Crelate Pricing: Cost Per User and AI Tiers

Crelate pricing, plan by plan

All prices are USD, per user, per month. The "on the card" column is what a human sees. The "in the page data" column is what Crelate publishes in its schema.org SoftwareApplication markup, which is what search engines and AI assistants read.

The AggregateOffer block declares a low price of $85, a high price of $299 and an offer count of four. That is a complete rate card, published by Crelate, in a place most buyers never look. It is also why Crelate roundups contradict each other so badly: the ones that read only the cards report two prices and two blanks, and the ones that read the markup report four.

What separates Essentials from Business

More than the $34 gap suggests. Essentials lists applicant tracking, recruiting CRM, job portal, resume parsing, sourcing, Self Service AI Support and unlimited jobs and companies. Business adds the AI Assistant, client and team portals, job portal and posting, the Resume Toolbox, reports and analytics, technical support, email connections and access to professional services.

So the $85 plan has no analytics, no client portal and no email connection. For two people running straightforward contingency work that is workable. For anyone reporting to clients it is not the plan.

There is a second reason to be careful with Essentials, and it is the oddest thing on the page. Scroll to the feature comparison matrix below the cards and its columns are Business, Business Plus and Enterprise. Essentials is not in the table at all. The plan carrying the headline price on the whole page does not appear in the vendor's own feature comparison, so the only description of it anywhere on the page is the eight-line card.

The Essentials seat rule contradicts itself

The Essentials card reads "Up to 2 users and 20k contacts", a maximum. The structured data for the same Essentials offer reads "Per user, per month, billed annually. 5-seat minimum." Those are opposite rules for the same plan.

The money at stake is real. On the card reading, two recruiters on Essentials cost $2,040 a year. On the data reading, the minimum spend is five seats, or $5,100 a year, and a two-person firm cannot buy the plan at all. That is a $3,060 swing on the cheapest thing Crelate sells, and no amount of reading the page resolves it. Ask Crelate which rule applies before you model $85 a seat.

Most likely one of the two is stale after a pricing change, and the visible card is the more recent. But a buyer should not have to guess, and an article that quotes $85 for a three-person agency without mentioning either constraint is giving you a number you cannot act on.

How much does Crelate cost per user?

Crelate costs $85 per user a month on Essentials, $119 on Business paid annually or $149 monthly, from $149 on Business Plus, and from $299 on Enterprise. All are billed annually except the Business monthly option. Multiplied out to a year, treating Essentials as unavailable above two seats:

Note the word "starting" on the two higher tiers. Crelate's own description says "Starting at $149" and "Starting at $299", which means a quote can land above those figures and the page tells you so. Treat them as a floor, not a price, and ask for the number at your exact headcount.

Does Crelate have AI, and which plan has it?

Crelate markets three AI agents: the Discovery Agent, which looks beyond your own data across more than a billion profiles for phone and email; the Insights Agent, which works continuously to clean and enrich your database and suggest next steps; and Co-Pilot, which brings generative AI into the context of a record. Crelate also lists an Open RESTful API, webhooks, and an MCP Server marked "Coming Soon".

Those climb four steps in the pricing. Essentials at $85 has resume parsing, sourcing and Self Service AI Support. Co-Pilot, listed as the "AI Assistant", starts on Business at $119. The Advanced AI Assistant, plus automation and sequences, is on Business Plus from $149. The Insights Agents and Data Quality Agents are a la carte on the Enterprise and Platform tier from $299.

The Discovery Agent is the interesting omission. It is the capability that reaches outside your own database into the billion-profile index, and it is not listed as an included line on any of the four published offers. That matters because outbound discovery is the main reason an agency shops this category. Everything else in Crelate's AI stack can now be priced from the page. That one cannot.

For context, the category norm is worse. Bullhorn publishes $99 and $165 seats with no AI in either and keeps search and match on quoted plans. Recruiterflow publishes $119 and quotes AIRA. hireEZ publishes exactly one figure. Loxo is the outlier in the other direction, putting its entire agent workforce and an 850M+ profile talent graph inside a published $199 seat. The seat-by-seat arithmetic between the two agency systems of record is in our Loxo vs Crelate comparison, where the honest pairing is Crelate Business Plus at $149 against Loxo Professional at $199.

What Crelate bills on top of the seat

Crelate reaches further into the back office than most recruiting platforms, and the modules that do it are priced separately from the subscription.

• Crelate Hire, priced per hire. Advanced onboarding checklists, state and local tax forms, WOTC integration, per-client, per-job and per-location templates, and an employee portal. A genuinely variable cost: a firm placing forty temps a quarter should model it before comparing seat prices with anyone.
• Crelate Data Sync Service, priced on volume and frequency. One-way and two-way integrations into back office, HCM and payroll providers, plus HubSpot, Monday, Salesforce and Dynamics, and named connections to People 2.0, Sense, CSV and ServiceNow.
• Additional fee applies. Crelate's own matrix marks email campaigns, Crelate Text Messaging, the RingCentral text connector, Crelate eSignature and native contact data enrichment as carrying an additional fee.

That last line deserves emphasis, because it is the one most likely to change your answer. Native contact data enrichment is metered separately, which means the phone numbers and emails behind any outbound campaign are not in the $119 or the $149. If your desk lives on outbound, get that price before you compare Crelate with a vendor that bundles contact data into the seat. The same applies to the onboarding side: if placements come with paperwork, tax forms and credentialing, the per-hire module is a real line item, and the wider question of how a firm runs those back-office onboarding and document workflows usually decides whether the module is worth buying or whether that work already lives somewhere else.

