Update, July 2026: Tezi is gone. You cannot buy it at any price. On 31 March 2026, Headway (the mental health provider network) announced it had acquired the team behind Tezi. The recruiting product was shut down shortly after, on 12 April 2026, and customers were given 30 days to export their data. Tezi's homepage is now a farewell letter from founder Raghavendra Prabhu, and the help centre no longer resolves.

So if you landed here searching for what Tezi's AI recruiter Max costs, the honest answer is: nothing, because there is nothing to sell you. This page has been rewritten to tell you what actually happened, what Tezi really charged while it was alive (which is not what most of the internet says), and what to do instead.

What happened to Tezi?

Tezi was founded in 2024 in Menlo Park by Raghavendra Prabhu (previously CTO at Thumbtack and Head of Engineering at Covariant) and Jason James (previously VP of Product and Design at Thumbtack and Instacart). It raised a $9M seed round led by 8VC and Audacious, with angel money from the founding CEOs of Instacart and Thumbtack.

The product was Max, pitched as the first fully autonomous AI recruiter: an agent that lived in Slack and handled sourcing, screening, scheduling and reporting end to end, on top of a native ATS and a candidate database. The bet was explicit in 8VC's investment memo: rather than sell software, Tezi went after the 97.4% of the roughly $250B annual US recruiting spend that goes to human labour, undercutting the $20,000 to $40,000 agencies charge for senior technical hires.

The timeline that matters to you:

• 31 March 2026: Headway announces it has acquired the team behind Tezi. Read that phrasing carefully. It is an acqui-hire. The press release talks entirely about engineers joining Headway's mental health infrastructure work and says nothing about the recruiting product or its customers.
• 12 April 2026: the product shuts down. Customers get 30 days to export data, per reporting at the time.
• Now: tezi.ai serves a goodbye note. Prabhu is VP of Engineering at Headway. help.tezi.ai returns a server error.

Roughly two years from seed round to shutdown, for a well-funded team with a genuinely strong pedigree. Hold that thought, because it is the most useful thing on this page.

What did Tezi actually cost?

Tezi never published a price. Not once, not at any point in its life. There was a pricing page, and it carried no numbers. Pricing was tiered by how many hires you planned to make, and you got a figure by talking to sales.

We want to be straight with you about something here, because it is our mess. An earlier version of this article estimated that Tezi cost $1,000 to $10,000 per year and attributed that range to "user indications". That number was our speculation. It was never verified against a Tezi price sheet, a contract, or a named customer. It has since been scraped and repeated by AI search engines and tool directories as though it were a fact about Tezi, and in at least one case handed back to us as a source. We are retiring it rather than launder it any further. If you see that range quoted anywhere about Tezi, it traces back to this page, and it was a guess.

What we can say with confidence about the shape of Tezi's pricing, from its own marketing and its investors' public writing:

• It was quote-only and tiered on hire volume, not seats.
• It was positioned against agency fees, not against ATS subscriptions. The claim was that a full year of Max cost less than a single agency placement, which anchors it somewhere below the $20,000 to $40,000 agencies charge for senior technical roles.
• That is an anchor, not a price. "Less than an agency hire" is a range wide enough to drive a truck through, and we are not going to convert it into a number for you.

The actual lesson: what Tezi should change about how you buy

The interesting question is no longer what Tezi charged. It is why a $9M-seed, ex-Thumbtack, ex-Instacart team with a hot product in the hottest category in HR tech was gone inside two years, and how you avoid buying the next one.

A few things worth taking from it:

• "Contact us for pricing" is a risk signal, not just an annoyance. When a vendor will not publish a number, you cannot compare, you cannot budget, and you cannot tell whether the business under the product is healthy. Every honest data point on this page came from a press release or an investor blog, not from Tezi.
• Single-product seed-stage startups carry shutdown risk that no feature list offsets. An acqui-hire is a perfectly good outcome for founders and investors. For you it is indistinguishable from the product being deleted, because that is what happens to it.
• Ask where your data goes when the vendor stops. Tezi customers got 30 days. If your candidate pipeline, notes and outreach history live inside an agent's native ATS with no export you have tested, you are one press release from losing them.
• Full autonomy was the hard part, and it stayed hard. Max's pitch was an agent you do not supervise. The category has broadly not delivered that, and the trust failure mode is brutal: the first time an autonomous agent screens out someone good or advances someone weak, the recruiter stops trusting it entirely and goes back to doing it by hand. AI that accelerates a recruiter's judgement has aged considerably better than AI that replaces it.

None of this means avoid AI recruiting tools. It means weight durability and exportability alongside the demo.

What are the alternatives to Tezi?

There is no drop-in replacement for Max, because "autonomous end-to-end recruiter" was always more of a pitch than a shipping product. What most former Tezi evaluators actually need is to reassemble the pieces: a system of record, a sourcing motion, and some AI assistance on screening. Here is where to look, honestly.

Manatal: the established, published-price ATS and CRM

If what appealed to you about Tezi was AI-assisted candidate scoring and a place for the whole pipeline to live, Manatal covers most of it, has been shipping since 2018, and starts at $15/user/month billed annually. It does AI candidate recommendations, resume parsing, enrichment from social profiles and a full recruitment CRM. What it does not do is run your search and your scheduling without you. It is a tool you drive, not an agent that drives itself.

HeroHunt.ai: closest to the autonomous sourcing pitch

Our own AI Recruiter is the nearest thing to what Tezi was selling on the sourcing half: it searches, screens and reaches out across a large candidate index. We are obviously not neutral about this one, so treat it as disclosure rather than a recommendation, and judge it in a trial like you would any other.

LinkedIn Recruiter: the boring, durable default

Expensive and manual, but the data is the data, and LinkedIn is not going to be acqui-hired out from under you in April. For many teams the correct post-Tezi answer is a solid ATS plus LinkedIn, with AI applied to screening rather than to autonomy.

Beamery: enterprise talent CRM

If your interest in Tezi was really about building and nurturing talent pools over time at enterprise scale, Beamery is the established option. Enterprise pricing, enterprise implementation, and correspondingly little shutdown risk.

Whatever you pick, run the Tezi test on it before you sign: can you see the price without booking a call, can you export your data on your own, and would the vendor survive its investors losing interest? Tezi failed the third one, and everything else stopped mattering.