An honest look at Coactive AI pricing and features in 2025

Let's be honest, dealing with a mountain of images and videos is a headache for most companies. You know there's valuable stuff in there, but how do you actually find it without endless manual scrolling? Tools like Coactive AI have popped up, promising to be the magic wand that sorts through all that visual data.

But before you sign on the dotted line, you need to know what you're actually getting into, who it's really for, and the big one: what's the price tag? This guide will give you a straight-up breakdown of Coactive AI, its features, and a clear look at its pricing so you can figure out if it's the right move for your team.

What is Coactive AI?

Coactive AI is a specialized AI platform built to pull useful information out of unstructured visual data, which is just a fancy way of saying images and videos. The company started in 2021 and has its sights set on data science teams and big companies in industries like media, entertainment, and e-commerce. Their main pitch is automating the slow, costly job of tagging and organizing huge libraries of visual content.

The platform uses what’s called multimodal AI, meaning it can understand information from different formats at once (video, images, audio, text) to create detailed, searchable metadata. So, instead of having someone watch hours of footage or click through thousands of photos, teams can use Coactive AI to:

• Tag and classify content automatically and pretty accurately.

• Search giant visual libraries just by typing in a normal question.

• Spot trends and patterns hiding in their visual assets.

• Plug these findings into their existing data workflows using SQL.

Basically, Coactive AI adds a layer of intelligence over a company's raw visual files. This makes them useful for things like personalizing content, moderating for brand safety, or targeting ads.

Coactive AI features that influence Coactive AI pricing

Before we get to the price, it’s worth looking at the features that are supposed to justify it. Coactive AI is a heavy-duty platform for technical users who are managing visual data on a massive scale.

The platform’s main features all work together to process and make sense of your visual content.

Automated metadata and dynamic tags

This is Coactive's bread and butter. The platform automatically creates descriptive tags for images and videos, figuring out context, objects, and even abstract ideas. For instance, it can spot specific products, brand logos, or a theme like "family holiday" in a video. This gets rid of the need for manual tagging, which is not only slow but often inconsistent. Coactive claims it hits 95% accuracy and can be tweaked for specific industry needs.

Multimodal semantic search

You can search your whole visual library using plain English. Instead of guessing at filenames, you can ask things like, "Show me all videos with our summer floral dress" or "Find clips of storm impacts." The platform pulls from visual, audio, and text clues to give you relevant results, even pointing to the exact moment in a video where your search term appears.

Advanced analysis and SQL integration

Coactive AI is built to play nice with a company's other data tools. It lets teams run SQL queries on their visual and transcript data. This means analysts can connect visual trends with other business numbers to measure content engagement or ad performance, all without needing to be machine learning experts themselves.

Auto evaluator for quality control

To make sure the AI-generated tags are on point, the platform has an "Auto Evaluator." This feature creates test datasets from your own library to check the precision and recall of its classifications. It helps teams confirm the AI is doing its job correctly and deploy new tags with confidence, turning weeks of manual checking into a task that takes just minutes.

A complete guide to Coactive AI pricing

Alright, let's talk about the part you're probably here for: the price. This is where things get a bit mysterious. If you go looking for a pricing page on Coactive AI's website, you won't find one. This is a pretty common move for enterprise-level software that relies on custom quotes and a long sales process.

Luckily, their official listing on the AWS Marketplace gives us a good idea of the investment involved.

Key takeaways from Coactive AI pricing

• A hefty price tag to start: The platform's starting price is a cool $75,000 per year. This puts Coactive AI squarely in the enterprise category, making it out of reach for most small and medium-sized businesses.

• Locked into an annual contract: There's no paying month-to-month here. You have to sign a 12-month contract that is non-refundable and non-cancellable. That's a serious commitment, especially for a tool you can't easily try out first.

