Orchid AI pricing 2026: what $29.99 a month really buys

Why Orchid's price is hard to find

Orchid wrote a whole blog post titled "Is Orchid AI free?" because, in its own words, it is "one of the most common things people search right before they text us." I work on search at eesel, so that sentence says a lot to me. Buyers who look up a price that often are usually having trouble finding it, and here that is the case: orchid.ai/pricing loads with a nav bar and a footer, with nothing in between.

That matters more than it sounds. On one eesel sales call, a budget-conscious buyer told the team a previous vendor's price had more than doubled on them, so they wanted contractual price locks before signing anything. Orchid's terms let it change fees with 30 days' notice, and the yearly price that would lock you in is not published anywhere. This post therefore pieces together the numbers Orchid has made public, what each of them buys, and where the real costs hide.

How much does Orchid AI cost?

Orchid is a personal assistant you text over iMessage or SMS, built by Zero Email, Inc., a Y Combinator company. It triages your Gmail and drafts replies in your voice, then books meetings and also texts you a brief before calls. My Orchid review goes deep on the product, while this post is only about the bill.

The only public price sits in that blog post, and the short answer there is quite blunt: "No. Orchid is paid, from $29.99/mo, as a flat subscription. There's no free tier and no meter running on your messages."

Here is every pricing fact Orchid publishes, in one place:

Two rows in that table deserve a second look. "From" $29.99 implies more than one plan, and the FAQ at the bottom of that post says "Current plan details live inside the app." So you only see the full menu after you sign up. The yearly plan clearly exists too, since the terms mention annual billing and the student deal is built around it, but I could not find a yearly price on any public page.

What the $29.99 includes, and what it doesn't

The billable unit is simple, one person paying one flat monthly fee. Orchid's pricing post says there is "no per-feature upsell inside the assistant," and it lists what the plan covers: inbox triage and drafting, scheduling and meeting prep, reminders and follow-ups, plus voice notes, carousels, and memory.

That is a cleaner deal than most AI email assistants, which tend to put their best feature behind a higher tier. Superhuman, for example, keeps Auto Drafts on its Business plan only, while with Orchid the morning digest and meeting prep come with the base price.

What the plan leaves out matters just as much for a pricing decision:

The Outlook gap is the one that changes the price for some readers. If your work email runs on Microsoft, $29.99 buys you nothing yet, and one of the tools built for AI in Outlook is the better fit. If you are on Gmail, it is also worth checking what Gmail's smart features cover first, since you may already pay for broader email AI.

Who gets Orchid AI for free?

Orchid has no free tier, but three groups get a free stretch, per the pricing post and the student page:

• Students: 3 months free, then 50% off a yearly plan "for as long as you're a student."
• YC founders: 3 months free, claimed by emailing the founder with your name, company, and batch.
• Notion Mail switchers: a free month, through Orchid's Notion migration page, since Notion Mail is winding down.

For everyone else, the 30-day money-back guarantee in the terms works as the real free trial, and the terms call it "no questions asked." The year one math changes quite a bit depending on how you get in:

My advice for the first month is to put a reminder on day 25 and, before it fires, check one thing: did Orchid warn you about a deadline or a meeting before you thought of it yourself? If yes, it is worth the $29.99. If you are still the one remembering everything, use the refund.

Orchid's math: the human executive assistant

Orchid prices itself against a person and not a chatbot. Its pricing post says that what Orchid replaces "isn't a chatbot subscription. It's the executive assistant you'd otherwise hire," and links to its own breakdown of what an EA costs.

The numbers in that essay are big on purpose. It puts a mid-level US EA on a $100,000 base at $145,000 to $170,000 a year fully loaded once benefits, equipment, recruiting, and ramp are counted, while an offshore EA comes to $1,200 to $4,000 a month. Against those figures, $359.88 a year is, in Orchid's words, "a rounding error."

The executive assistants who read about Orchid did not quite buy the comparison. In an r/ExecutiveAssistants thread about the product, the sharpest reply was on who the pricing is really aimed at:

"This is marketing fluff aimed at the people who could never really afford us. It's aspirational at best. It claims to be able to replicate your writing style but it's meant to replace your writing. Beyond that it's a reminder app"

u/mmcgrat6, Reddit r/ExecutiveAssistants

The top comment in the same thread had a more practical read:

"I think we'll see AI start to replace overseas virtual assistants."

u/lilsimbastian, Reddit r/ExecutiveAssistants

I think both are right, and together they show where the EA anchor misleads. Nobody choosing between Orchid and a $150,000 hire is really choosing, because the person who buys Orchid was never going to hire an EA. Their real options are Orchid, another AI assistant, or just doing the work themselves. That is the shelf that matters:

For a fuller picture of how human and AI costs compare, this breakdown of AI vs human agent cost does the math for support teams, where the numbers are much easier to measure.

Orchid AI pricing vs other AI assistants

On the real shelf, Orchid is mid-priced. It costs the same per month as Lindy's entry plan and is cheaper than Fyxer or Martin on monthly billing, though it is three times the price of Folk Pro. What makes it stand out is the missing free plan, since most of the field lets you start at $0.

