AI Executive Assistant Pricing Compared 2026

Entry prices for an AI executive assistant run from $0 to $48.50 a month — a six-fold spread for tools that all promise the same thing: fewer hours lost to your inbox and calendar. Sticker price tells you almost nothing, though. One tool's $8 plan caps you at 30 messages a day. Another's $10 plan only books travel. A third bills per computer, not per person.

We pulled current pricing from the official pages of six tools on 5 August 2026 — Dume, Sintra, alfred_, Simular, Otto the Agent, and Saner.AI — and mapped what each price actually buys. Here's where the money goes, and which model fits which kind of buyer.

Key Takeaways

• Entry paid plans span $8/month (Saner.AI Starter) to $48.50/month (Sintra X), with Dume at $9/month and alfred_ at $29.99/month flat (official pricing pages, August 2026).
• Only Dume and Saner.AI offer a permanent free tier. alfred_ gives 7 days, Otto gives a full year free, and Sintra and Simular give none.
• Credit caps matter more than headline price: Sintra meters every plan at 250 credits/month no matter what you pay.
• Saner.AI's plans exclude GPT, Claude, and Gemini access — those are billed separately per token or via your own API key.
• Simular charges per computer, not per seat, so a second machine doubles your bill.

What You're Actually Paying For

Three pricing models dominate this category, and they're not interchangeable. Of the six tools we checked, two run a permanent free tier, two charge a single flat rate, and four use tiers gated by credits or capacity (official pricing pages, August 2026). Which one saves you money depends entirely on how predictable your workload is.

Free tiers: real ones and trial-shaped ones

A free tier only counts if it doesn't expire. Dume and Saner.AI both offer one. Dume's free plan includes 5 agents, 1 integration, 1 MCP connection, and 20 messages a day. Saner.AI's gives you 30 AI messages a month and 100 notes. Both are thin, but both let you test against your real inbox before paying.

Otto the Agent is free for a full year, no credit card, then $10/month. alfred_ offers 7 days. Sintra and Simular offer nothing free — just a 14-day refund window in Sintra's case.

Flat pricing: one number, no math

alfred_ charges a flat $29.99/month for individuals, or $299.99 a year, with no usage tiers to reason about. Otto charges $10/month after its free year, with — in its own words — no contracts, no agent-assist fees, and no minimum spend. You trade ceiling for clarity: there's no cheaper plan to fall back to.

Tiered and credit-metered: cheap to start, easy to outgrow

Dume, Sintra, Saner.AI, and Simular all meter usage. Dume runs Free, GO ($9), PRO ($18), and MAX ($40) monthly, dropping to $8, $15, and $33 on annual billing. Saner.AI runs Free, Starter ($8), and Standard ($16). Sintra sells a single product, Sintra X, but prices it by commitment length rather than features.

That last one is worth pausing on. Sintra's list price is $97 for a one-month plan, currently discounted to $48.50. The 12-month plan lists at $52 and sells at $15.60. Same product, same 250 monthly credits — the only variable is how long you commit (sintra.ai/pricing, 2026).

Hidden Costs to Watch For

The gap between advertised price and real cost is where this category gets expensive. Four patterns show up repeatedly across the six pricing pages we read, and each one can quietly multiply your bill.

Credit caps that don't scale with price

Sintra is the clearest example. Every plan — the $15.60 annual and the $48.50 monthly alike — ships with 250 monthly credits. Paying triple doesn't get you more headroom; it gets you a shorter commitment. Run out and you buy top-ups. Simular's $20 Plus plan includes 10,000 credits that are reloadable, which is a different bet: cheap until it isn't.

Model access billed separately

Saner.AI's plans list "Access to External AIs" as a feature, but that means availability, not inclusion. Messages to GPT, Claude, or Gemini don't count against your plan's message limit because they aren't covered by it — you pay per token or supply your own API key. A $16/month plan can carry a meaningful variable cost on top.

Seats and machines, not users

alfred_'s Teams plan costs $34.99 per seat with a two-seat minimum — $69.98 before anyone else joins, and $5 more per seat than the individual plan. Simular is stranger still: it prices per computer. Two machines means two subscriptions, whether or not it's the same person using them.

Promotional anchors

Sintra shows $97 struck through next to $48.50. Simular shows $200 struck through next to $20. Treat struck-through numbers as the price the vendor may charge later, not as savings you've banked. Simular also confirms it offers no annual pricing at all, so there's no way to lock a rate in.

Stale prices on the vendor's own site

Check the pricing page, not the homepage. When we pulled these figures on 5 August 2026, alfred_'s pricing page listed $29.99/month and $34.99 per team seat, while its homepage and ROI calculator still quoted $24.99. Marketing pages drift; the billing page is what charges your card.

Which Pricing Model Fits Which Buyer

Match the model to how variable your work is. Predictable, high-volume inbox work rewards flat pricing. Bursty or seasonal work rewards metered tiers with a free floor to fall back to.

Start with a free tier if:

• You want to point the assistant at your real inbox before paying anything — Dume and Saner.AI are the only two that allow this indefinitely.
• Your volume is genuinely low, or spiky enough that a flat monthly fee would sit idle half the year.
• You're evaluating two or three tools side by side and don't want three subscriptions running at once.

Choose flat pricing if:

• Email and calendar are your whole bottleneck and the volume is consistently high — alfred_'s $29.99 stops being a question after the first week.
• You'd rather not think about credits, top-ups, or which tier you're on.
• Your travel booking is the specific pain — Otto's $10/month is the narrowest and cheapest scope here, but it does travel and little else.

Choose tiered or metered pricing if:

• You expect usage to grow and want to pay in steps rather than all at once — Dume's $9 to $18 to $40 ladder is built for that.
• You need more integrations, agents, or model choice as you scale, not just more messages.
• You're automating desktop workflows rather than managing an inbox, in which case Simular's per-machine model is the right shape — at $20 or $500 depending on scale.

One honest caveat about our own tier: Dume's free plan caps you at 20 messages a day and a single integration, which is enough to evaluate the assistant but not to run a week on. If you like it, you'll be on GO or PRO quickly. We'd rather say that than have you discover it in day three. Full detail sits on the Dume pricing page, and our head-to-head with alfred_ covers the feature side of the same comparison.

Frequently Asked Questions

Bottom Line

Price the work, not the plan. The cheapest entry point is $8 and the dearest is $48.50, but those numbers describe six different products — one books travel, one automates desktops, one runs a dozen business personas, and three manage your inbox and calendar.

Not sure what your volume looks like? Start somewhere free and find out. If you already know email eats two hours a day, flat pricing removes a decision you don't need to keep making. Whichever you pick, check the credit cap before the price tag — that's the number that decides whether you're still happy in month three. You can start with Dume's free plan and move up only when the usage justifies it.