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16 AI products that replace a person you used to hire, with the invoice you stop paying. A $9 video editor, a $4-per-thousand-pages data-entry desk, a $12,000 migration first guessed at $6M.
The honest entries state what you stop paying in the unit they bill: Multi puts $500 to $3,000 a video next to its $9 a month; Mistral prices OCR at $4 per 1,000 pages, a data-entry contractor's unit. Sixteen cases, prices re-checked 22 Sep 2026, and one where the tool costs more than the person.
Every AI product page says it saves you money. Almost none of them say compared to what. This library only holds the ones where the comparison can be made: a named human role you could have posted on Upwork, and a real shipping product with a price on the page. Wherever it exists, the entry also carries the cost of the person, stated by the vendor or by the operator who stopped paying it.
Sixteen entries. Every price below was re-checked against the live vendor page on 22 September 2026, with one exception noted in its entry. Three entries had changed since they were first written: two prices and one traction count. Prices move silently; the check date is part of the resource.
AI replacing contractors: what you stop paying
The vendors worth trusting print the human baseline themselves, in the same unit they bill.
Multi's homepage has a table headed "What it costs to grow on YouTube": agency production, $3,000 a video; freelance editor, $500; do-it-yourself in Descript, $200 once you count your own time at $50 an hour. Then its price: $9 a month for 20 minutes of video. Rasa Legal's page says the law firms it competes with "typically charge somewhere between $1,500 to $3,000 per record"; its own legal review is $25. Mistral prices OCR 4.1 at $4 per 1,000 pages, which is the unit a data-entry contractor is priced in, so the comparison needs no arithmetic.
When the baseline is missing, the vendor is asking you to do the comparison in your head, and heads round up. Nine of the fifteen products below have no sourced human cost. They are still in the library because the product is real and the role is nameable, but their cost column says so rather than guessing. The rule this library was built on: source the baseline or drop the number. Never estimate.
Two samples, so you can see what an entry looks like
Pieter Levels: the two largest lines on his list were people. In September 2026 he published the fourteen services he replaced with software he wrote himself, about $25,000 a month in total. Twelve are SaaS-for-SaaS swaps. The two biggest are not: human moderators on all his sites, replaced with moderation running on xAI models (~$10,000 a month), and customer support, replaced with Featurebase plus an AI bot (~$5,000 a month). The useful half of the post is what he refuses to replace: domains, email sending, storage, backups, servers, GPUs. Operator-stated, one portfolio of consumer sites, not a market rate.
Asana: the migration guessed at $6 million came in at $12,000. Gergely Orosz's reporting on AI-driven code migrations collects four shipped cases. Asana's removal of Enzyme from more than 3,000 test files was estimated at about $6M over five years; with agents it cost about $12,000 in model and infrastructure and roughly a week and a half of engineering, across two calendar weeks. The caveat matters: Orosz asked, and Asana's Dan Ubilla confirmed the $6M was a back-of-envelope figure and "five years" was when a low-priority migration would have finished on its own, not five years of headcount. The $12,000 and the two weeks are the numbers to keep. Airbnb did 3,500 files in six weeks against an estimate of 1.5 engineering years; Uber moved 600,000 tests to JUnit 5 with two engineers in four months. Bun moved 530,000 lines from Zig to Rust in two weeks for $165,000 of API spend.
How to use this library
Each entry names the role, the price (checked 22 Sep 2026), the human baseline with who stated it, and the catch, which is usually the reason the entry is in here. Read the baseline column first. Where it says "not stated", treat the entry as a real product with an unproven saving. Where the tool costs more than the person, that is written down too; there is one.
The four families: sales and outbound; support, moderation and ops; research, documents and video; engineering, QA and legal.
Family 1 — Sales and outbound
- Explee: the outbound SDR at $30 per 1,000 emails. Role: outbound researcher and sender: list building, personalised email, domain warm-up. Price: pay as you go, $30 for 1,000 emails, which the page says yields roughly 2–8 warm leads and 1–2 meetings. Published cost per lead by campaign runs from about $1.69 to $6.33 (the paused campaigns cost three times the scaling ones). Baseline: Dru Riley's vendor analysis puts the seat this replaces at 60% quota attainment and 40% annual attrition across 351 sales teams, which is the cost nobody puts in the comparison. Catch: the unit price is the headline; the campaign-level variance decides whether it beats a person. Source: explee.com/pricing.
