SeekOut Pricing and SeekOut Cost: Recruit Core, License Cost Per Seat and Plans for 2026

We opened seekout.com/pricing on 16 September 2026 and read both billing toggles and the full plan comparison table. SeekOut sells SeekOut Recruit in four plans. One has a price on the page: Recruit Core, at $149 a month paid annually and up front, which is $1,788 a year, or $179 a month billed monthly. The page labels the difference as a $360 a year saving, and the arithmetic holds: $30 a month times twelve.

Core is described as a self-serve plan for individual recruiters, but the comparison table is more generous than that description. It lists three seats included. It also lists unlimited search over more than one billion profiles, AI search, more than 30 filters, standard power filters, 500 contact credits a month, 1,000 exports a month, export to Excel, PDF or an ATS, email integration with send on behalf, AI multi-step campaigns and talent pool insights. Support is the help center and trainings.

The other three plans are Recruit Sourcing, Recruit Sourcing + Integration and Recruit Full Recruiting Funnel. All three say "Custom" and "Billed annually", and all three route to a demo. Sourcing raises the allowance to 750 contact credits and 5,000 exports per seat and adds SSO, the advanced inferred and diversity filters, inferred security clearance, healthcare search and a customer success manager. Sourcing + Integration adds ATS rediscovery and reporting. Full Recruiting Funnel adds inbound applicant evaluation, AI screening against job rubrics and the new agentic AI workflows.

So SeekOut is unusually open about its entry plan and closed about everything above it. The pattern matches most of the category: our survey of AI recruiting software pricing found the same split at LinkedIn, Bullhorn, Recruiterflow and hireEZ, with Loxo the main vendor that prices its AI tier in public.

Search for SeekOut pricing and most of the first page is third-party analysis, and it disagrees with itself. Among the claims currently in circulation: that Core covers a single seat, that there is a self-serve "Recruit Lite" plan for one license at $2,150 a year, that SeekOut lists a price of $833 per seat per month, and that SeekOut sells Essentials, Professional and Enterprise tiers with per-seat bands attached.

None of those appears on SeekOut's page as it reads today. Core includes three seats. There is no Lite plan and no $833 figure. The plan names are Recruit Core, Recruit Sourcing, Recruit Sourcing + Integration and Recruit Full Recruiting Funnel. Some of the older names may have been accurate once, since SeekOut has repackaged Recruit more than once, but a budget built on them today starts from the wrong document.

The contract data is a different matter and it is useful. Vendr, which sees real purchase orders, reports a median SeekOut contract of $20,000 a year across 65 purchases, with observed deals from $5,820 to $54,920 and an average saving of 16 percent against the first quote. Those are whole contracts, not per-seat prices, and they cover the quoted plans. Use them to sanity check a proposal, and check any figure on this page against seekout.com/pricing on the day you build the budget.

On annual billing, Core costs $149 a month for 500 contact credits, which is 29.8 cents per credit. Billed monthly it is $179, or 35.8 cents. A contact credit reveals a candidate email address or phone number, so for SeekOut this is a real cost per revealed contact, before you allow for the share of details that turn out to be stale.

The catch is who shares them. The feature table lists Core's allowance as 500 a month and the Sourcing allowance as 750 per seat. Core's allowance is not multiplied by three, so a three-person team splits 500 contacts, about 167 each. A recruiter running outbound on two or three roles at once can use that in a week. SeekOut does not publish an overage rate or a way to buy extra credits on Core.

Against the rest of the category, 29.8 cents sits in the middle. Juicebox Growth works out near 12 cents a contact and Gem Professional near 20 cents, both per seat, while SeekOut's advantage is the seat price itself: three recruiters for $149. We line the two models up in SeekOut vs Juicebox and Gem vs SeekOut, and SeekOut's index strengths for engineering roles in the best sourcing tools for technical recruiters.

For one to three recruiters, the SeekOut license cost is simple and low. $1,788 a year on annual billing works out to $596 per seat per year, or about $49.67 a month, if all three seats are used. A solo recruiter pays the same $1,788 and gets two seats they may never fill. On monthly billing the same plan is $2,148 a year.

At five recruiters, the published price stops applying. Core has no additional seats, so the team needs Recruit Sourcing or higher, which SeekOut prices per seat by quote and bills annually. Vendr's median contract of $20,000 a year is the most useful anchor we have for this band, and it is more than eleven times the cost of Core.

At ten recruiters and above, most buyers are on Sourcing + Integration or Full Recruiting Funnel, and the price depends on seats, term, the inbound screening add-on and integration work. Vendr reports deals up to $54,920 a year. Ask for the per-seat rate, the contact credits per seat and the renewal terms as three separate lines, so you can compare them with other vendors on the same basis. Our SeekOut vs LinkedIn Recruiter page runs the same team sizes against LinkedIn.

For a small team that sources outbound, yes, and the entry plan is the reason. Three seats, unlimited search over a very large index and 500 contacts a month for $149 is hard to beat anywhere in sourcing, and the 14-day trial lets you test the index on your own roles before you pay. SeekOut is also strong where the index matters most: technical talent, security-cleared candidates and healthcare, though the last two sit on the quoted plans.

The case against is about what you still have to do yourself. Core is a search engine with outreach attached. A recruiter writes the search, reads the profiles, decides who is worth a credit and writes the sequence. The AI screening of your inbound applicants and the agentic workflows are on the top plan, so the parts that take work off a recruiter's desk are the parts you cannot buy with a card. If your team is at four or more recruiters, you are negotiating either way.

That is the gap HireAgent is built for. It is priced on open roles and sourcing volume as well as seats: $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-volume teams, with roughly two months free on annual billing. It sources candidates against your structured criteria, screens and ranks them into an explainable shortlist with the evidence attached, drafts personalized outreach and books interviews, with candidate consent and AI disclosure, and a human makes every hiring decision. See the full HireAgent pricing, or the SeekOut alternative page for what teams compare SeekOut against.

What is the per-seat rate, and what is the contact credit allowance per seat? Sourcing is published at 750 credits per seat, so any proposal should show both numbers. Divide one by the other and you can compare the quote with Core's 29.8 cents and with other vendors.

What happens when we run out of credits mid-month? SeekOut publishes no overage price. Get the answer in writing, along with whether unused credits carry over, before you commit to a year.

Is AI inbound screening in this quote, and at what price? It is an add-on below Full Recruiting Funnel. If screening your applicants is part of the reason you are buying, price it now rather than at renewal. Our candidate screening software guide covers what to test.

What is the renewal increase, and what are the terms for a multi-year deal? Third-party data shows buyers saving about 16 percent against the first quote, which tells you the first quote is not the final one. Ask for a cap on the year-two increase while you still have leverage.