Fourteen tools, every price read off the vendor's own page, most of them on 10 August 2026 and the rest within days of it. Eleven publish at least one number. Three publish none. And the number you can see is rarely the number you will pay, for reasons the pricing pages themselves explain.
Fourteen AI recruiting tools, priced from the vendors' own pages in August 2026. Eleven publish at least one real number. Three publish none: Paradox and Findem redirect their pricing URLs to marketing pages, and GoPerfect keeps the plan names on screen but not the money. On almost every ladder that does carry a number, the published one is the bottom rung. LinkedIn prices Recruiter Lite and quotes everything above it. hireEZ prices the solo seat and quotes the team.
The gap between the sticker and the spend comes from three mechanisms, all visible on the pages themselves: seats that multiply as the team grows, quotas of credits and InMails that run out before the month does, and tiers that exist only behind a sales call. So this survey is sorted by billing unit rather than by vendor name. The unit predicts your bill better than the sticker does.
Disclosure: Metix AI publishes this article and appears in the survey, so read our section the way you would read any vendor's.
Ask what an AI recruiting tool costs and you will get a clean number. $170 a month for LinkedIn Recruiter Lite. $494 for a hireEZ solo seat. $149 for SeekOut Recruit Core. $99 for a Juicebox Starter seat. $95 per user for Leonar Starter. Each of those is real, we checked every one against the vendor's own page in August 2026, and the table near the end puts all fourteen side by side.
But a published price answers exactly one question: what does the first unit cost.
A budget needs three more answers. How many units will you actually need, what happens when a metered allowance runs out mid-month, and which rungs of the ladder carry no number at all.
That is why this article is organized by billing unit instead of alphabetically. Per seat, per company, per candidate, and quote-only are four different bets about where the value sits, and each one leaks money in a different place.
A seat price assumes a recruiter is sitting at the tool. You rent capability; the output depends on the operator, and the seat bills the same in a month with five hires and a month with none. Six of the fourteen bill this way.
LinkedIn is the strangest case in the survey, because its published price is real but hidden. The Recruiter Lite product page shows no dollar figure anywhere; its call to action reads "Try now for $0". The price lives on the help center: $170 a month for a single license, or $1,680 a year.
Extra seats cost more, not less. Licenses two through five run $270 a month each, or $2,670 a year, and an online subscription stops at five recruiters. So a five-seat Lite team comes to $1,250 a month at list, which is our arithmetic on LinkedIn's published rates, not a figure LinkedIn prints.
The free trial runs one month, requires a card, and converts to a paid subscription unless canceled at least a day before it expires.
Then the quota layer. Each Lite license includes 30 InMails a month, with the option to purchase up to 70, in LinkedIn's own wording. Searches reach only your third-degree network, capped at 2,000 profile views a day.
The tiers that lift those limits, Recruiter Corporate, RPS and RPS+, publish no price at all: the help center's pricing column for all three reads "Contact our Sales team", and the Corporate product page says pricing varies with company size and seat count. Reported quotes for Corporate seats circulate, and our three-way comparison discusses what buyers report. None of those figures appear on LinkedIn's pages, so none appear here.
Two footnotes belong next to any LinkedIn number. The list prices are USD and vary by region. And LinkedIn's own Premium Business page, which prices that adjacent tier at $69.99 a month (checked August 2026), labels its figures as estimates that may exclude VAT or GST. The full anatomy, InMail arithmetic included, is in our LinkedIn Recruiter cost breakdown, and LinkedIn Recruiter alternatives covers the exits.
hireEZ publishes exactly one number: $494 a month for a solo recruiter, with a 7-day trial, checked August 2026. Everything above it is quote-only, and the vendor is open about the logic: enterprise deals are, in its words, "priced to the tools it replaces" rather than per seat times headcount. A solo year is $5,928 at list, our arithmetic, not a published annual price.
Whether that seat is cheap or expensive depends entirely on how hard it gets worked, which is the per-seat bet in one sentence. The head-to-head with our own product is in Metix AI vs hireEZ.
SeekOut prices one tier. Recruit Core is $149 a month paid annually, and paid upfront, so the actual transaction is $1,788 leaving the account at once, our arithmetic on SeekOut's published rate rather than a figure SeekOut prints. Billed monthly it is $179, checked August 2026, with a 14-day trial that asks for no card.
Above Core, every tier is quoted: Recruit Sourcing, Sourcing plus Integration, Full Talent Funnel, and the managed Spot service. SeekOut's own pricing FAQ says team pricing rides on seats and usage, with per-seat rates that adjust with volume, which is a fair description of how most enterprise seat pricing behaves once it leaves the page.
