Artisan alternatives, without the demo gloss.
Ava demos beautifully — most AI SDRs do. If you're here, you've likely learned that cold email is won in details a subscription doesn't own: list verification, reply judgment, and noticing a bounce rate creeping past 2% before a domain burns. Your realistic options split into four, and the right one depends on what you actually want to buy.
If you want software: another AI SDR
11x, AiSDR, and a dozen others compete directly with Artisan. Reasonable if your team has real outbound expertise and wants volume leverage. Just know you're changing tools, not incentives — the subscription still bills on activity, and category reviews cite the same complaints across vendors. We wrote the same honest breakdown for 11x alternatives.
If you want a department: retainer agency or in-house
A $3–5K/month retainer agency or a ~$60–70K fully-loaded SDR seat both make sense at scale, when outbound is proven for your offer and you're buying capacity. Both make you pay in full during ramp — months where you carry all the risk. The comparison of those economics is in pay-per-meeting vs retainer.
If you want outcomes: pay-per-meeting outbound
This is what we do, so discount accordingly — but the structure speaks for itself: done-for-you cold email where you pay $250 per meeting that is actually held, and a zero-meeting month costs you $0 in fees. AI where it's strong, a human accountable for every reply and every deliverability decision. The numbers are public on the pricing page.
Whatever you pick: interrogate it the same way
Six questions expose any outbound vendor in one call — who owns deliverability, what a no-result month costs, who writes the copy, whose infrastructure it is, what the contract defines as success, and what happens when you leave. The full checklist: how to vet an outbound agency. Use it on us too.
Done paying subscriptions for activity?
30 minutes. We'll tell you honestly whether your offer will work on cold email — even if the answer is no.