Beam AI vs Stack AI vs Gumloop vs BuildShip vs Toolhouse vs Relevance AI: Which Agent Automation Platform Can You Actually Buy

Six vendors, one question: can you actually pay for this without talking to a salesperson?

Our earlier comparison of Zapier, Make, n8n, Activepieces, Pipedream and Trigger.dev covered the classic "connect app A to app B" automation tools — you wire the steps, the platform executes them. Beam AI, Stack AI, Gumloop, BuildShip, Toolhouse and Relevance AI are a different animal: you describe the outcome, and an LLM plans and executes the multi-step work itself. That's a real capability difference, and it shows up in the pricing too — agent-native platforms sell fewer, bigger plans, and several of them don't sell self-serve at all.

We checked all six pricing pages today. The honest finding: three of the six will not let you buy anything meaningful without a sales call, one has a floor of $500/month, and one jumped its paid floor from $50 to $3,990/month with nothing in between. Only one has a real graduated ladder a small team can climb.

What each vendor will actually sell you today

Sources: beam.ai/pricing, stack-ai.com/pricing, gumloop.com/pricing, buildship.com/pricing, toolhouse.ai/pricing, relevanceai.com/pricing — all checked 2026-09-28.

The credit and task units aren't comparable across vendors — a Beam AI "task" is not a BuildShip "credit" is not a Gumloop "credit" (which is itself a composite of model tokens, tool calls, and compute time, billed at $0.005 each). What's comparable is the shape of the ladder: how many rungs exist between free and a sales call, and how far apart they're spaced.

The two that won't sell you anything self-serve

Relevance AI's pricing page has exactly one plan card: Enterprise, and the only button on it is "Talk to sales." No number appears anywhere on the page — not a starting price, not a per-seat figure, nothing. That's a deliberate positioning choice: Relevance AI sells itself as an "embedded deployment team" that gets a company live with its first agents over six weeks, which is a consulting engagement, not a self-serve SaaS purchase.

Stack AI is more subtle because it does have a free tier — 500 runs/month, 2 projects, 1 seat, community Discord support. But there's nothing between that and Enterprise. The pricing page's own comparison table shows two columns: Free and Enterprise. If your free 500 runs run out and you need more without buying an entire enterprise contract (dedicated infrastructure, SSO, on-prem deployment, a solutions engineer), Stack AI has nothing to sell you.

The two with a paid floor, but no free tier and no middle rungs

Gumloop dropped its free plan. The pricing page shows one paid tier — Pro at $37/month billed monthly, 20,000 credits — and then Enterprise. Gumloop's own documentation is explicit that what looks like a free trial isn't one in the traditional sense: "every new account starts with a 14-day free trial of Pro," but the trial "requires a card... and rolls into a paid Pro subscription when it ends unless you cancel first." That's a paid product with a card-gated trial, not a free tier, and there's no second self-serve paid plan — Pro is the only rung before a custom Enterprise quote.

Toolhouse's floor is steeper. Its marketing copy says "start free," but the cheapest plan actually on the pricing page is Business at $500/month for 25,000 credits and 50 "workers." There's a genuine 14-day trial with no credit card required, which is more generous than Gumloop's, but once it ends the entry price to keep using the product is $500/month — nothing lower is offered. Business Max at $1,200/month is the only rung before Enterprise.

The one with an 80x cliff

Beam AI has the most dramatic gap in the group. Free gets you 20 tasks/month — enough to test the product, not to run anything real. Pro is $50/month for 200 tasks. Then the next tier, Scale, is $3,990/month — a roughly 80x jump in price for a plan Beam AI describes as adding "high-volume task execution" and three base integrations. There is no rung between a plan built for evaluating the product and one priced for enterprise-scale deployment.

The one with a real ladder

BuildShip is the only vendor here with graduated, self-serve pricing a small team can actually climb: Starter at $19/month (20,000 credits, 20 flows, 10 AI agents), Pro at $59/month (100,000 credits, 150 flows, 50 agents), Business at $449/month (300,000 credits, 300 flows, 100 agents), then Enterprise. It dropped its own free tier at some point after our records were last checked — the current floor is the $19 Starter plan, not $0 — but three priced tiers with roughly 3x, then 7.6x spacing between them is a real ladder compared to everyone else's one-rung-then-a-cliff structure. Credits also top up separately at $0.0001 each ($10 per 100,000) on any plan, so a team that outgrows its monthly allowance isn't forced to upgrade the whole plan just to finish a burst of work.

Which one to actually buy

If the honest answer to "is there an affordable way into agent automation here" matters more than any single feature, BuildShip is the buyable option: three real self-serve price points, a top-up mechanism for usage spikes, and no sales call required until you're past 300,000 monthly credits. Gumloop is the second-best buyable option — $37/month is affordable and self-serve, but it's genuinely one tier; if you outgrow 20,000 credits, the next stop is a custom quote, not a next rung.

The other four are built for a different buyer. Beam AI and Toolhouse both want you to either stay small (20 tasks, or a short free trial) or commit to four-figure monthly spend — there's no product built for the team in between. Stack AI and Relevance AI are, functionally, enterprise sales motions with a free trial or a demo bolted on the front; neither is set up to take a credit card from a mid-size team that wants to pay $200/month and scale from there.

None of this is a knock on the product quality of any of these six — Stack AI's document-workflow focus, Relevance AI's GTM-agent specialization, and Beam AI's SOP-automation angle are all real, defensible positions for an enterprise buyer with a procurement team. But if the question is "can I swipe a card and start automating today without a sales call," BuildShip is the answer, Gumloop is the fallback, and the other four are asking you to either stay tiny or pick up the phone.