How much does it cost to run a business with AI agents?

newc0 does not publish its own price yet, so this page does not quote one. When it is confirmed it will appear on the claim sheet and be stated plainly.

What are the actual line items?

Five. The platform subscription. Any percentage taken from customer payments. Fees applied to advertising spend. Usage-based charges for model calls or credits. And your own time reviewing what the agents did, which is a real cost even though nobody invoices you for it.

Published examples of the first line, read from vendors’ own sites in August 2026: Lindy publishes plans at $29.99, $99.99 and $199.99 per user per month plus credits. 11x, Artisan and Relevance AI publish no pricing at all. Polsia’s homepage says free to start with no credit card.

A free or cheap first line usually means the money is somewhere else. That is not a criticism — it is a pricing model, and for a business with no revenue yet it is genuinely the lower-risk one. It just means the sticker price is not the cost.

Why does a revenue percentage matter so much?

Because it is the only line that grows with your success. A subscription is a fixed number you stop noticing. A 20% fee on customer payments means a business doing $10,000 a month pays $2,000 a month, and a business doing $50,000 pays $10,000, for the same software.

Polsia’s terms document exactly this: a platform fee of currently 20% on all customer payments received through the service, with a $100 payment resulting in $80 credited to the customer. A separate 20% platform fee applies to advertising spend.

Work out the crossover before you choose. Below some monthly revenue, a percentage is cheaper than a subscription. Above it, it is not, and the gap widens every month the business grows. The right question is not which is cheaper today but which is cheaper at the size you are aiming for.

How does this compare to hiring someone?

Almost always cheaper, and that is the least interesting thing about it. US Bureau of Labor Statistics figures put benefits at 30.1% of private-industry compensation on top of wages, before recruitment or tooling. But cost is the wrong axis: hiring buys judgment and accountability that no subscription includes.

The comparison is set out properly, with sources, on newc0 versus a first hire, an agency, or a VA.

How do you work out which pricing model is cheaper for you?

Find the crossover. Divide the fixed subscription by the percentage rate to get the monthly revenue at which the two cost the same. Below it, the percentage is cheaper. Above it, the fixed fee is, and the gap grows every month the business does better.

A worked example with round numbers. A platform charging 20% of customer payments costs $200 a month on $1,000 of revenue and $4,000 a month on $20,000. A fixed subscription of $200 costs $200 in both cases. The crossover here is $1,000 of monthly revenue, and every dollar above it favors the fixed fee.

Two adjustments make the comparison honest. Include any percentage applied to advertising spend, since that is a separate fee on a separate base. And run the numbers at the revenue you are aiming for rather than the revenue you have, because you are choosing a platform for the business you intend to build.

The conclusion is not that one model is wrong. Percentage pricing genuinely protects a founder with no revenue, and that is worth something real. It is that the model you want at the start is often not the model you want at the end, which makes the exit terms part of the pricing decision.

The cost people forget

Your attention. Every platform in this category produces a queue of things that need a person, and the time you spend on it is a genuine operating cost of the business. On newc0 that is about fifteen minutes on an ordinary morning, and the site says so up front rather than letting founders discover it in week three.