# How Much Does an AI Employee Cost Per Month?

*Question — 2026-09-13 — by Mahmoud Zalt*

A plain answer to what an AI employee costs monthly, how the plan plus credits model works, and the parts of the bill nobody explains up front.

**Short answer.** **An AI employee costs a fixed monthly plan fee, and Sistava paid plans run from $25 a month at the entry tier up to $200 a month for teams.** Every plan includes a monthly allowance of credits, which is the fuel the employee burns when it does work. A month of light tasks stays inside the allowance. A month of heavy research, long documents, or high message volume can use it up faster, and you can watch that number and cap it before it surprises you. There is also a free tier with a small one-time credit allowance if you just want to see how it behaves.

You searched for a price and got a useless range. One page says free, the next says fifty thousand a year, and none of them tell you which one describes a business your size. That is not because the answer is secret. It is because most pricing pages are written for the buyer the vendor wants, not the one reading.

So here is the honest version. Your monthly cost has two parts: a plan fee that never moves, and a usage number that moves with how hard you work the employee. Once you can see both, budgeting takes about ten minutes.

**Sistava** sells AI employees on a monthly plan. You pick a tier, you hire one or more employees for specific jobs, and the plan comes with a credit allowance included. Credits are consumed as the employee reads, thinks, writes, and calls the tools you connected. Each tier also bundles how many employees you can hire, how many workspaces you get, and how many seats your own team can use.

## At a Glance

- **2** Parts to the bill: plan fee plus credit usage
- **$25** Entry plan, per month
- **24/7** Hours an employee is available to work
- **0** Recruiting fees, notice periods, or setup charges

## What does an AI employee cost per month?

A monthly plan fee, starting at $25 and stepping up through $50, $100, and $200 as your volume and team size grow. That fee is the whole predictable part of the number. It does not change because you had a busy week, and it does not move up and down with the calendar.

The tiers differ on how many credits you get each month, how many employees you can hire, how many workspaces you can run, and how many seats your own team gets. The entry tier includes 20,000 credits a month and room for three employees. The top self-serve tier includes 160,000 credits and room for ten. Most solo operators sit on one of the two lower tiers for a long time.

If you want the current numbers rather than a description of them, the [pricing page](/pricing) always shows what is live today. Plans change over time and an article is a bad place to keep a price list.

## What are credits, and why is anything usage-based at all?

Credits are the unit that measures work done. Every plan includes a monthly allowance of them. A short reply to a customer costs a small number. A run that reads forty pages, cross-checks a spreadsheet, and drafts a six-page report costs a much larger number, because it genuinely took more work.

Usage-based billing exists because the alternative is worse for you. A pure flat fee has to be priced for the heaviest customer, which means the light user pays for someone else's heavy month. Metering the work means a quiet month costs you a quiet month, and a launch month costs you a launch month.

The part that matters most is visibility. You can see credit usage as it happens, per employee and per job, so you are never reading your bill for the first time at the end of the month. You can also cap spend, which turns the scary open-ended part of usage pricing into a number you chose.

When the allowance runs out, work pauses rather than silently billing you into a hole. You top up or wait for the month to reset. That is a deliberate design choice: a surprise invoice is a worse outcome than a paused task.

## A real month, worked out end to end

Take Nadia, who runs a two-person bookkeeping practice with about forty small business clients. Her worst recurring job is chasing missing documents: receipts, bank statements, a signed engagement letter that never came back. She spends roughly six hours a week on it, mostly writing polite follow-up emails and updating a tracker.

Six hours a week is about twenty-six hours a month. Nadia bills clients at $85 an hour, so those twenty-six hours are worth $2,210 in work she is not doing. That is not money she loses, but it is the ceiling on what solving this is worth to her.

| Line | Nadia's number | How she got it |
|---|---|---|
| Hours on document chasing | 26 per month | 6 hours a week, measured for three weeks |
| Her billable rate | $85 per hour | What she charges clients |
| Value of that time | $2,210 per month | 26 hours multiplied by $85 |
| Plan fee | Fixed, from $25 | Whichever tier fits her volume |
| Credit usage | Variable | Higher in the two weeks around month-end |
| Hours she still spends | About 5 per month | Reviewing drafts and handling the awkward cases |

Notice the last row. She did not get twenty-six hours back. She got about twenty-one, because she still reads what goes out and still handles the three clients who need a phone call rather than a fourth email. Any model that promises you the full number is not modelling reality.

Her usage is also lumpy. The two weeks around month-end burn far more credits than the rest of the month, because that is when the chasing actually happens. Averaging her usage across the month would have made her plan look wrong when it was fine.

## What the monthly price does not cover

Your plan buys software that reads, writes, decides within limits you set, and calls the tools you connect. It does not buy a person who will show up, take responsibility, and own an outcome. That distinction is the single most useful thing to hold in your head while budgeting.

