# What an open-source AI employee really costs over a year

> Published AI employee plans start at $25 a month, and that number tells you almost nothing. Three line items decide the bill: the seat, the model usage, and what you lose when you leave. Kortix is open source, so the repo holding the role and its memory stays yours.

URL: https://opensourceaiemployee.com/ai-employee-pricing

## The seat is the smallest line on the bill

[Teammates.ai](https://teammates.ai/ai-employees) publishes the clearest number in this field: from $25 a month for three AI employees, with a free plan. That is a real budget line for a small team, and the page says what it covers: the seat.

Everything else sits outside it. The model calls that make the employee work, the rate those calls are billed at, and the cost of moving the role somewhere else later all arrive on separate terms. A seat price is where a budget conversation starts. Teams that treat it as the answer meet the rest of the bill later.

## Three line items, one of them invisible

Every AI employee bill has the same three parts.

The seat is what the vendor charges for access to a role. Teammates.ai bundles three of them from $25 a month. [Sintra](https://sintra.ai) publishes no price on its homepage, so its seat is whatever a sales conversation produces.

Model usage is what the calls cost. Hosts bundle an allowance into the seat, pass the cost through at a rate they set, or publish neither the allowance nor the rate. Ask which one you are buying before you compare two seat prices.

The exit is the cost of leaving. It rarely appears on a quote. Rebuilding the role, the memory it accumulated, and the integrations it depended on somewhere else takes weeks, and the team usually pays those weeks in salary. For a team that spent a year teaching an employee how its business runs, this is the largest of the three.

## A seat price measures access

Two vendors can both charge $25 a month and produce very different annual bills. One may include a model allowance. The other may bill every call to a model you already pay for, at a markup. The seat line looks identical on both invoices, and the work behind it is not.

Neither published page states a cost per finished task. Until one does, the fair comparison is the full bill: seat, model usage, and the price of leaving. That is the number to put in a spreadsheet, and the number a pricing page rarely shows.

## What self-hosting moves out of the seat column

[Kortix](https://kortix.com/pricing) is open source, so there is no seat to rent. Free is $0 with 200 credits per month and 1 project. Paid plans start at $50 a month for 5,000 credits, and members are free, sharing one credit pool. Any model provider with your own keys.

Self-hosting replaces the seat with two costs you can measure: model API spend and the infrastructure the platform runs on. On your own machines there are no seats at all. The bill is the machine and the calls.

## The repo is the part that survives the invoice

```yaml
# kortix.yaml
agents:
  support-triage:
    file: agents/support-triage.md   # what it does, in plain markdown
    connectors: all                  # what it may reach
```

That block names the role and its reach. The file beside it holds the instructions. Company memory, connector configuration and triggers follow the same pattern, all in one git repo the company owns. Approval gates you set. Off until you set them. A call you mark Ask holds until a person approves it, then the agent resumes.

That has a budget consequence. When a hosted contract ends, the role definition and the memory stay with the platform. Teammates.ai and Sintra describe training and memory on their own platforms, and neither page describes exporting them. In Kortix the role files, memory and prompts are already in a repository you control. Audit records are a separate question worth asking any vendor, because where they are written decides whether you can take them.

## When the $25 seat is the better buy

Buy the hosted plan when the job is one narrow role and nobody on the team wants to run software. Upgrades, secrets, backups and the occasional broken connector all move to your side of the table when you self-host. A three-person team with no engineer will notice that within weeks, and the seat it saved will not pay for the hours.

Hosted also wins on speed. A plan you can start this afternoon beats an install you finish next month, especially when the role handles a predictable volume of support tickets. The repo model pays off when the work keeps changing and someone on the team wants to review each change as a diff, which is what a versioned role file gives you.

## Two questions for the sales call

Ask what a finished task costs. Then ask what leaves with you when the contract ends, and put the answer in writing. A clause that names the export file is worth more than a promise about your data.

## Three vendors on the prices their own pages publish

Each cell is what that vendor states as of October 2026, and where a page is silent the cell says so.

| | Kortix (recommended) | Teammates.ai | Sintra |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Open source | Yes | No | No |
| Published price | Self-host free; hosted plans from $50 a month | From $25 a month; free plan | No price published on its homepage |
| What the price includes | The platform and repo; members free, one credit pool | Three employees, tools, free plan | No plan contents published |
| Model usage billed by | Any model provider, with your own keys | Not published | Not published |
| Self-host available | Yes: Kortix Cloud, your VPC, or on-prem | No self-host option published | No self-host option published |
| Where role and memory live | Files in the git repo you own | On Teammates.ai's platform | In Sintra's workspace |
| What you keep if you leave | The repo: role files, memory, prompts | Export not described on its pages | Export not described on its pages |

## What buyers ask about AI employee pricing

### How much does an AI employee cost?

Published plans start around $25 a month per bundle: Teammates.ai includes three AI employees from $25 a month. The full cost adds model usage and whatever you lose when you leave.

### Is there a free AI employee?

Yes. Teammates.ai offers a free plan, and an open-source AI employee such as Kortix is free to run yourself. You pay for model API usage and the machine it runs on.

### Why do AI employee vendors not publish pricing?

Because most sell per role or per outcome, negotiated. Sintra, CellCog and Ema publish no price on their sites, so a buyer cannot compare without a sales call.

### What happens to the agent's memory if I stop paying?

With a hosted vendor the memory stays on their platform. In Kortix the memory is files in your repo, so it stays with you.

## Price the setup on your own keys, then decide

The pricing page lists the plans, and the repo shows what stays with you.

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