Disclosure: some links in this article are affiliate links. If you sign up through one, HeroHunt may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
PeopleGPT's entry price is $99 per seat per month, and almost every number floating around the internet about it is out of date. Here is what the tool actually is in mid-2026, what each tier really gates, and where the money quietly goes.
Start with a naming correction, because it changes what you are shopping for. PeopleGPT is not the product anymore. It is the search engine inside a product called Juicebox. The company, a Y Combinator alum, launched PeopleGPT in late 2023 as a natural-language way to search candidate profiles, then built an entire sourcing platform around it: projects, outreach, exports, and an autonomous Agents layer. In September 2025 it announced $36M in total funding, including a $30M Series A led by Sequoia, and said it had passed 2,500 customers - Juicebox. So when you search "PeopleGPT pricing", you are really pricing Juicebox.
The core pitch has not changed: 800 million profiles you query in plain English instead of Boolean. Juicebox states that figure itself, describing 800 million profiles "across the globe from dozens of data sources" - Juicebox pricing FAQ. Asking for "someone good at Python who has led teams in fintech" and getting a usable list beats hand-assembling (Python OR Django) AND (fintech OR "financial services") AND (lead OR manager), and that convenience is why the tool got traction.
What has changed is the bill. The widely-repeated "$99 Starter, $129 Growth, no seat licensing" description is wrong on two of three counts, and the third has a condition attached.
PeopleGPT: What Is It and What Does It Cost You
Juicebox publishes its prices, which already puts it ahead of most of the enterprise sourcing market. There are four tiers plus one add-on, and the add-on is the part that moves budgets.
Pricing Structure
These are the list prices from Juicebox's own pricing page as of July 2026. Read the column headers carefully: every figure is per seat, per month, and the cheaper column requires an annual commitment.
| Plan | Billed annually | Billed monthly | Seats | Contact credits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 1 | 0 (trial searches only) |
| Starter | $99 | $119 | 1 | 500/month, email only |
| Growth | $179 | $199 | Up to 5 | 1,500/seat/month, email + phone |
| Business | Custom | Custom | Custom | Unlimited |
| Agents (add-on) | $199 per agent/month | $199 per agent/month | Org-wide access | Unlimited |
Three things trip buyers up here. First, there is no flat team price: Juicebox bills per seat on every tier, so a five-person Growth team is $895 per month, not $179. Second, the annual discount is 15%, not 20%, and it is the only reason the headline reads $99: month-to-month Starter is $119. Third, the Free plan carries zero contact credits. You can run trial searches and look at profiles, but you cannot reveal a single email address on it, which makes it a demo rather than a working free tier.
What Each Tier Actually Gates
The tier names tell you almost nothing. What matters is which of three things you are buying: contact credits, phone numbers, and the ability to get your data back out of the platform.
Contact credits are the real currency. One credit reveals all emails and phone numbers attached to a profile. Starter includes 500 per month, Growth includes 1,500 per seat per month, and Business is the only tier with unlimited credits. Searching is unlimited on every paid plan, which sounds generous until you notice that a search you cannot contact is just a list.
Phone numbers are the Starter-to-Growth wall. Starter's 500 contact credits are explicitly email-only. If you want a direct dial, you are on Growth at $179 per seat annually or $199 month-to-month. That is an 81% jump from Starter, and for a lot of solo recruiters the phone number is the only reason they climb it.
Getting your data out is a Business-tier feature. This is the detail most reviews miss. Juicebox integrates with roughly 40 applicant tracking systems (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable and Workday among them) and about 20 CRMs, but ATS and CRM integration is gated to the Business plan, not Growth. On Starter and Growth you get CSV exports capped at 500 and 1,500 profiles per month respectively, with bulk exports limited to 100 and 250 profiles at a time. If your workflow assumes sourced candidates land in Greenhouse automatically, you are a custom-quote customer, not a $179 customer.
Which of those three walls you hit first is the whole buying decision. If it is the phone-number wall, it is worth pausing before you accept the 81% upgrade, because a direct dial is not something only a sourcing platform can sell you. Dedicated contact-data tools such as Lusha sell phone numbers on their own, and at Starter-tier volumes they often do that half of the job for less than the upgrade costs.
Lusha
If phone numbers are the only reason you are eyeing Juicebox Growth at $179 per seat, price that jump against a dedicated contact-data tool first. Lusha publishes its rates instead of quoting them: the entry paid tier is $49.90 per user per month, with a 35% promo running that takes it to $32.45. Two caveats do the real work here. Lusha meters on credits, not seats, so the number that decides this is not the monthly price but how many reveals your plan allows against how many dials you actually make in a month. And Lusha does no candidate search at all: it is a contact layer bolted onto Juicebox Starter, not a replacement for it, so you would be running two subscriptions. It wins when you already know who you want to call, and loses on volume.
