Dust vs Zapier Agents Cost for a 25 Person Team

Dust and Zapier end up on the same shortlist for one reason: both now say "AI agents" on the homepage. A head of operations with a budget line for agents searches both names, finds two pricing pages built on completely different units, and has no way to put them side by side. One sells seats full of credits. The other sells a platform plan, a task allowance and an add-on measured in activities.

This article does the conversion for one concrete case, a company of 25, and then says which of the two fits which job.

Are Dust and Zapier the same kind of tool?

No. Dust is a workspace where people talk to AI agents that can read company data. Zapier is an automation platform that moves data between apps, with an agent product added on top. They overlap only in the middle, where an agent takes an action in another app.

The clearest evidence is on Dust's own pricing grid, which has a row called "Automation platforms" listing Zapier, Make, n8n and Power Automate. Dust treats Zapier as something you plug into Dust. Zapier, for its part, describes its MCP and SDK products as ways to "connect AI agents to actions across 9,000+ apps". Each company positions the other as a component.

So the useful question is which side of the work you are buying for:

• People asking and drafting all day, with agents that know the company's context. That is Dust's center.
• Work that should happen without anyone asking: a lead arrives, a row is added, a message goes out. That is Zapier's center.

What does Dust cost for 25 people?

Twenty-five Dust Pro seats cost $7,200 a year on yearly billing ($24 per seat per month) or $9,000 a year month to month ($30). Each seat includes 8,000 credits a month, and unused credits do not roll over.

Few teams stay all Pro. Dust's second paid seat, Max, costs $120 a month on yearly billing and carries 40,000 credits. Put five heavy builders on Max and the same 25 person team pays $12,960 a year. Nothing else changes between the two seats, since Dust does not lock models or features behind the higher one.

The limit that matters more than the seat price is on data. Pro and Max both live inside Dust's self-serve Business plan, which allows up to 3 data connectors, 5 Spaces and 5 remote MCP servers, for teams up to 100 people. A fourth connected source means Enterprise, which is quote only. The full breakdown of seats, credits and caps is on our Dust pricing page.

What does Zapier Agents cost for 25 people?

Zapier's Team plan starts from $69 a month and includes 25 users, so one plan covers the whole company. Zapier Agents is billed as an add-on: Agents Pro is $400 billed annually, shown as $33.33 a month, for 1,500 activities a month. Together that is about $1,228 a year at the lowest task tier.

Three details sit behind that number.

First, "starting from" means the lowest task tier. Zapier prices every plan by how many tasks you run a month, and the price climbs with the tier. If you go over, Zapier switches you to pay-per-task billing at a higher per-task rate unless you turn that off, in which case your Zaps pause until the next period.

Second, the agent allowance is shared. Zapier's help center says that on Team and Enterprise accounts "all the users on your account will share the total number of activities". Fifteen hundred activities across 25 people is 60 each a month, roughly three per working day.

Third, activities and tasks are separate meters. Zapier states that using activities does not affect task usage, so a team running both Zaps and agents is watching two allowances. There is also a rate limit of 500 agent messages a day, and a cap of 40 activities per run on Pro so that one run cannot empty the month.

Dust credits vs Zapier activities

A Zapier activity is one billable thing an agent does: using a trigger, answering from a knowledge source, running an action, browsing or searching the web. A Dust credit is a smaller unit: each message costs token credits for the model's work plus action credits for each tool, at 0, 1 or 3 credits per action.

The units cannot be converted into each other honestly, and anyone who offers you a credits-to-activities exchange rate is guessing. What you can compare is the shape. Divide each price by its allowance and a Dust credit works out to $0.003 inside a seat, while a Zapier activity works out to about $0.022 on Agents Pro. But one activity is a whole step and one credit is a fraction of one, so those two figures describe different amounts of work.

The practical difference is who runs out. On Dust, one person can burn through their own 8,000 credits and be blocked while a colleague's allowance sits unused, unless an admin has funded the shared pool. On Zapier, one busy agent can use the allowance everyone else was counting on.

Can you use Dust and Zapier together?

Yes, and Dust expects it, but the combination is billed on both sides. Usage that reaches Dust through an automation tool counts as programmatic usage, which Dust lists at $0.01 per credit on the Business plan, more than three times the $0.003 a credit costs inside a seat.

Dust's credit documentation is specific here. Programmatic usage covers API calls, Zapier automations, n8n workflows, Slack bots and automated triggers. It is not tied to any user, it draws only from the workspace credit pool, and it has no included allowance. On Business that pool is prepaid through top-ups. On the Zapier side, every action in the Zap uses tasks as usual, and Zapier notes that a tool call through its MCP server uses two tasks.

None of that is a reason to avoid the pairing. A Zap that hands a new support ticket to a Dust agent for a draft reply is a good use of both. It is a reason to estimate volume first, because a workflow that fires 2,000 times a month is metered twice.

It is also worth asking whether you need to build the agent at all. For a well-defined job there is often a finished product, the way a hiring team can use an AI recruiter that sources and screens candidates instead of assembling one from prompts and triggers.

What neither one is built for

Neither Dust on its self-serve plan nor Zapier Agents is a company-wide search engine. This is the gap most teams discover after buying, because "an agent that knows our company" was the reason for the purchase.

Zapier's agents answer from knowledge sources you attach to each agent, which works for a handbook or a product sheet and does not scale to everything the company has written. Dust goes much further, with real connectors and permission-aware Spaces, but Business stops at three connectors, and every search of connected data is an Advanced action at 3 credits. A team whose knowledge is spread over Slack, Google Drive, Notion and Confluence is over the cap on day one. We compare Dust with search-first tools on Dust vs GoSearch.

InSearch is built for exactly that question, the "where did we already write this down" one. An admin connects Google Drive, SharePoint, Gmail, Slack, Notion, Confluence, Jira and Salesforce once, read-only. Anyone can then ask in plain English and get one answer with a link to every source, filtered by what they are already allowed to see in each app. There is no credit or activity meter and no connector cap. For 25 people it costs $6,000 a year on the Team plan, at $20 per user per month billed annually, and it is bought by card on our pricing page.

Which should a 25 person team buy?

Buy Zapier if the goal is automation between apps with a few agents on top: it is the cheaper line by a wide margin and reaches far more apps. Buy Dust if the goal is to give every employee an AI workspace and you have someone who will build and maintain the agents. Buy a search product if the goal is answers from company knowledge.

A reasonable setup for a company of 25 uses more than one of these, sized to the people who need each:

• Zapier Team for the operations owner, with Agents Pro added only once a real agent is running and its activity count is known.
• Dust for the five or six people who build and use agents daily, starting month to month at $30 a seat so you can read the credit numbers before committing to a year.
• Search for everyone, because finding the answer is the one need all 25 share. See how one index across every app works on unified search.

Before signing either, ask each vendor one question in writing. For Dust: what does a workspace pool top-up cost per credit on our plan, and what is the maximum per cycle? For Zapier: at our expected task volume, which tier are we on, and what is the pay-per-task rate above it? Those two answers move the totals above more than anything on the public pricing pages. If Dust turns out to be the wrong shape for your team, the replacements are on Dust alternatives.