The database seat: you rent profiles and contacts
Juicebox and Pin sell the same shape. You buy a seat, the vendor supplies the database, and credits buy the contact details. The tool does search and retrieval. The bill tracks how many recruiters sit in it.
Juicebox lists Starter at $99 and Growth at $179 per seat each month on yearly billing. The monthly rate is $119 and $199. Starter carries 500 contact credits; Growth carries 1,500. Pin lists Solo at $100 and Professional at $135 per user, billed annually, with 500 and 1,000 lookup credits. Figures checked in November 2026.
A seat is the right purchase when profile access is the scarce thing. If recruiters run out of database before they run out of day, a seat buys back hours. The seat says nothing about the other half of the job: whether the person you just spent a credit on is already in your pipeline.
The platform on top of the ATS: one contract against your stack
hireEZ sells the layers that sit on top of an ATS as one system. Sourcing, CRM, outreach, screening, scheduling and analytics run together on the ATS you already use. Its pricing page states the argument plainly. A team prices a tool by the seat, then finds the seat was only part of the job. Five or six contracts later, no one can say what the whole thing costs.
hireEZ puts a solo recruiter at $494 a month with a 7-day free trial. Enterprise deals are priced against the stack they replace, not against headcount, and the page says so (checked November 2026). The shape suits a team with a working ATS and a sprawl of point tools it wants to fold into one renewal.
The all-in-one that replaces the stack
Gem sells the third shape, where the system of record is part of the purchase. A built-in ATS means nothing to connect, and sourcing agents, CRM, scheduling and analytics sit inside the same product.
Gem's standard plans are custom, priced against your company's FTE count. The startup program on Gem's pricing page does publish a rate: $130 a month for a company of 1-10 FTE on yearly billing, down from $270 (checked November 2026). A company under 30 employees also gets the platform free for six months, then 50% off when it moves to a paid plan. Pick this shape when the ATS is what you want to replace, not keep. The cost of the shape is a migration on a date you choose.
The agent you own in a repo: rules are files, drafts stop at a review inbox
On Kortix the sourcing job is three files in a repo you own: an agent file with the prompt, a skill file with the rules, and a trigger. The rules are the part worth reading. The skill tells the agent to read the role's Greenhouse pipeline first. It drops every match already in that pipeline before drafting. Each email is written from one or two real details in the candidate's background.
The schedule is a kortix.yaml block:
triggers:
- slug: daily-sourcing-sweep
name: Daily candidate-sourcing sweep
on:
cron: "0 0 7 * * *"
run:
agent: candidate-sourcing
prompt: Load the outbound-sourcing skill and run one complete sourcing sweep for the open role.A run opens a fresh session on its own cloud computer. It searches LinkedIn for one open role, checks that role's Greenhouse pipeline, and drafts. One example run, the one Kortix publishes, reads like this: "Reviewed 31 LinkedIn profiles and dropped 13 that were already in the pipeline. Drafted 18 personalized emails, each with the candidate's current role and the reason they matched. All 18 are in the review inbox, and nothing was sent." Kortix labels those counts: "Illustrative example. Your counts depend on the role and the sourcing profile."
Nothing sends itself. The agent has no send action and no write access to Greenhouse. The recruiter reviews each draft, edits it, and sends it. Changing the rules means editing a file and opening a change request, which is the difference between buying a workflow and owning one.
Run it on Kortix Cloud, in your VPC, or on your own on-prem network. Self-host is free. Start on your own keys, with credits from $50 a month at 100 credits per dollar.
Which shape fits your team
Pick the seat when your problem is profile access. A team that has spent its LinkedIn searches and has a recruiter rebuilding the same Boolean every morning has a database problem. A seat solves it for a monthly number you can read off a pricing page.
Pick the platform when you are consolidating contracts. Count the tools that touch one role: sourcing, CRM, outreach, scheduling, reporting. If that list is five lines long and every line has an invoice, one system on top of the existing ATS is a smaller bill and one fewer integration to keep.
Pick the agent when the pipeline is the bottleneck. Duplicate outreach happens because the search runs in one product and the record of who was contacted sits in another. No seat closes that gap. On Kortix the dedupe rule, the draft rule and the schedule are files, and the first touch is drafted from the candidate's own background before a recruiter reviews it. How to source candidates covers the manual version of the same sequence, and AI candidate sourcing covers what changes when an agent runs it.
Three questions settle it. Does your team run out of profiles or out of hours? Is the ATS the system you trust or the one you want gone? Who reads the first line of an outreach email before it goes out? The answers map to a seat, a platform, or an agent you own. Open-source candidate sourcing explains what the last of those changes about the code you can read.