- The half of the SDR you keep: Dru Riley's rule. Same category, different lesson. Riley's report on AI sales agents is unusually clear about which half of the job to buy: "Buy the sourcing. Write the message yourself. Software beats you at finding people and getting mail delivered. The half that teaches you what to build next stays yours." Buying the whole loop is the promise that keeps failing across the category. Catch: seven sales-tech vendors changed hands in five months; your lists and reply history compound on someone else's server. Source: Dru Riley, AI Sales Agents.
- Amorphic Labs: the sales engineer who records a demo before the first call. Role: SDR or sales engineer building bespoke demos. An agent researches the prospect, adapts the pitch, seeds data and records a narrated product video. Price: not published; demo booking only. Baseline: not stated. Real: live login at studio.amorphiclabs.com and a counter reading "124 demos generated this week" when the page was read in August; re-check whether the counter moves. YC-backed. Source: amorphiclabs.com.
- Lightfield: the CRM data-entry contractor, and the entry where the tool costs more. Role: sales ops, the person who updates records after calls and writes the follow-up. Price: Starter $89 per user a month (up to 3 seats, billed monthly); Pro $999 and Growth $1,999 a month per workspace, both billed annually; a 14-day trial. Baseline: not sourced. Catch: this is the library's negative entry. At $999 a month per workspace it is priced like a team system, not like the part-time contractor it displaces, and the vendor sells it on unlimited seats and automation rather than on cost. It stays in because the thesis needs its counter-example. Source: lightfield.app/pricing.
Family 2 — Support, moderation and ops
- Pieter Levels: moderators and support, ~$15,000 a month of a ~$25,000 saving. Role: content moderation and first-line support. Replacement: his own moderation on xAI models; Featurebase plus an AI bot. Baseline: ~$10,000 and ~$5,000 a month, his own historical bills. Catch: one operator's numbers, and the list of what he keeps paying for is the boundary to copy. Source: levels.io.
- Holly Helpdesk: the support rep with a refund button. Role: first-line customer support including refunds. Mechanism: the agent handles the case end to end but cannot issue the refund; the owner gets a button that opens the Stripe request. Price and baseline: not established as a priced product; the workflow is a published template, so the build cost is low and the run cost is not stated. Catch: the transferable pattern for any agent that touches money is the gate, not the autonomy. Source: Claire Vo's workflow.
- Cursor's Google Workspace plugins: the executive assistant. Role: inbox triage, scheduling, document wrangling. The agent searches and sends Gmail, creates and moves Calendar events, finds free slots, and creates and organises Drive documents. Price: not stated on the changelog. Baseline: not stated. Catch: a shipped feature of an established product rather than a launch claim, so it passes the "is it real" test on its own; the saving is unproven. Source: cursor.com changelog.
- Lockdown: the SOC 2 contractor that opens a pull request. Role: compliance monitoring: the fractional security person who checks what has drifted and tells you what to fix. Mechanism: it logs into the controls dashboard, scans, investigates new vulnerabilities and opens a PR with the fix before notifying its owner. Price and baseline: not established; it runs on a general-purpose agent platform rather than as a priced product. Catch: Claire Vo's bar is the transferable test for the category: a compliance agent should fix problems, not report them. Source: Claire Vo, Grok Bot agent templates.
Family 3 — Research, documents and video
- Multi: the video editor at $9 a month. Role: video editor or production freelancer. Written content in, a finished YouTube video with narration, visuals and captions out, published to the channel, in about three minutes. Price: Creator $9 a month, 20 minutes of video, extra minutes as overage. Baseline, vendor-stated on the page: agency $3,000 a video, freelancer $500, DIY $200 counting your time. Catch: built by the publisher of the newsletter the item arrived in, so the original placement was self-promotional; the page stands on its own. Source: makemulti.com.
- Mistral OCR 4.1: data entry at $4 per 1,000 pages. Role: data-entry or document-processing contractor, the role most routinely outsourced per page. Price: $4 per 1,000 pages, $5 per 1,000 annotated pages, GA since July 2026, with paragraph-level bounding boxes and block-level confidence scores. Baseline: not cited here; per-page BPO rates are published widely but none is sourced in this library, so no figure is printed. Catch: the cleanest unit-priced entry in the set; when you source a per-page human rate the comparison is a division. Source: docs.mistral.ai.
