Ask manufacturing vendors what AI costs and you will get five different units: per user, per page, per estimate, per credit, or “talk to sales”.
In 2026 the split is clean. Maintenance and inspection platforms price by the seat. Quoting and drawing tools price by the work — a page read, an estimate produced. The AI that watches machines is rarely priced in public at all.
Every figure below was read from the vendor's own pricing page in late October 2026; where a vendor publishes nothing, this article says so.
1. MaintainX — maintenance AI inside the seat price
MaintainX runs work orders, procedures and asset history for plants that have left spreadsheets behind. Its AI drafts digital procedures, flags anomalies in work-order inputs to catch faults earlier, turns past jobs into time estimates, and adds MaintainX Assist for asset questions.
Pricing is per user per month: free, then $20 billed annually ($25 monthly) on Basic and $65 ($75) on Advanced. Procedure generation, anomaly detection, time estimates and Assist sit under one Artificial Intelligence row the table marks “Limited”. Figures on getmaintainx.com.
Why it made the list: AI bundled into a seat price instead of sold as an upgrade.
2. Fiix — one AI feature included, one billed as an add-on
Fiix, owned by Rockwell Automation, splits its AI in two. Foresight — the analytics engine that finds trends and forecasts parts — appears in the Professional plan's features. MAX, the assistant that answers questions about your own CMMS data, is labelled a paid add-on.
Plans are $0 free, $45 per user per month on Basic and $75 on Professional, with Enterprise by quote. A Lite License lets operators complete assigned work without a full seat — also an add-on. Details at fiixsoftware.com.
Why it made the list: the honest worst case — one AI feature now, another on the invoice later.
3. Mitti by SafetyCulture — AI from the free plan up
Mitti is SafetyCulture's frontline operations product: inspections, checklists, training and issue reporting from a phone on the shop floor. Its pricing page carries the banner “NEW — AI included in every plan”, with an assistant, AI issue creation and always-on agents.
Free covers 10 users with up to 300 AI credits per seat per month. Premium is $24 per seat per month billed annually ($29 monthly) with credits from 500; Enterprise starts at 800 on custom pricing. Rates at mitti.com.
Why it made the list: a free tier with a published AI allowance, rare in industrial software.
4. Werk24 — reading drawings, priced per page
Werk24 reads technical drawings and extracts what quoting and ERP systems need — PMI, tolerances, GD&T, threads — as structured data an API can consume. Its use cases are costing automation and automated RFQ triage: a narrow, checkable job.
It prices the work, not the person. Pay as you go is €1.25 per page with no monthly fee; Production is €590 a month including 500 pages, then €0.95 per page; Contract starts at €18,000 a year. Rate card at werk24.io.
Why it made the list: per-page pricing lets you size the bill from last month's RFQ count first.
5. Toolpath — DFM checks and estimates, priced per estimate
Toolpath is built for machining and fabrication shops that want manufacturability feedback and a quote-ready estimate from a raw CAD model. Core advertises geometry and feature recognition, manufacturability flags, tooling-access checks and cycle-time prediction, and the product is API-first.
The entry tier is free: 100 DFM analyses and 10 estimates a month, no card. Core is $400 a month for 500 analyses and 60 estimates; Pro is $1,500 for 2,500 analyses and 400 estimates. Plans at toolpath.com.
Why it made the list: it prices estimating, not seats, so 60 jobs a month is one line of arithmetic.
6. Uptool — AI estimating for small machine shops
Uptool goes after the small American job shop: it takes in CAD files, drawings and BOMs, produces an AI-powered estimate, and keeps email and QuickBooks in the loop so a quote does not die in an inbox. Its copy is candid that not every shop will hand the whole job to AI.
There is a one-week free trial for US shops under 100 people, after which pricing starts at $195+ per month depending on employees and ITAR status — a floor, not a rate card. Details at uptool.com.
Why it made the list: the lowest-priced credible route into AI quoting for a small shop.
7. Asytra — quoting with AI credits on top
Asytra ships three connected products: Trace for digital work instructions and per-unit traceability, Quote for CNC part quoting, and Measure. In Trace, manual entry is free and AI credits only speed up writing and translating steps. Quote adds an embeddable widget that prices uploads at any hour.
Trace starts at $49 a month for 3 users and 30 AI credits, rising to $99 for 10 users and 100 credits. Quote starts at $129 a month. DFM analysis is +$30 a month and extra users run $10 to $15. Figures at asytra.com.
Why it made the list: it separates the subscription from the AI, so you see what credits buy.
8. Roboflow — build your own inspection model
Roboflow is the do-it-yourself route to visual inspection. Instead of buying a finished defect-detection system, you train and deploy your own computer-vision models, chain them into workflows, and log Vision Events — “visual event logs of everything significant that your cameras see”.
The free tier includes the platform and 10 credits a month. Core is $39 a month billed monthly with 20 credits, and packs step up from there: +25 credits for $89, +40 for $139. Pricing at roboflow.com.
Why it made the list: the cheapest way to test AI inspection before an installation programme.
9. Katana — a genuinely free tier for production
Katana covers production planning, inventory and traceability for small manufacturers, and it does what most of this list avoids: it states its free tier plainly. Katana AI Replenishment recommends purchase orders from your demand history plus “plain-language context you control”.
The free plan is $0 with no card required: up to 30 SKUs, unlimited users, unlimited integrations and locations, plus all features and API access. The paid Advantage plan is custom-priced. Plans at katanamrp.com.
Why it made the list: the cleanest starting point for a small manufacturer, with AI outside the paywall.
What the shop-floor vendors charge — and why you cannot see it
The tools that watch machines, predict failures and inspect parts at line speed are almost all quote-only. Augury says “Get Your Quote”. Tractian quotes by asset count. MachineMetrics publishes tiers with no figures. Oden sells Forge agents and Process AI with no rate card. Limble publishes a calculator instead of a price, with AI-Powered PM Builder on every tier. Paperless Parts' pricing page is a form. ProShop's Chip — “the AI built for precision manufacturing” — is quoted on every deal.
Not every published price is an AI price. MRPEasy is the counter-example: $49, $69, $99 and $149 per user per month, plus $79 a month per bundle of 10 users from the 11th onwards. Its AI is a free product chatbot, Mr. Peasy.
How to choose without five demos
Work out your unit first. If the pain is maintenance admin you are buying seats: compare $20 to $75 per user per month against an hour of a planner's time. If the pain is drawings and quotes you are buying work — pages, estimates, credits — sized from last month's RFQ volume.
Then ask which AI is metered and which is tiered. Vendors that meter credits — Mitti, Roboflow, Asytra — let you start small. Vendors that tier AI — MaintainX, Fiix — turn a feature into a negotiation. Only one shows up cleanly in a forecast.
Finally, take the free tiers literally: Katana's plan, Toolpath's API tier, Roboflow's credits and Mitti's 300 AI credits exist to be pointed at real work.
The Honest Takeaway
Manufacturing AI has an odd shape in 2026: the affordable end is administrative, the expensive end is physical, and only the affordable end publishes a price. Anything touching a machine, a camera or a line arrives with hardware and a sales conversation.
That is not a reason to wait. A shop that starts with a maintenance platform and a quoting tool learns what AI is good at on its own data — and can ask the one question that decides the plant-floor deal: what does this cost per machine, per year?