundle savings vs hiring individually run from 18% to 33% on monthly hire and up to 54% on setup.
A Personal & Executive Founder Bundle (Personal Assistant + Chief of Staff + Briefing Agent) is $1,799 setup + $649/mo - covering more ground than a part-time human EA at less than half the cost.
Tier 4 - a custom multi-department workforce deployed on your own infrastructure - starts at $15,000 to build and scales up to $150,000+ for complex enterprise deployments.
Pay annually and everything is 20% off the monthly hire. The first 25 customers get 30% off setup on top of that.
The full pricing page is at landingpad.solutions/pricing. The calculator on that page lets you build any combination and see the exact cost in real time.
The bottom line
AI agents aren't cheaper humans, and they aren't smarter software. They're a third category of how work gets done, and they're at their best when paired with humans rather than instead of them.
Our pricing reflects that. We're cheaper than full-time hires because we should be. We're more expensive than DIY software because we do the configuration work that makes the difference. We're cheaper than agencies because we don't include strategic consulting. We're priced like a teammate, because that's what we're selling.
If you're trying to work out whether an AI agent or department fits your business, the easiest next step is to use the calculator on the pricing page or submit a Hiring Brief. Tell us what work you're trying to get done, and we'll come back within one business day with what we'd recommend. No commitment, no pressure - just a clear answer to a fair question.
Ready to see what an AI workforce would cost for your business? Try the calculator or submit a Hiring Brief.
