The four marketing platforms a buyer meets first price from $0 to $1,250 a month. What decides the bill is the meter: profiles, credits, active customers. Kortix is the open-source AI Operating System: your agents, their skills, your company memory, and every connector in one git repo you own, with the agents working on real cloud computers.
Each cell comes from the vendor's own pricing page, read in October 2026.
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KortixEach platform on the list a buyer meets first prices the same marketing work against a different number. Klaviyo counts profiles and sends: its free tier allows "up to 250 active profiles (contacts who may receive marketing emails) and 500 email sends per month", plus "$5 of mobile messages per month" (Klaviyo, read October 2026). Deskferry counts credits: 5,000 a month on Growth at $49, 12,000 on Pro at $99, 40,000 on Scale at $299, and its pricing page states the intent in one line, "You are choosing how much work your agents get through each month" (Deskferry, read October 2026). Blueshift counts the profiles it engages. "Unlike others, we charge only for the profiles you use, not the ones you store," its page says, and the bill runs on the contacts a team actively engages rather than its whole database (Blueshift, read October 2026). Braze counts MAU, its monthly active customers, defined on its pricing page as "the customers who actively interact with your brand across your digital experiences" (Braze, read October 2026).
Read those four numbers as behavior and the choice gets easier. A profile meter moves with the size of the list, so it climbs in the week a sign-up form starts working, before an agent has done anything. A credit meter moves with the work an agent gets through, so it climbs in a launch week and falls in a quiet one. Braze's meter moves with how many customers touch the brand, which a campaign can influence and a marketing team cannot control. A plan that charges per seat moves with headcount, so a fifth hire lifts the bill in the first month and not one session has to run for it to happen.
Kortix meters the work and nobody's login. A credit there pays for the agent computer, members are unlimited and free, and the account shares one credit pool. Those credits buy the four jobs described on the home page: a launch note, the campaign variants, a claim audit and a competitor digest.
A credit plan lets a reader do the sum before signing. Work an example month with inputs anyone can replace, and keep every rate beside its source.
Kortix sells a credit at one cent, so 100 credits make a dollar and $50 buys 5,000. Its pricing page then states the rate for the machine underneath: "11 credits = 1 hour" of an agent computer at 2 vCPU, 4 GB and 20 GB, and "1 credit buys about 5 minutes of agent computer" (Kortix, read October 2026). Eleven credits an hour is eleven cents an hour, and $50 reaches about 454 hours at that size.
24 sessions x 45 minutes = 1,080 minutes1,080 minutes / 60 = 18 agent-computer hours18 hours x 11 credits an hour = 198 credits198 credits / 100 credits per dollar = $1.98The inputs are a team of four that starts 24 sessions in a month and lets each agent computer run 45 minutes. The arithmetic gives $1.98 for those inputs, and it is nobody else's quote. The free tier's 500 credits reach about 45 hours at the same size. Swap 24 and 45 for your own month and the method still holds. The rate is the one the pricing page carried in October 2026, and pricing pages move.
One more line belongs under that figure. Model calls go to the provider whose key the project holds, so the model bill is separate from the credit bill on that route.
The same 24 sessions on Deskferry Growth pay $49 for the month, because "Renews automatically at $49/month until canceled" holds whether the agents clear 24 sessions or 240, up to the 5,000 credits (Deskferry, read October 2026). Blueshift's Starter plan "starts at $1,250/month (billed annually)" for a platform that includes the CDP, Customer AI and the omni-channel campaigns (Blueshift, read October 2026). Neither number moves with 24 sessions. On Klaviyo, cross 250 active profiles or 500 sends and the account "will no longer be able to send additional emails or messages until the next billing cycle or until you upgrade to a paid plan" (Klaviyo, read October 2026).
Three shapes, three answers to the same month. Which one is smaller depends on the month, and a quiet month is the one that separates them.
A seat-priced tool bills access. Everyone with a login costs the same in a heavy month and in a quiet one. The line on the invoice describes who may use the product.
"Credits pay for the agent computer: the cloud machine where your agent runs code, browses and edits files. It bills per second while it runs and costs nothing while it is stopped" (Kortix, read October 2026). That sentence describes a machine doing work: it starts when a session starts, stops when the session goes idle, and a stopped agent computer is not on the invoice. A marketing team that runs four campaigns a quarter pays for four campaigns, and the two weeks between them cost nothing at the platform layer.
The difference shows up in how a month behaves. A seat bill is flat and predictable, which finance teams like. An agent bill is spiky, which means the forecast has to come from the work plan rather than from the headcount. Write the work plan down, sessions and minutes a session, and the credit bill becomes a line you can compute instead of a surprise. A hosted plan that renews monthly is the easier forecast, and the Deskferry comparison is where the two forecasts sit side by side.
Ask in writing, and keep the answer beside the price. Every vendor here answers them differently, and the differences decide which meter your team hits first.
Free runs at $0: "500 credits / month; 1 project; bring your own API key for any premium model; connect your ChatGPT subscription". Credits start at $50 a month, members are unlimited on one shared pool, and unused credits roll over one month. Managed models, DeepSeek and GLM, come with the Credits plan and not with Free. "Connect your ChatGPT subscription. Your agents use it for model calls and no credits are spent" (Kortix, read October 2026).
Under that sits the floor every hosted plan lacks. Run it on Kortix Cloud, in your VPC, or on your own on-prem network. Self-host is free, which takes the platform fee to $0 and leaves a server bill, model calls, and the person who reads the diffs. What stays on whose machine when a marketing team self-hosts is four commands and one honest list.
The four that come up first, then two about what the month costs.
Published prices for the four marketing platforms a buyer meets first run from $0 to $1,250 a month. The unit decides which end you land on: Klaviyo's free tier counts profiles, Deskferry counts credits, Blueshift counts engaged profiles, and Kortix counts agent-computer time.
For work that repeats, yes, when the output lands where a person can review it. A launch note, a set of campaign variants and a weekly digest come back as drafts, and the review costs minutes. The bill is worth checking against the hours the work used to take.
No vendor here publishes a build price, because the build is the time to write the agent and grant it access. On Kortix that work happens inside a plan you already pay for. Hosted vendors fold the setup into the subscription.
Kortix publishes no price for ChatGPT. What Kortix does state: connect your ChatGPT subscription and your agents use it for model calls, and no credits are spent.
From $0 on Klaviyo's free tier and Kortix's free plan to $1,250 a month on Blueshift's Starter plan, with Deskferry at $49 and Kortix's credits from $50. The month's work decides the credit plans; the list size and the customer count decide the others.
Kortix rolls unused monthly credits over one month, and top-ups never expire. Deskferry says top-up credits never expire while the plan is active. Blueshift's standard term is annual, so the commitment is the thing to watch there.
Free starts at $0 with 500 credits on your own provider keys or ChatGPT subscription, and each platform in the comparison publishes a meter you can read.