Core also meters what the seat can touch: 500 contact credits and 1,000 exports a month when we checked in July 2026 for our round-up. The full comparison is in Metix AI vs SeekOut.
Juicebox publishes its whole self-serve ladder, which makes it one of the more readable pages here. A free tier carries limited searches. Starter is $99 per seat a month billed yearly, $119 monthly; the toggle marks yearly as 15 percent off. Growth is $179 yearly or $199 monthly, capped at five seats. Business is quote-only and annual only, all of it unchanged since our July round-up.
The stacking is where budgets slip: the agents the product is marketed on cost a separate $199 per agent a month on top of the seat, and contact reveals are metered, 500 credits a month on Starter and 1,500 per seat on Growth, an email costing one credit and a phone number three, checked July 2026. One recruiter on Growth running one agent is $378 a month on annual billing, our arithmetic again.
Nine alternatives, plus Juicebox and LinkedIn Recruiter, are priced in our Juicebox alternatives round-up.
Leonar prices both of its plans and quotes neither, then puts the real decision in a toggle with three settings instead of the usual two. Starter is $119 per user a month billed monthly, $109 on a twelve-month commitment, and $95 if you prepay the year, which is $1,140 per user leaving the account in a single payment. Professional, which adds multichannel outreach, unlimited sourcing and the AI agents, runs $199, $169 and $149 on those same terms, or $1,788 prepaid. The page loads on the prepaid rung, so $95 and $149 are the figures a visitor sees first and the monthly rates are the ones you have to go looking for, re-read 11 August 2026.
Then you multiply, and the tidy number stops looking tidy. Five recruiters on Starter is $475 a month prepaid, which arrives as $5,700 up front; $545 a month on the twelve-month commitment, $6,540 across the year; $595 with no commitment at all, $7,140. Five on Professional is $745 prepaid and $995 billed monthly. Those are our multiplications of Leonar's published per-user rates, not quoted team prices.
The credits scale with headcount too, 100 per user a month on Starter and 300 on Professional, and contact reveals draw them down. So the subscription and the outreach capacity both track how many people you employ, rather than how many roles you are trying to fill.
Wellfound prices its self-serve sourcing agents in plain sight. Explore is free with 20 contact reveals a month. Starter is $135 per seat a month with 250 reveals; Growth is $199 with 1,000 reveals and ATS integration; Scale is custom. Only monthly prices are published, and there is no annual toggle anywhere on the page, so the number you see is the number you pay.
The second unit is the company itself: a flat fee scaled to how big you are, whether or not anyone is hiring this quarter. It removes the per-seat arithmetic and replaces it with a size ladder.
Ashby's Foundations plan starts at $400 a month for companies up to 100 employees. Starts at is the honest verb, because the pricing widget adjusts the total by company-size band. Annual commitments take 10 percent off. Above 100 employees, Plus and Enterprise are quote-only, and the Analytics add-on is quoted on usage.
The metering sits under the flat fee rather than on top of a seat: 200 sourcing email lookups a month are included, extra lookups cost $90 per 1,000, and SSO is a $100-a-month add-on. No free trial is mentioned on the page.
Ashby is the ATS-shaped end of this survey. The rest of that shelf, where Greenhouse and Lever publish no numbers at all, is covered in our ATS pricing comparison.
Gem prices both of its main plans, Gem + Your ATS and Gem All-in-One, as custom, based on your company's FTE count, with a talk-to-sales button. The one number on the page sits in the startup widget: $130 a month at one to ten FTE on yearly terms.
Under 30 employees, All-in-One is free for six months and then half price; from 30 to 100 employees, reduced rates apply with no sales call. Recruiting firms get a separate published line, Essentials at $99 per user a month billed yearly, checked July 2026 for our round-up.
The pattern deserves naming. The number Gem shows is for the buyer with the least money, and the buyer with the most gets a quote.
Dover is the counterexample to most of this article. The ATS is free, with unlimited users and unlimited jobs, and the Premium tier is a flat $199 a month, with no annual price published.
What is missing is the marketplace: Dover's fractional recruiters set their own rates, hourly, retained, or per hire. The software cost is fully published and the labor cost is negotiated per recruiter, which at least puts the negotiation where the variance actually is.
The third unit meters output instead of access: a delivered lead, an open role, a booked candidate. This is the shelf our own product sits on.
Fetcher's self-serve plan is $115 a month for 300 leads and one seat, and at that tier you are buying software, because candidates sourced by Fetcher's own team start with Growth at $379 a month billed annually, or $499 month to month. Amplify, which adds a dedicated sourcer, is $649 annual or $849 monthly, and Enterprise is quoted.