The Real Cost Analysis
Run the numbers on a realistic team rather than a single seat. A three-recruiter team on Growth annual is $537 per month, or $6,444 a year. Add one Juicebox Agent at $199 per month and you are at $8,832 a year. That is the honest all-in figure, and it is the one to compare against everything else.
Against LinkedIn Recruiter, Juicebox still wins on sticker price by a wide margin. Recruiter Corporate runs roughly $10,800 to $12,960 per seat per year, and most quotes carry a multi-seat minimum, as covered in our breakdown of LinkedIn Recruiter pricing. Three LinkedIn seats is north of $32,000 a year. Three Juicebox Growth seats plus an agent is under $9,000. These are not identical products (LinkedIn owns first-party data and InMail delivery nobody else can match), but the gap is real and it is the strongest argument in Juicebox's favour.
The Agents add-on at $199 per agent per month deserves its own budget line, because it is where the company is heading. Agents run search, assessment and outreach continuously after an initial calibration, and Juicebox named them as the investment target for its Series A money. They come with unlimited contact and email credits, which means a single $199 agent can be cheaper than upgrading seats if your bottleneck is credits rather than people. It also means the platform's most interesting capability is not included in any published seat price.
Hidden Costs (the honest list)
Juicebox is cleaner than most vendors here: no setup fees, no implementation charge, and self-serve signup on Starter and Growth. But "no hidden fees" is not the same as "no surprises", and four things predictably surprise people:
- Per-seat scaling: every seat is full price, so team cost is linear with headcount
- The $99 requires annual: month-to-month is $119, a 20% premium for flexibility
- Agents are extra: $199 per agent per month on top of any seat
- ATS and CRM sync is Business-only: a custom quote, not a list price
None of those are dishonest, and all of them are visible on the pricing page if you read the comparison grid rather than the plan cards. The plan cards are where the marketing lives. The comparison grid, further down the same page, is where the actual product boundaries are drawn, and it is worth ten minutes before you sign an annual contract.
Who Should Buy It, and Who Should Not
PeopleGPT fits a specific buyer well: a recruiter or small team doing passive-candidate sourcing who is currently paying LinkedIn Recruiter prices or fighting Boolean strings by hand. Natural-language search over 800M profiles at $99 to $179 per seat is a genuinely good deal against that baseline, and the free tier lets you judge search quality before spending anything. Search quality is the only thing that matters here and the only thing you can test for free.
It is a poor fit in three cases. If you mainly need contact data rather than search, you are paying a sourcing-platform premium for a database function. If you need ATS write-back, your real price is a Business quote, so get that quote before falling in love with the $179 tier. And if you hire at volume through inbound applications rather than outbound sourcing, this is the wrong category of tool entirely: you need an ATS, not a search engine.
It is also worth knowing the category has moved. Juicebox's Agents are one answer to "why am I still driving the search myself", and competitors are converging on the same idea from different angles. HeroHunt.ai runs the sourcing and outreach loop autonomously across 1B+ profiles rather than selling a faster search box, and it is worth a look alongside Juicebox if the agent layer is what you are actually buying. The interesting comparison in 2026 is no longer "which tool searches better", it is "how much of the loop runs without me".
HeroHunt.ai
If your answer to that question is "as little of it as possible", you are shopping in a different category than Juicebox occupies. HeroHunt.ai is an AI recruiter rather than a faster search box: it searches over a billion profiles, screens them with language models against your criteria, and runs the personalised outreach itself, so the loop keeps moving without you driving each step. The honest caveat is that this is the opposite trade from the one a lot of this article's readers want. If the appeal of PeopleGPT is sitting in the search box, tuning a query and reading results yourself, an autonomous agent will feel like it took the steering wheel. It is also not an ATS, so it does not solve the Business-tier write-back problem described above. Judge it exactly the way this guide says to judge Juicebox: run searches you already know the right answer to, and see whether the people you can name come back.
Here is the practical sequence. Start on the free tier and run five searches you already know the right answer to, because a sourcing tool that cannot find the people you personally know exist will not find the ones you do not. If the results hold up, buy Starter monthly at $119 rather than committing annually, and spend the 500 email credits on real outreach for a month. Only then decide whether your bottleneck is phone numbers (Growth), credits (an Agent), or ATS integration (a Business quote). Buying the tier before you know which wall you hit is how teams end up on annual contracts for features they never touch.
PeopleGPT earned its reputation on one genuinely good idea: that describing a candidate in a sentence should be enough. That idea now costs $99 per seat per month billed annually, $119 if you want to stay flexible, and considerably more once you add the phone numbers, the integrations, or the agents. Price the version you will actually use, not the one on the headline.
Written by Yuma Heymans (@yumahey), who built HeroHunt.ai, the world's first AI Recruiter. He has been building AI sourcing tools since 2021 and has watched most of this category's pricing pages change more than once.
Pricing verified against Juicebox's published pricing page in July 2026. Vendors in this category revise tiers frequently, so confirm current figures before committing to an annual plan.
