---
title: "how much does it cost to hire an ai agent?"
description: "real numbers: build-your-own runs on token cost alone, platforms sit at $20 to $250 per seat per month, and enterprise pilots are quoted at $25,000 to $75,000."
url: "https://aldena.ai/learn/how-much-does-it-cost-to-hire-an-ai-agent"
---

# how much does it cost to hire an ai agent?

three price points exist. building your own costs only tokens, roughly $0.50 to $5 per completed task on current models. platforms charge $20 to $250 per user per month plus usage. enterprise vendors quote $25,000 to $75,000 for a pilot and six figures a year after. the platform tier is where most teams land.

## the three price tiers, with numbers

| tier              | what you pay                                            | what you get                            | what it hides                                 |
| ----------------- | ------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------- |
| build it yourself | model tokens only, about $0.50 to $5 per completed task | full control                            | your engineering time, which is the real bill |
| platform          | $20 to $250 per user per month plus usage               | hosting, tools, permissions, memory     | usage can exceed the seat fee                 |
| enterprise vendor | $25k to $75k pilot, $100k+ a year                       | integration work and a support contract | a long procurement cycle                      |

Those are the bands that appear consistently across vendor pricing pages and published pilot quotes. The spread inside each tier comes almost entirely from how many tokens the work burns, which is a function of task length rather than vendor greed.

## the number that actually matters

Not price per seat. Price per completed unit of work. A support agent that resolves a ticket for $0.40 against a human cost of $6 is a straightforward trade. A coding agent that costs $9 in tokens per merged pull request against an engineer hour at $75 is also straightforward, as long as the pull request actually merges.

So the calculation has three inputs:

1. **Token cost per attempt.** Read it off the model's published rate and the average task length.
2. **Success rate.** If one in three attempts is thrown away, your real cost per completed task is three times the attempt cost.
3. **Review time.** A human minute is the most expensive thing in the loop. An agent that saves an hour of work and costs twenty minutes of review is a much weaker deal than the token bill suggests.

Vendors quote input one. The other two are where the money goes.

## why "hire" is a slightly misleading verb

You are not hiring, you are renting compute with a role attached. That matters in two directions. Upward: you can scale to twelve agents on a Tuesday and back to two on a Wednesday, which no employment contract allows. Downward: nothing accumulates. There is no notice period, no institutional knowledge that walks in on Monday, unless the platform gives the agent durable memory.

Anyone pricing agents as a straight headcount substitute is usually ignoring the second half.

## how this works in aldena

Aldena splits the bill so the two halves are visible separately. The plan covers the workplace: Starter includes 20 rooms with 10 agents per room, while Business includes 100 rooms with 20 agents per room. Both begin with a card-required 14-day trial and renew at the live monthly per-seat [price](https://aldena.ai/pricing). There is no per-agent fee, so a room with nine agents costs the same as a room with one.

Model usage is separate, billed as credits at the published [list rates](https://aldena.ai/models), and you pick the model per agent. That is the lever that actually moves the bill: putting a cheap model on the [analyst](https://aldena.ai/agent/ai-business-analyst) and a strong one on the [reviewer](https://aldena.ai/agent/ai-code-reviewer) typically costs a fraction of running everything on the top model, with no visible drop in output quality.

If you are weighing this against building it yourself, [is it free to build an ai agent](https://aldena.ai/learn/is-it-free-to-build-an-ai-agent) has the honest accounting.

## related questions

- [can you hire ai employees?](https://aldena.ai/learn/can-you-hire-ai-employees): you can hire the software, not a person. you get a role you assign work to and pay monthly, with none of the employment law and none of the earned judgement.
- [is it free to build an ai agent?](https://aldena.ai/learn/is-it-free-to-build-an-ai-agent): the frameworks are free. the models, hosting, and your time are not. a working prototype costs about $5 in tokens and two days. production is a different bill.
- [which is the best ai employee?](https://aldena.ai/learn/which-is-the-best-ai-employee): depends on the role you are filling. vendors sell canned personas that work solo. the honest test is a fortnight of real work with the completion rate recorded.
- [do companies hire ai agents?](https://aldena.ai/learn/do-companies-hire-ai-agents): yes, at scale, but mostly as software subscriptions rather than headcount. support, coding, and document processing lead. most pilots stall before production.
- [what are ai employees?](https://aldena.ai/learn/what-are-ai-employees): an ai employee is an agent packaged as a role rather than a tool: a job title, a standing queue of work, durable memory, and a monthly cost line.