The pricing FAQ is unusually direct about the annual lever: month-to-month costs about 30 percent more, in the vendor's own words. Extra lead credits sell in blocks of 1,000 and roll over while you keep a seat.
One find from reading the raw page: Fetcher's own meta description still advertises a $117 entry price with $99 on annual commitment, while the plan cards say $115. The cards are what you can transact on. The mismatch is a small reminder that vendors lose track of their own stickers, which is why the date on a price matters.
Wellfound's managed service prices the role. Autopilot is $500 a month per open role, plus a 10 percent placement fee on a successful hire, with no contract and the option to pause anytime.
The flat fee meters your open roles, and the placement fee ties part of the cost to salary the way agency pricing does, at a fraction of the usual agency rate. If your hiring is lumpy, a per-role meter spends nothing in the quiet months, which no seat can offer.
Metix AI prices the candidate. Plans are $49, $89, $159 and $299 a month, buying 3, 12, 30 and 75 interview-ready candidates against 1, 3, 6 and 12 active roles. Annual billing takes 10 percent off, and the pricing page carries a yearly toggle that swaps $49 for $44 at Starter.
The meter is a credit, spent only when a qualified, interested candidate is unlocked; if nobody clears your bar, nothing is charged. The trial is 14 days with 3 New Roles and 12 Credits, no card.
And since every vendor here keeps a quote door, here is ours: volume hiring and specialized searches go through a talk-to-us path with no published number. Our delivery figures, first interviews within 24 hours on 95 percent of roles, come from the roles we have run so far and have not been audited by anyone outside the company. Why we chose this unit over the seat is its own argument, made in per-candidate vs per-seat pricing.
Three vendors publish nothing, and that absence is a finding, not a gap in our research. Paradox's pricing URL, paradox.ai/pricing, redirects to its homepage, which carries no plans, no tiers and no numbers, only a demo request, checked August 2026. Findem is the same shape: findem.ai/pricing redirects to the platform page, and no price appears anywhere on the site, checked August 2026.
GoPerfect withholds differently, and more usefully. Its pricing page keeps the plan names and the scope and leaves out the money, saying pricing is customized on team size and hiring volume. Starter is aimed at two to five recruiters filling 5 to 15 roles a month, Growth at five to 20 recruiters and 15 to 50 roles, Enterprise at teams above 20 recruiters.
Agency plans are custom per position or per user, and the page defines that unit where it will not price it: a position is created the moment you open a role and start sourcing for it, unused positions stay available through the billing cycle, and a filled role can be closed and swapped for the next one. The contract terms are published too: every plan requires an annual commitment, month-to-month is not offered at all, and recruiters added mid-contract are prorated for the rest of the term, re-read 11 August 2026.
So you can size yourself against the tiers without learning what any of them costs. Note what that leaves on the table. GoPerfect meters the open role, the same unit Wellfound Autopilot meters, and Autopilot puts $500 a month against it. That is more than Paradox or Findem give you, and still not a price.
An unpublished price is not a scandal. Enterprise software has been sold this way for decades, and all three sell to buyers whose procurement teams negotiate everything regardless. But it changes what a comparison can honestly say.
Any dollar figure you read for Paradox, Findem or GoPerfect came from somewhere other than Paradox, Findem or GoPerfect, and figures that circulate for unpublished products have a habit of being wrong. When we verified our Juicebox round-up in July, two widely repeated GoPerfect prices traced back to nothing at all, which is why no number appears next to its name here.
Now add the quote-only upper tiers to the three quote-only products, and the pattern covers the whole survey: every rung above LinkedIn Lite, hireEZ solo and SeekOut Core, plus Juicebox Business, Ashby above Foundations, Gem in-house, Fetcher Enterprise, Wellfound Scale, and our own volume path. Leonar is the one vendor whose plan grid has no quote-only rung at all, both plans priced on the page at all three billing terms, though bespoke agent work is quoted there like anywhere else.
Quote-only is not a missing feature; it is segmentation working as designed. The vendor prices your alternatives, your urgency and your renewal calendar, not just the product. That works out fine for buyers who negotiate every week. It gets expensive for a team that does this once every two years, against a sales desk that does it every day.
