What AI adds to your CRM bill: Agentforce vs Breeze vs Attio credits, priced for a 20-seat team

A CRM seat price is only half the bill now. Every big CRM has added AI agents, and every one meters them in a different unit. Salesforce counts actions and conversations. HubSpot, Attio and Close count credits, but a credit buys a different amount of work at each.

So we took three jobs a sales team actually gives an AI, and priced them for 20 seats in each vendor's own unit. We read each vendor's pricing pages and docs on 27 September 2026. We didn't use these AI features ourselves, and no CRM vendor pays us. aliteq is a US company, so every figure is a US list price in dollars. Our guide to the best CRM for AI startups selling to enterprise covers the seat prices; this page covers only the AI on top.

How each CRM meters AI

Each CRM uses its own unit, so one "AI cost" line across vendors is meaningless. Salesforce bills per agent action or per conversation. HubSpot bills credits by a rate sheet. Attio and Close bill credits per feature, with packs for more. Pipedrive and Zoho bundle their AI into the plan and publish no meter.

Two rules sit under this table. First, Salesforce doesn't let you mix models: its FAQ says "Flex Credits and Conversations will not be supported in the same org." Second, none of these vendors rolls unused credits forward. HubSpot, Attio and Close reset monthly. Salesforce's included credits are a yearly pool, and "Unused Flex Credits do not roll over into subsequent subscription terms."

What 20 seats get included

Most CRMs give one AI pool per account, not per seat. So a 20-seat team gets the same allowance as a 5-seat team on HubSpot, Attio and Salesforce. Close adds credits per user, but stops adding after 10 users.

Salesforce's Starter and Pro Suite editions list no Flex Credits, and its pricing page says "AI can be added to Core and above." Seat prices come from each vendor's page on annual billing; the CRM seat-cost guide has the full table.

HubSpot's two numbers

HubSpot's own documents disagree on the allowance, and we couldn't resolve it. The pricing page's plan cards show 5,000 credits on Starter, 10,000 on Professional and 15,000 on Enterprise. HubSpot's Product and Services Catalog, its legal price list, gives Customer Platform 500, 5,000 and 10,000. Single hubs such as Sales Hub get 500, 3,000 and 5,000.

HubSpot's knowledge base uses the smaller catalog numbers in its examples. The pricing page's FAQ gives no number at all. We price with the catalog figure, the conservative one. If the pricing page is right, each HubSpot bill below drops by 5,000 credits, or $50 a month. Ask HubSpot to put your allowance in the order form.

What one AI task costs past the allowance

Once the allowance is gone, filling one field on a record costs about a dime on Salesforce and HubSpot, and one to two cents on Attio. Researching a lead is where the gap opens: $1.00 on HubSpot, against about $0.14 on Attio.

We defined three tasks, then matched each to the closest thing each vendor prices:

• Fill one field on a record. An AI step writes one value: a summary, a category or an enriched fact. Salesforce: one Agentforce action; "updating a record" is Salesforce's own example of an action. HubSpot: a Data agent prompt on one record, or one AI action in a workflow, 10 credits each. Attio: an AI attribute such as prompt completion or summarize, 1 credit per record. Close: enrichment, "6 credits" per field on one record.
• Research one lead. HubSpot's Prospecting agent is 100 credits to "Recommend outreach for one lead". Attio's web agent is 10 credits a record. Salesforce doesn't publish how many actions its prospecting or account research agents use, so we assume one. For Close we assume three enriched fields, or 18 credits.
• Handle one customer chat. HubSpot's customer agent is 50 credits to "Resolve one conversation". Salesforce's worked examples run two to five actions per request, so we assume three on Flex Credits, or $2 on its Conversations model. Attio and Close don't price a text chat agent on the pages we read.

Credits buy wildly different amounts at each vendor, so compare dollars per task, never credits per plan. A HubSpot credit costs $0.01 and a Salesforce Flex Credit $0.005, but a HubSpot record prompt takes 10 credits and a Salesforce action takes 20. They land at the same $0.10.

Three workloads, priced for 20 seats

At our light workload, only HubSpot bills much past its allowance: about $350 a month. At medium, the extra runs from $120 on Attio Pro to $2,250 on HubSpot Pro. At heavy, from $475 to $8,450. The workloads are our assumptions, so change them to your own numbers.

Here are the workloads, for a team of 20 reps:

• Light: 2,000 field fills and 200 leads researched a month. That's about five AI field fills per rep per working day.
• Medium: 8,000 field fills, 1,000 leads researched and 1,000 customer chats handled by an agent.
• Heavy: 20,000 field fills, 4,000 leads and 5,000 chats.

First, the units each vendor would count. These are the numbers to check against your own usage report.