• Fuzzy usage fees: The plan covers a certain amount of use, but any "Additional platform utilization" costs $1.00 per unit. The catch is, it's not clear what a "unit" is (an hour of video? a thousand images?). This ambiguity makes it hard to guess your total costs and could lead to some surprise bills.

This pricing setup is a major hurdle. You have to go through a sales team, commit to a huge upfront cost, and deal with vague overage fees, all without a simple way to test the platform for yourself.

It’s a different story with a tool like eesel AI, which lays its pricing out in the open. Plans are listed right on the site, starting at $239/month (when billed annually), and are based on a clear number of AI interactions. No mystery fees. You can even pay month-to-month and cancel anytime, giving you the freedom to test and scale without getting locked into a massive contract.

A visual of the eesel AI pricing page, which contrasts with opaque Coactive AI pricing by showing clear, public-facing costs.

Limitations and key considerations

Beyond the steep price, there are a few other things to think about before jumping in with Coactive AI.

A narrow focus on visual data

Coactive AI is a beast when it comes to images and videos. But what about all the other places your company knowledge lives? Most customer support and internal info is text-based: help desk tickets, emails, Slack messages, Confluence pages, and Google Docs. Coactive AI isn't built for that, which leaves a big hole in your ability to get comprehensive answers.

This is where a solution like eesel AI really shines. It connects to all your knowledge, whether it's buried in past Zendesk tickets, Slack threads, or your Confluence wiki. It learns from the actual text conversations your team has every day, so its answers are grounded in the reality of your business, not just what's in a video.

A complex, developer-first platform

Coactive AI is clearly made for engineers and data scientists. Their website is full of talk about APIs, SDKs, SQL, and machine learning workflows. It's not a tool you can just sign up for and start using if you're a support manager or a non-technical person. Getting it up and running requires developer time and a serious integration into your data systems.

On the other hand, eesel AI is designed to be completely self-serve. You can connect your help desk, like Zendesk or Freshdesk, with a single click and be up and running in minutes, not months. The whole platform is built for the support teams who actually use it, so they can manage it themselves without needing to write any code.

A flowchart outlining the quick, self-serve implementation of eesel AI, highlighting an alternative to the complex setup that can affect Coactive AI pricing.

No easy way to test it out

Agreeing to a $75,000 platform without being able to see how it performs in the real world is a big gamble. While Coactive has its "Auto Evaluator," that feature just checks the technical accuracy of its tags. It doesn't show you how an AI agent would actually handle a customer issue from beginning to end.

This is a huge difference with eesel AI, which has a simulation mode. You can run the AI on thousands of your old support tickets in a safe environment. This gives you a real forecast of how many issues it can resolve and how much money you could save. You get to see exactly how the AI will respond before a single customer ever interacts with it. From there, you can roll it out slowly, starting with certain topics until you're confident.

The eesel AI simulation dashboard shows how the AI uses past data to predict automation rates, a key feature to consider when evaluating Coactive AI pricing.

The final verdict: Is Coactive AI right for you?

There's no doubt that Coactive AI is a sophisticated platform for big companies sitting on massive piles of visual data. If your main problem is making millions of images and videos searchable for a technical team, its specialized tools might be a good fit, assuming you have the budget and the engineers to handle it.

But for most companies, the high, hidden Coactive AI pricing, mandatory annual contracts, and laser focus on visual content make it a non-starter. This is especially true if you're trying to automate customer support or bring all your internal knowledge into one place. The platform's complexity creates a barrier to entry that just doesn't exist with more modern, flexible tools.

Coactive AI's co-founder explains how the platform is transforming the way organizations handle visual data.

For teams that need an AI platform with transparent pricing, a simple setup, and the ability to learn from all company knowledge (not just videos), you'll need a more practical alternative. eesel AI is a fully self-serve platform that connects to all your tools in minutes, lets you test risk-free with its simulation mode, and has a clear pricing model you can actually plan for.

Ready to try an AI support solution you can set up yourself in minutes? Get started with eesel AI for free.