Entry price is the lowest number the vendor shows without a sales call. Wellfound appears twice because its self-serve seats and its managed service meter different things, so fourteen vendors make fifteen rows.
| Tool | Published price you can see | The billing unit | Quoted, not listed |
|---|---|---|---|
| LinkedIn Recruiter | $170/mo Lite; seats 2-5 at $270/mo | Per seat, plus InMail credits | Corporate, RPS and RPS+ |
| hireEZ | $494/mo, solo recruiter | Per seat | Team and enterprise |
| SeekOut | $149/mo paid annually upfront, $179 monthly | Per seat, plus contact credits | Everything above Core, and Spot |
| Juicebox | Free tier, then $99/seat/mo yearly, $119 monthly | Per seat, plus credits; agents $199/mo each | Business tier |
| Leonar | $95/user/mo prepaid yearly, $109 on a 12-month commitment, $119 monthly | Per user, plus contact credits | Nothing, both plans are listed |
| Wellfound Reach | Free tier, then $135/seat/mo | Per seat, plus contact reveals | Scale tier |
| Ashby | From $400/mo, up to 100 employees | Flat tier by company size | Plus, Enterprise, Analytics |
| Gem | $130/mo startup rate at 1-10 FTE | By FTE count | Both main in-house plans |
| Dover | Free ATS, $199/mo Premium | Flat monthly fee | Marketplace recruiter rates |
| Fetcher | $115/mo, $379/mo with sourced candidates | Plan fee, metered leads | Enterprise |
| Wellfound Autopilot | $500/mo per open role + 10% placement fee | Per open role | Nothing |
| Paradox | Not shown | Not published | Everything |
| Findem | Not shown | Not published | Everything |
| GoPerfect | Not shown | Per position; recruiter seats prorated mid-contract | Every tier, annual commitment required |
| Metix AI | $49 to $299/mo | Per interview-ready candidate | Volume and specialized hiring |
Fourteen vendors in fifteen rows, with Wellfound counted once. Eleven publish at least one number you can transact on; Paradox, Findem and GoPerfect publish none, and no quote-only tier is given a figure anywhere in this article. Prices read from each vendor's own page on 10 August 2026, except Leonar and GoPerfect, re-read on 11 August 2026, and the hireEZ and SeekOut entries, which record the month rather than the day; the SeekOut and Juicebox credit allowances and Gem's recruiting-firm line come from our 27 July 2026 round-up. Where a cell carries more than one rate for a tier, the cheapest committed rate comes first and the uncommitted monthly rate last, whether the discount is bought with an annual bill, a prepayment or a twelve-month commitment. Every performance claim here is company-reported, Metix AI's included.
The seat is rarely the biggest line on a hiring budget. It needs an operator, and the benchmark bodies count the operator in: SHRM's benchmarking glossary (Talent Access Report, 2022, with the same wording in its 2025 brief) sums third-party agency fees, job-board fees, referral costs, recruiter pay and benefits, and talent acquisition system costs, then divides by hires. Everything in this article is one term in that sum.
For scale, SHRM's 2022 benchmarking, on 2021 data, put the average cost per hire near $4,700, while the median in the same table was $1,244, which tells you the average rides on expensive outliers. SHRM's 2025 report gives medians only: $1,200 for nonexecutive hires and $10,625 for executives, with a 44-day median time to fill for nonexecutive roles. How the software line fits into that larger sum is worked through in our cost-per-hire breakdown.
Thirty InMails on a $170 license works out to roughly 1.4 messages per working day, our arithmetic on a 21-day working month. The sticker buys a ceiling, not a month.
A sourcing seat with 500 contact credits stops revealing emails when the credits stop, however much month remains, and Ashby's $90-per-1,000 lookup rate shows what the meter charges once the allowance is gone. Before comparing stickers, count your own consumption: reveals per recruiter, messages per role, roles per quarter. The plan that looks expensive per month is often cheap per unit consumed, and the reverse.
The anchor under every quote-only negotiation in this market is the agency fee: convention puts a contingency search at 20 to 30 percent of first-year salary, and SHRM's own stated range is 20 to 25 percent of first-year cash compensation, with retained executive search near 33 percent, per its 2016 guidance.
Every quote-only tier in this survey lands somewhere between the software sticker and that agency fee, and the sales call is where the exact point gets found. We run that comparison properly in agency fee vs software cost.
Build the estimate over twelve months, even where the vendor advertises a monthly equivalent. Annual discounts, upfront payment and minimum terms vanish from a month-by-month comparison, and those are exactly the terms that decide what leaves the bank account.
Five lines per vendor is enough, and three of them are where the surprises live.
Then run one real month through it. Two recruiters who each need to reach 800 new people do not fit inside 500 contact credits on a single seat, however unlimited the search is. A founder who needs five people willing to interview, with nobody on staff to work a search database, has bought cheap software and no operating plan. Both are illustrations, not customers of ours.