Then the dollars past each allowance, at list price:

How we got there, vendor by vendor, using each one's own billing rule:

• Salesforce includes 500,000 credits a year on Core, so we compare a year of use with the yearly pool. Medium: 240,000 credits a month is 2,880,000 a year, 2,380,000 over the pool, times $0.005 is $11,900.
• HubSpot is billed monthly: credits used minus the 5,000 included, times $0.01. Medium: 225,000 credits over is $2,250. The pricing page's 10,000 would make it $2,200.
• Attio sells whole packs. Medium needs 8,000 more credits, so the +10,000 pack at $120 a month on annual billing ($150 monthly).
• Close sells credit plan tiers. Medium needs 46,000 more credits, so Tier 8, which has 47,000 for $500.

This is not a ranking. Attio and Close carry no chat workload, because they don't sell a text chat agent, and their seats cost differently. HubSpot's biggest line in the medium and heavy months is the Prospecting agent: 4,000 leads at $1 each is $4,000 of the $8,450. If you'd research leads another way, HubSpot's bill falls fast.

Salesforce: Flex Credits, Conversations or the $125 add-on

Salesforce sells Agentforce three ways, and the right one depends on who talks to the agent. Flex Credits bill each action at $0.10. Conversations bill $2 per customer conversation. Per-user add-ons at $125 a month give "Unmetered Agentforce usage for employees".

The maths between them is simple:

• Flex vs Conversations: $2 buys 20 actions. If your customer agent averages fewer than 20 actions a chat, Flex is cheaper. Salesforce's own examples run two to five.
• Flex vs the $125 add-on: $125 buys 1,250 actions. A rep whose own AI use tops 1,250 actions a month is cheaper on the add-on.
• Our heavy workload puts 24,000 employee actions across 20 reps, 1,200 each. That's just under the line. With add-ons for everyone plus Flex Credits for the chats, we get $45,500 a year, against $44,300 on Flex alone.

That add-on figure assumes the lead research runs as employee usage, which is our reading of "for employees". Confirm it with your account executive. Also note the smaller costs around the edges: an Agentforce User License is $5 a user a month and "Requires Flex Credits", and Salesforce's examples "do not include other costs like Data 360 credits". EU buyers pay €500 per 100,000 credits, which is $570.15 at the ECB rate of 25 September 2026, 14% more than the US list.

HubSpot: what Breeze includes and what costs credits

Breeze Assistant comes with every HubSpot seat, and it isn't on the credits rate sheet. The Breeze agents are what spend credits. HubSpot's catalog says a Core Seat "Grants core access to all purchased products, built-in AI with Breeze Assistant".

What each agent costs, from HubSpot's rate sheet, at $0.01 a credit:

Three billing rules matter more than the rates:

• The allowance is a hard stop. HubSpot's knowledge base says that if you haven't bought extra credits, "any usage-based features will pause until your next reset date." Overage billing needs a credit purchase first.
• The default changed on 16 September 2026. Credits bought on or after that date default to pay-as-you-go overage. Earlier buyers default to auto-upgrade, which adds 1,000-credit packs "for the remainder of your contract".
• Packs are a commitment. You can only cancel or downgrade credit packs at the end of the term. From the pricing page's own price data, 5,000 extra credits list at $50 a month, or $45 paid annually.

Attio, Close, Pipedrive and Zoho

Attio has two credit pools. Workspace credits (10,000 a month on Pro) pay for workflows and AI attributes. Seat credits (1,000 a user on Pro) pay only for Ask Attio, its assistant, and can't be shared. Its guide prices the pieces plainly: "Summarize record: 1 credit per record", "Web agent: 10 credits per record". An Ask Attio request like "Prep me for my next meeting" is 10 to 20 credits. In new workflows, triggers and logic are free, and data writes are 1 credit.

Close gives 2,000 credits a user a month on Scale, but "Additional users beyond the cap don't add more included credits": the cap is 10 users, so 20,000. Many of its AI features never use credits, including Chloe Chat, the notetaker, lead summaries and email drafting. Credits go to enrichment ("6 credits" a field), Auto Updates and Chloe voice agents, which also pay telephony rates. Close doesn't state the credits per Auto Update or per voice minute.

Pipedrive lists AI report creation and its Nova meeting briefs on Lite, and AI email writing and summaries on Premium. It publishes no credit system or per-use AI price on its pricing or AI pages, so there's nothing to meter here.

Zoho CRM lists its Zia AI features, such as workflow suggestions and email intent and sentiment analysis, on Enterprise ($40 a seat, annual) and Ultimate. Its comparison page shows no per-use AI price.

How to keep the AI line predictable

The cheapest AI line is the one you've measured before you sign. Every vendor here shows usage by feature, and most let you set limits.

Put your own seat count into the calculator to see the seat side of the bill, then add the AI line from the tables above.

If a CRM's agent pricing looks steep for simple jobs, building your own flow is the other route. Our AI automation hub compares Zapier, Make, n8n and agent platforms on the same kind of workloads, and what it costs to run an open model shows the token side. The rest of the software stack is on our business software hub.