Live AI category
AI that plans, uses tools and completes multi-step work
Agentic AI goes beyond answering prompts. These products plan work, operate tools or computers, create deliverables and recover from intermediate failures—with different charges for subscriptions, credits, model calls, runtime and actions.
Where it creates value
Autonomous research and analysis
Documents, spreadsheets and presentations
Browser and computer-use workflows
Scheduled monitoring
Enterprise customer and employee agents
Multi-agent application development
What creates the bill
Credits or actions per attempt
Model, browser and sandbox runtime
Connectors and external APIs
Failure, retry and escalation rate
Human approval and repair
Unused monthly capacity
Tracked products
Pricing is shown in its native unit and then normalised through cost per accepted outcome. Public affiliate availability never determines a tool's ranking.
Manus · Autonomous general-purpose agent
Subscription plus task credits
Free and paid credit plans; task complexity determines consumption.
Best for
Research, websites, slides, scheduled tasks and multi-step deliverables
Cost trap: Comparing included credits without measuring accepted deliverables.
OpenAI · Knowledge-work agent
Eligible paid-plan usage plus additional credits
Long-running Work tasks use plan capacity and can draw on purchased credits.
Best for
Documents, spreadsheets, presentations, reports, Sites and connected apps
Cost trap: Treating included access as zero-cost unlimited work.
Anthropic · Knowledge-work and file agent
Included with paid Claude plans
Practical capacity follows the limits of the selected Claude plan.
Best for
Document assembly, file synthesis and structured knowledge work
Cost trap: Ignoring verification and repair time for high-consequence output.
Perplexity · Search-native digital worker
Subscription plus credits
Computer consumes credits based on task complexity; allocations vary by plan.
Best for
Cited research, connected-app tasks, asset creation and monitoring
Cost trap: Counting a completed run before its claims and actions are verified.
Genspark · Multi-tool super agent
Subscription plus credits
Individual and team plans combine specialist agents with a shared credit allowance.
Best for
Research, slides, sheets, documents, design, coding and communications
Cost trap: Using one broad agent for every task without measuring specialist output quality.
Microsoft · Enterprise agent builder
Prepaid Copilot Credits or pay-as-you-go
Capacity and pay-as-you-go options meter agent actions and usage.
Best for
Microsoft 365, Power Platform and external-channel agents
Cost trap: Buying capacity before estimating credits per resolved workflow.
Salesforce · CRM-native enterprise agent platform
Flex Credits, conversations or user licensing
Pricing can be based on credits, actions, conversations or user packaging.
Best for
Customer service, sales and employee workflows in Salesforce
Cost trap: Optimising action price while ignoring implementation and unresolved cases.
AWS · Managed agent runtime and operations platform
Modular consumption pricing
Runtime, browser, memory, gateway, identity, evaluation and observability are charged separately.
Best for
Operating custom production agents on AWS
Cost trap: Comparing model tokens while omitting the operational service stack.
Google · Open-source agent framework
Open-source framework plus infrastructure usage
No framework licence fee; landed cost comes from models, tools, hosting and operations.
Best for
Code-first agent and multi-agent development
Cost trap: Calling the framework free while excluding production infrastructure and labour.
n8n · Workflow automation and agent platform
Cloud subscription or self-hosted infrastructure
Cloud plans meter workflow executions; self-hosting shifts cost into infrastructure and operations.
Best for
Developer-controlled AI workflows, agents and integrations
Cost trap: Calling self-hosting free while omitting maintenance, upgrades and incident support.
Make · Visual automation and AI-agent platform
Subscription plus execution credits
Plans scale by monthly credits, with most workflow module actions consuming credits.
Best for
Visual workflows, app integration and accessible AI automation
Cost trap: Comparing monthly credits without calculating credits per successful business workflow.
Taskade · AI agents, automation and app builder
Subscription plus AI credits
Plans bundle seats, AI credits, agents, automations and the Genesis app builder.
Best for
Small-team agents, workflows, collaborative projects and prompt-built apps
Cost trap: Buying a high-credit tier before proving recurring agent and automation usage.
Browse AI · Browser automation and web-data agent
Subscription plus extraction credits
Plans meter websites, credits and task volume; difficult sites can consume more credits.
Best for
No-code scraping, monitoring, website-to-spreadsheet and data workflows
Cost trap: Using cost per robot run instead of cost per accepted clean dataset or alert.
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Commercial-intent guides
Each page targets a specific buying question and uses an accepted-outcome denominator.
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FAQ
An agent pursues an objective across multiple steps, invokes tools, observes results and continues until a stopping condition. Autonomy is a spectrum; one model call is not automatically an agent.
Use cost per accepted completed task. Include subscription, credits, model usage, runtime, tools, retries and human approval or repair.
No. Agents can be economical for bounded repeatable work, but vague tasks, unreliable tools and expensive review can make them costlier.
Coding agents are agentic, but repository access, testing, review and accepted engineering outcomes create a distinct buying and cost model.
Choose the economic system first
Do not compare credits with tokens or seats with executions. Start with the architecture that matches the job, then calculate subscriptions, usage, retries, runtime, human review and accepted outcomes in one landed-cost model.
Delegated research, documents and multi-step knowledge work
Primary cost unit: Plan, credits and accepted tasks
Repository work, debugging, refactoring and software delivery
Primary cost unit: Seat, requests, tokens and accepted code changes
A bounded production workflow with one accountable agent
Primary cost unit: Tokens, tools, runtime and reviewer time
Specialist roles where measured quality gains justify orchestration
Primary cost unit: Role calls, handoffs, repeated context and coordination tax
Deterministic processes with selected AI steps
Primary cost unit: Executions, operations, model calls and maintenance
Organisation-wide agents with identity, policy and audit requirements
Primary cost unit: Seats, capacity, connectors, governance and support
Add platform, model, tool, runtime, retry, infrastructure and human-review costs. Divide by work that passes the written acceptance checklist. For multi-agent systems, also show the coordination tax against an equivalent single-agent design.
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