Prices are from each vendor's own pricing page as checked on October 6, 2026, and collected in my Orchid alternatives roundup. Two of these deserve a note. Martin's triage, drafts, and Cc-to-schedule features are on its Pro plan only, so the honest comparison to Orchid is $49 a month and not $35. Lindy also charges per active user on credits, which means a heavy month can cost more than the sticker.

Orchid's own comparison with Poke frames the choice as "the job" rather than the price, and that framing is fair. Orchid is built as an executive assistant with approval on everything that leaves, whereas Poke centers on channels and custom automations.

If price decides it for you, Folk is the cheapest assistant in this set with drafting that waits for your approval. Lindy is the one to look at for the closest match to Orchid plus Outlook. Other assistants in the same texting category, like Meta Muse and Town AI, have their own price breakdowns, and my best AI assistants roundup covers the whole field.

Is Orchid worth $29.99 for you?

The fairest way to judge a flat fee is the break-even, meaning how much time Orchid needs to save you each week to pay for itself. The answer is smaller than most people expect. At a $50 hourly value, $29.99 a month is about 36 minutes a month, or roughly 8 minutes a week. You can plug in your own numbers:

The calculator makes the price look easy, and for a founder taking several meetings a week, it is. The harder question is whether those minutes are real. The EA thread had a blunt one-liner on that: "chatgpt literally does this," per u/mrrakim. It does not, quite, since a chat app does not watch your inbox and calendar in the background. Still, it is a fair reminder to count only the minutes that Orchid saves and that a ChatGPT subscription or Claude Pro you already pay for would not.

The costs that don't show up in $29.99

A flat fee is easy to budget, so the costs worth checking are the ones sitting in the legal pages and not on the price tag.

Price changes. The terms let Orchid change fees with 30 days' notice, and continued use counts as acceptance. A yearly plan is the usual way to lock a price, but Orchid does not publish what that costs. If price stability matters to you, ask for the yearly number in the app before you commit, and keep in mind that yearly plans get a prorated refund within 60 days.

Liability. This is the number I would look at before connecting a work inbox. The terms cap Orchid's total liability at the greater of fees paid in the prior 12 months or $100, and the cap explicitly covers "Actions taken by the AI agent on your behalf." In plain terms, when the agent sends the wrong thing, your recourse is roughly what you have paid:

That is standard for a young consumer app, and Orchid's approval-first default lowers the risk, since replies stay as drafts until you hit send. It is still a reason to keep client inboxes out of it, and Orchid makes no SOC 2 or similar claim for itself yet.

What "paid" buys on privacy. Orchid's pricing post makes a strong promise: "We never sell your data, share it, or train on it. That's exactly why it's paid." The privacy policy is narrower: "We don't train shared models on your data" but "We may train your personal model on your data. Only yours." A per-user model is a reasonable way to learn your writing voice, but it is still not "never," and the policy is the page that binds. My Orchid review walks through the rest of the fine print, and this guide to AI data privacy has a checklist that applies to any assistant you connect to email.

Switching costs. If your email lives in Outlook, the real cost of Orchid is moving your inbox to Gmail, and that is not a $29.99 decision. Orchid's FAQ lists Outlook as "on the way," but gives no date.

What Orchid's team charges businesses: Keiki

Orchid's team has a second product, and its price model is completely different. Keiki packages Orchid's infrastructure into a platform for building customer-facing agents across iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Teams, and email, per its launch post. Where Orchid is flat, Keiki is metered.

The $300 iMessage line is the number that jumps out: for a business, the texting channel alone costs ten times what Orchid charges a person for the whole assistant. Keiki is also a builder, so you define the agent and pick the model, then wire up the tools yourself. That fits a product team fine, but it is a lot of setup for a support lead who just wants the queue handled.

Try eesel

If you landed here because you are pricing AI for a support team rather than your own inbox, Orchid is the wrong shelf. eesel is an AI teammate platform where you hire ready-to-work teammates for a defined job, and the AI helpdesk teammate is the one for support. It joins the helpdesk you already use, learns from your knowledge base and past tickets, and answers only from knowledge you approved, handing the rest to your team.

The pricing is public, which after this post should count for something. The pricing page shows a free plan with 100 credits, then fixed monthly plans from $299 for 500 credits, where a ticket or a chat is one credit. Every feature is on every plan, with no per-seat fees. Before any of that, you can simulate the teammate on your past tickets and read its resolution rate before a customer sees a reply. If you want the wider math first, here is what an AI support agent costs across the market.

Keep Orchid for your own calendar. For your customer support queue, try eesel free and test it on your own ticket history first.

My verdict on Orchid AI pricing

Orchid's pricing is simple where it counts: one flat $29.99 a month, every feature included, no meter, and a 30-day refund that makes the first month free to test. For a founder or investor who lives in Gmail and Google Calendar and takes several meetings a week, the break-even is only a few minutes a week, and the morning digest and meeting prep will likely clear it.

What I would push on is everything around the number. The pricing page is empty and the yearly price is hidden inside the app, while the terms allow price changes on 30 days' notice and the liability cap is roughly what you have paid. None of that makes Orchid a bad deal. It makes it a deal to test on your personal inbox for 30 days, with a reminder set, before a client inbox or a yearly commitment goes behind it.

If you are on Outlook, want a free plan, or want the lowest price, Folk and the rest of the Orchid alternatives are the better places to start.