Useful limits buried in the feature matrix

Once you are choosing between the three quoted tiers, the matrix carries numbers worth knowing. Premium resume parsing is limited to 100 on Business and 500 on Business Plus and Enterprise. Client portal limits are 5, 20 and 20. Activity form limits are 20, 50 and 50. Custom document types are 20, 30 and 30. API call rates are 60, 60 and 120 requests a minute. Bulk email is capped at 2,500 on all three, and free job board distribution at 50 on all three.

The API line is the one buyers misread. Business and Business Plus share the same 60 requests a minute, so the difference between them is not throughput. It is scope: "Full API and Integrations Access" is a Business Plus bullet. If you intend to wire Crelate into your own stack, the $30 step from $119 to $149 is what unlocks that, and it is a cheaper step than it looks next to Loxo, which puts API access on its $199 tier.

Is Crelate worth it for a small agency?

For a one or two person direct-hire desk, Essentials at $1,020 to $2,040 a year is good value for a real agency system of record, assuming the two-user card is the live rule rather than the five-seat minimum in the data. You get applicant tracking, a recruiting CRM, a job portal and resume parsing, and you do your own sourcing and outreach.

For a firm of three to ten placing contract or temp staff, Business at $119 plus Crelate Hire is a strong fit, because the onboarding, tax forms, WOTC and back office sync genuinely have no equivalent at Loxo or Recruiterflow. If you also want sequenced outbound, budget Business Plus from $149 rather than Business, because sequencing is not on the cheaper tier.

Where it gets harder to justify is the firm of three to ten whose actual bottleneck is finding candidates rather than processing them. Crelate is a configurable system of record first. The sourcing reach it markets, the Discovery Agent over a billion profiles, is on none of the four published offers, so you are comparing a known $5,364 to $17,880 against a blank for the capability you came for. Firms in that position usually end up pricing Crelate against vendors that publish the sourcing layer, which is the comparison run across the category in AI recruiting software pricing, and specifically against contract-desk options in our breakdown of contract staffing software.

What to ask for before you sign

Five things, in writing, and the quote is not a quote until it has all five.

First, which Essentials seat rule applies: up to two users, or a five-seat minimum. The page says both and the difference is $3,060 a year.

Second, whether Business Plus really starts at $149 at your headcount. The word "starting" is doing work there, and the quote can land above it.

Third, the renewal rate. Crelate publishes no renewal terms anywhere. Get year two as a number, from Crelate and from anyone else on your list.

Fourth, the per-hire price of Crelate Hire and the volume pricing of Data Sync, if you place contract. Both are variable and both can exceed the seat cost on a busy temp desk.

Fifth, what native contact data enrichment costs per record, and whether the Discovery Agent is included in any tier you are being quoted or sold on top.

Paying for seats, or paying for filled roles

Every plan above prices a person by the month. Crelate bills you for how many recruiters are logged in, which is a clean model when headcount and hiring volume move together. They usually do not. Hiring is lumpy, and a seat costs the same in the quarter a recruiter carries twelve reqs as in the quarter they carry three.

HireAgent plans scale with seats, open roles and sourcing volume: $299 a month for one seat and up to 3 roles, $799 for three seats, up to 10 roles and ATS integration, and $1,999 for ten seats and high sourcing volume. It takes the role brief, sources matching candidates, screens and ranks them into an explainable shortlist with the evidence behind every score attached, drafts personalized outreach and books interviews, with candidate consent and AI disclosure. A human reviews every shortlist and makes every hiring decision. Our candidate screening software page shows what the ranking and evidence look like on a live role.

Common questions

How much does Crelate cost? Essentials is $85 per user a month paid annually, Business is $119 annually or $149 monthly, Business Plus starts at $149 and Enterprise starts at $299. The two higher figures appear in Crelate's published offer data rather than on the plan cards, which both read "Custom". Read from crelate.com/pricing on 22 September 2026.

Does Crelate have a free plan? No. Crelate offers a free trial from its site navigation, but there is no $0 tier. The cheapest paid entry is Essentials at $85 per user a month.

What is the difference between Crelate Essentials and Business? Essentials covers applicant tracking, recruiting CRM, job portal, resume parsing and sourcing, with a contact cap of 20,000. Business at $119 adds the AI Assistant, client and team portals, job portal and posting, the Resume Toolbox, reports and analytics, technical support and email connections. Essentials does not appear in Crelate's own feature comparison matrix.

Does Crelate Business include automation and sequences? No. Automation and sequences are a Business Plus line, along with the Advanced AI Assistant, business development workflows, full API and integrations access, premium client portals and marketplace partners. Business Plus starts at $149 per user a month according to Crelate's published offer data, so the step up from Business is about $30 a seat.

Is there a seat minimum on Crelate? The page says both yes and no. The Essentials card reads "Up to 2 users and 20k contacts" while the structured data for the same offer reads "5-seat minimum". No minimum is stated on any other tier. Confirm the rule in writing before budgeting $85 a seat.

How does Crelate pricing compare with Loxo? Compared like for like, the gap is $50 a seat. Crelate Business Plus starts at $149 and is the cheapest Crelate tier with sequencing and full API access. Loxo Professional is $199 and includes Loxo Source over 850M+ profiles, the full agent workforce and 2,500 credits a seat. Comparing Crelate Business at $119 with Loxo Professional overstates the gap, because Business cannot run sequenced outbound.