- **Anything physical.** Nobody is signing for a delivery, walking a site, or fixing a machine.
- **Anything needing legal accountability.** A person has to sign filings, contracts, and regulated advice. Software cannot carry that responsibility.
- **Relationship work.** The call where a client is upset and needs to hear a human voice is not a task you hand over.
- **Judgment on a broken process.** If the underlying process is unclear, automating it faster just produces confusion at speed.
- **Your setup time.** The first week involves you writing down how the job is actually done. That is real hours and it is not on the invoice.

That last item catches people. Setup is not a fee, but it is a cost. Budget three to five hours in your first fortnight to write clear instructions, connect accounts, and correct the first batch of output. Skip it and the software will do exactly what you vaguely asked.

## When hiring a person is simply the better spend

Sometimes the right answer is a person, and it is not close. If the work needs someone accountable in the room, someone who builds trust with your customers over months, or someone who can walk into an unclear situation and decide what should happen, hire a human being. Software is not competing for that job.

Hire a person when the work changes shape constantly, when it depends on reading a room, when it needs a signature that carries legal weight, or when the value is the relationship itself. Hire a person when you need someone to own a result end to end and answer for it.

In practice most small businesses end up with both. The person keeps the judgment work and the relationships. The AI employee takes the specified, repeatable half that was quietly eating the person's week. That is a better outcome for everyone in the building, and it is the shape we see most often.

## How to find your own monthly number in one week

### A one-week cost check

1. **Pick one job with a countable output** — Follow-up emails sent, invoices reconciled, leads researched, tickets answered. If you cannot count it, you cannot price it.
2. **Measure last month honestly** — Count the real volume from your inbox, helpdesk, or CRM. Use what happened, not what you plan to happen next quarter.
3. **Start on the tier that fits that volume** — Do not buy headroom for a future you have not reached. Moving up a tier later takes a minute.
4. **Watch credit usage for two full weeks** — Look at where it spikes. Lumpy usage is normal and tells you more than a monthly average ever will.
5. **Subtract the hours you still spend** — Review time, corrections, the cases you handle yourself. The honest saving is what is left after that.
6. **Set a cap you are comfortable with** — Decide the ceiling before you need it. A cap you set calmly beats a bill you read in a panic.

## Comparison

| Dimension | Traditional | With Sista |
|---|---|---|
| Predictability | Your own hours, invisible and uncosted | A fixed plan fee plus a usage number you can watch |
| Quiet month | Same cost, because your time is the cost | Plan fee only, usage stays low |
| Busy month | Work slips or you work the weekend | Usage rises with volume, and you can cap it |
| Scaling up | Hire, onboard, wait weeks | Hire another employee for another job the same day |
| Judgment work | Handled by a person | Still handled by a person, on purpose |

## FAQ

### How much does an AI employee cost per month?

A monthly plan fee plus whatever credits you use. Sistava paid plans start at $25 a month and step up through $50, $100, and $200 as your volume and team size grow. Each tier includes a monthly credit allowance, from 20,000 credits at the entry tier to 160,000 at the top self-serve tier, so a light month costs the plan fee alone. Check the pricing page for the details that are live today.

### Do I pay extra for each person on my team?

No. Seats for your own team are bundled into the plan rather than charged incrementally, and each tier includes a set number of them. So adding a colleague does not add a line to your bill. If you outgrow the seats your tier includes, you move up a tier, which is a single step rather than a per-person charge every month.

### What happens if I run out of credits mid-month?

Work pauses rather than quietly billing you past your budget. You can top up to continue immediately, move to a tier with a larger allowance, or wait for the monthly reset. Pausing is deliberate, because an unexpected invoice is a worse problem than an unfinished task you can restart in thirty seconds.

### Can I set a hard spending limit?

Yes. You can see usage as it accumulates, per employee and per job, and set a cap so spend cannot run past a number you chose. Set it in your first week rather than your third month. The whole point of visible metering is that you get to make the decision calmly, in advance.

### Is the entry plan enough for a one-person business?

For most solo operators running one or two well-defined jobs, yes, and it is the sensible place to start. Buy for the volume you have rather than the volume you hope for. Moving up a tier later takes a minute, while paying for headroom you never use is money gone for good.

### Why is my usage so uneven week to week?

Because your business is uneven. Most workloads cluster: month-end reconciliation, a launch week, the two days after a campaign goes out. Lumpy credit usage is normal and it is more informative than a monthly average, because it shows you which weeks actually need the capacity you are paying for.

Monthly cost feels like it should be one number on a page. It is really two numbers and a habit: a plan fee you choose once, a usage figure you watch, and the discipline of measuring what you actually got back.

Do that for one job for one month and the question answers itself. You will know your real volume, your real usage pattern, and the honest number of hours you recovered, which is a far better basis for a decision than any range you can find online.

**Tags:** ai-employee-cost, monthly-pricing, credits, small-business, budgeting