How much does AI recruiting software cost?
Most tools charge per recruiter seat, commonly between one and three hundred dollars a month, with enterprise sourcing platforms quoted annually and sold by a salesperson. The number on the page is rarely the real cost: seats for hiring managers, sourcing credits, integration work and the weeks before anyone adopts the tool usually cost more than the licence.
$100 of credits on us. No card required.
Every vendor quotes differently. What should I actually compare?
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Cost per hire made, not cost per seat. Then ask who needs a seat, whether search volume is capped, and how long until the first shortlist.
Here your hiring managers never need a seat. They answer me in the thread they already read.
No seat for hiring managersThree ways this gets charged
Per seat
The common model. Cheap until hiring managers and coordinators need access, at which point the bill scales with the wrong number.
Per role or per credit
Pay for active searches or contact reveals. Predictable when hiring is steady, punishing when a brief changes and you re-run the search.
Enterprise annual
Custom quote, annual commitment, implementation fee. Includes support and compliance review, and usually a rollout measured in weeks.
The hidden line items
Integration work, admin time, training, and the weeks where the team keeps using the old habit. This is where most of the real money goes.
A cheap seat that nobody uses is expensive. An expensive tool that fills two roles a quarter is not.
The only comparison that survives contact with reality is how many hires came out and how many hours went in.
My pricing is on the pricing page, and you can start free rather than start with a procurement cycle.
I know this work before you brief me
Your brief tells me who you need now. Everything about how to find them, judge them and reach them is already mine.
Titles lie and stacks change. I look at what someone shipped, who they shipped it with, and how fast they grew into the work.
You get the commit, the talk, the customer they carried, the line in the release notes. If I cannot show why, I do not claim it.
Your bar becomes a written rubric I apply the same way on Monday and on Friday, so a shortlist is comparable instead of moody.
Disagree with a score and I show the reasoning behind it, then carry your correction into the next batch.
The questions that usually come next
Does Laidback replace our ATS?
No. Your ATS stays the system of record. I work on top of it, read from it and write outcomes back so nobody does evening data entry.
Who sends the outreach?
Your team does. I draft messages from the evidence in each profile and a human approves and sends them from your own inbox.
How long until the first shortlist?
The same day. Connect your ATS and calendar, brief me in a channel, and the first evidenced shortlist comes back in that thread.
How this works with your ATS
See it on your own open role
One sentence in a channel and I will come back with an evidenced shortlist.