Open-source AI agents for small business, priced for a two-person team

What a small business actually needs from an agent

Most agent products are sold to a company with an administrator. Someone runs the trial, fills in the security questionnaire, watches the invoice, then decides at renewal. A business of two people has none of that, and a feature comparison answers a question nobody there asked. The useful question is narrower. What can one of you put to work on Monday, what does it cost to keep, and how fast does it come out when it is wrong?

Every plan detail matters more at that size. A seat price bites when you hire. A task price bites when one process runs hot. An approval gate matters when the agent can reach a bank account, a customer list or an inbox. The exit matters most, because work built inside someone else's canvas is work you rebuild the day you leave.

Kortix keeps the ownership question at the front: the project is a git repo. The agent is a markdown file plus a block in kortix.yaml that says what it may reach. The session you talk to is a branch of that repo, so only what you commit and push survives into next week.

Three setups, priced from the vendors' own pages

Setup one is a seat. Lindy opens with $50 in free credits that last 7 days and need no card, then bills every active user in your workspace from $29.99 a month for 3,000 credits each (its pricing page, 27 October 2026), into a pool the workspace shares. Two people who both work in it pay $59.98 a month for 6,000 credits once that free week is over and before any top-up. Credits refresh at the start of each billing cycle and do not roll over. A quiet month buys nothing you keep, and extra credits cost $10 per 1,000.

Setup two is a task. Zapier's free plan includes 100 tasks a month, and Copilot, AI steps, code and the SDK all follow the same task-based model. The bill follows volume, and headcount never enters it. That suits a business where one process runs hot and everything else is quiet. A second person adds nothing until their work starts spending tasks.

Setup three is a repo you own. On Kortix, free is $0 with 500 credits per month, every feature and 1 project. The paid plan is credits: 25 tiers from $50 a month (5,000 credits) to $50,000 a month (5,000,000 credits), at 100 credits per dollar. Two Lindy seats cost $59.98 a month whatever those two people get through. That is about 6,000 Kortix credits at the entry rate, and what those credits produce stays in files you already control.

Two shapes sit outside those three. Gumloop's Pro plan starts at $37 a month, on a visual builder it hosts. Intercom charges $0.99 per outcome for Fin on all plans, with no charge when it cannot answer. That is a fair price for a support desk and a poor one for work that runs all day.

Kortix, Lindy, Gumloop, Zapier and Intercom then line up on who gets billed, what the first month costs, and whether the work can leave with you.

The switch-off test

Leaving is the expensive part. On a hosted builder the automations live in that company's canvas, so the exit is a rebuild somewhere else. With Kortix the files that hold the work are in your repo, and self-hosting is free, so cancelling the cloud account does not cancel the agents.

Two things keep the exit cheap. The first is where the configuration lives. For Kortix that is kortix.yaml and agents/kortix.md, plain text you can read in a pull request and diff before anyone depends on it. The second is how much damage a wrong answer can do before you switch it off, which is what the approval gate is for. "Approval gates you set. Off until you set them." Lindy publishes its own version of the same rule on its pricing page: anything with outside impact waits for approval, naming email sends, ticket updates, channel posts and doc publishing, while read-only lookups from approved sources go through. Set your gates on the first day, before an agent gets a connector that can send an invoice or reply to a customer.