The denominator matters as much as the total. For a sourcing seat it is cost per contactable, relevant prospect. For a screening product it is cost per reviewed applicant. For an outcome-priced service it is cost per interested, interview-ready candidate. Cost per hire arrives later, and by then it is measuring your interview loop and your offers as much as the vendor's work.
Send the same list to all of them, before a demo turns into a quote.
Get the answers onto the order form. A demo explains the product; the order form defines the invoice.
Every price came from the vendor's own page. Most were read on 10 August 2026; leonar.app and goperfect.com were re-read on 11 August 2026, and the hireEZ and SeekOut entries record the month rather than the day, both carried from our August 2026 comparison pages. Every billing toggle was read, not only the setting a page opens on, because most open on the cheaper rate and the most common error in this category is quoting the visible number as the monthly one. Leonar is the sharpest case: three settings rather than two, opening on annual prepaid, so $95 is on screen and the $119 monthly rate is not.
Where prices render by script, the figure came from the page source rather than the rendered summary: Juicebox serves both toggle variants in its HTML, Leonar carries all six of its USD rates as data attributes on the plan cards, and Fetcher's plan data is embedded in the page, which is also how its meta-description mismatch surfaced. Redirects were followed to the end, which is how the Paradox and Findem pricing URLs became findings instead of sources.
Prices are USD list rates; several vendors note regional variation, and LinkedIn labels some published figures as estimates that may exclude VAT or GST. No quote-only tier is assigned a number in this article, GoPerfect included, and third-party figures for it were checked and dropped. Where our comparison pages do carry figures for Recruiter Corporate, they are labeled reported quotes, never published prices.
Every published figure above sits on a public page you can check directly:
Fourteen vendors, four billing units, and the sticker belongs to the unit rather than to the job. A seat charges for a login. A flat tier charges for your headcount. An output meter charges for a delivered candidate, and a quote charges for whatever your alternatives happen to be worth that quarter. Line those entry prices up in a column and you have ranked four different products by accident.
So the question worth answering first is which meter matches the work your team cannot do itself, and only then what that meter costs. Ours counts interview-ready candidates, and a single open role is enough to read it.
Eleven of the fourteen we checked in August 2026 publish at least one transactable number: LinkedIn (Recruiter Lite only, on its help center), hireEZ (one solo rate), SeekOut (Core only), Juicebox, Leonar (both plans, at all three billing terms), Wellfound, Ashby (Foundations only), Gem (one startup figure), Dover, Fetcher, and Metix AI. Three publish nothing: Paradox and Findem redirect their pricing URLs to marketing pages, and GoPerfect lists plan names and scope with no dollar figure at any tier.
Recruiter Lite is $170 a month or $1,680 a year for a single license, with licenses two through five at $270 a month each and a five-recruiter cap (checked August 2026, published on LinkedIn's help center rather than its marketing pages). Each license includes 30 InMails a month. Recruiter Corporate, RPS and RPS+ publish no prices; all three are quote-only.
It depends on the job you are buying it to do. Four vendors have a free way in that is not a full hiring process on its own: Dover's ATS is free with unlimited users and jobs, with marketplace recruiters paid separately; Juicebox has a free tier below its paid seats; Wellfound Reach Explore is free with 20 contact reveals a month; and Gem is free for six months for companies under 30 employees. Among published paid entry prices, Metix AI Starter is $49 a month for three interview-ready candidates on one active role, Leonar Starter is $95 per user a month if you prepay the year and $119 billed monthly, Juicebox Starter is $99 per seat a month on yearly billing, and Gem shows $130 a month for an eligible 1 to 10 FTE startup. Those are different products with different eligibility rules, so the cheapest usable option is the one that covers your seats, your outreach volume and the recruiting work your team can actually do.
Three mechanisms separate them. Seats multiply, sometimes at a higher rate than the first one, as with LinkedIn's $270 add-seats, and sometimes by plain multiplication, as with Leonar at $95 to $119 per user, where five recruiters is $475 to $595 a month. Metered quotas of InMails, contact credits or email lookups run out before the month does, and the overage is a purchase. And most ladders end in a quote-only tier, where the price is a negotiation rather than a number.
Plans are $49, $89, $159 and $299 a month for 3, 12, 30 and 75 interview-ready candidates against 1, 3, 6 and 12 active roles, with 10 percent off on annual billing (checked August 2026). A credit is spent only when a qualified, interested candidate is unlocked, and if nobody clears your bar, nothing is charged. The free 14-day trial includes 3 New Roles and 12 Credits with no card required. Volume and specialized hiring go through a quote path.