- Synthetic research panels: the $4,500 ad test you waited three months for. Role: the bought survey panel and the researcher who runs it. Baseline: Kantar's self-serve ad test starts at $4,500, which is what priced out anyone running social creative on a normal budget. The market, per Dru Riley: Simile, Evidenza (bootstrapped to seven figures in year one) and Artificial Societies for synthetic audiences; Listen Labs (over a million interviews), Outset and Quantilope for AI interviews. YouGov is the only incumbent shipping validation as a product step, and Gallup sells nothing synthetic and says so. Catch: persona tools under $100 a month are the ones predicted to lose, because a frontier model will react as thirty suburban parents for free; the defensible seat is done-for-you research, not the tool. Source: Dru Riley, Synthetic Audiences.
- StockDrifts: the junior equity analyst's twenty tabs. Role: junior research analyst consolidating filings, earnings calls, insider activity and ratings. Price: free to start, no card; paid tiers were not visible when the page was read. Baseline: it positions against a Bloomberg terminal and gives no figure; a terminal seat is widely reported around $30,000 a year but is not cited here, so it is not printed. Real: working signup, API docs, five named users with public X handles you can check yourself. Source: stockdrifts.io.
Family 4 — Engineering, QA and legal
- Framework migration: the role guessed at $6M that came in at $12,000. Role: the migration engineer or contractor team. Four shipped cases: Asana, Enzyme to React Testing Library, 3,000+ files, ~$12,000 and ~1.5 weeks of engineering; Airbnb, 3,500 files in six weeks against 1.5 engineering years. Then Uber, 600,000 tests to JUnit 5, two engineers, four months; and Bun, 530,000 lines Zig to Rust, two weeks, $165,000 of API spend. Catch: do not repeat the $6M as a clean figure; Asana confirmed it was back-of-envelope. Source: Gergely Orosz, The Pulse.
- Argos CI: the person who clicks through the build. Role: manual visual-QA reviewer. Screenshot, Markdown and JSON review in CI, for teams and for agents. Price: Hobby free, up to 5,000 screenshots; Pro from $100 a month with 35,000 screenshots included, extra at $0.004 each ($0.0015 for Storybook); SSO options priced separately. Baseline: not stated. Catch: it positions itself as the reviewer for agent-generated UI changes, which is the builder/critic split arriving as infrastructure. Named customers MUI and Doctolib. Source: argos-ci.com/pricing.
- Remix: the engineer who makes small product changes. Role: the contract front-end developer a PM or support rep waits weeks for. Non-engineers build live variants of the real app from the actual codebase, test them, and hand engineering a reviewed pull request. Price: free for two collaborators; Pro $29 per seat a month; Teams $99 per seat, as read on 17 August 2026; the page did not render for the 22 September re-check. Baseline: not stated. Catch: the page only renders in a real browser, which is why this entry exists at all; the vendor states the problem in one line: "That wait is where most good ideas quietly die." Source: remix.one.
- Rasa Legal: the criminal-defense attorney, for record clearance. Role: the attorney who checks whether a record qualifies for sealing or expungement and files it. Price: eligibility check free; legal review $25; full representation "low-cost", not priced publicly. Baseline, vendor-stated: law firms "typically charge somewhere between $1,500 to $3,000 per record". Traction on the page today: 35,000+ eligibility checks and 7,000+ records sealed or expunged, up from 25,000+ and 5,000+ in August. Live in Utah, Pennsylvania, Oregon and Arizona. Catch: the outcome number is the strongest social proof in the library, and it moved in five weeks. Source: rasa-legal.com.
What is not in here
Genome Intelligence (replaces a lab service, not a hireable person), RentAHuman QA (it is human labour), Buildbox (no evidence it ships), HeadsUp.bot (its page never loaded outside a browser, so nothing could be confirmed) and Reception, the AI receptionist (no price on the page, so no baseline). Anything whose only evidence is a landing page with a demo form. And every number that was a guess.
Keep reading
The rest of this article: 16 AI products that replace a person you used to hire, with the invoice you stop paying. A $9 video editor, a $4-per-thousand-pages data-entry desk, a $12,000 migration first guessed at $6M.
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