Twelve GTM tools benchmarked, and Mixmax drops its cheapest tier

In this issue

1. Comparison

   Ollama pricing, free local models plus a $20 cloud tier

   The local-LLM staple keeps local use free forever; the cloud plans run Pro at $20 a month ($16.67 billed annually, $60 of monthly usage credits), Max at $100 ($300 of credits), and Team at $500 ($1,000 of shared credits) [1]. Off-peak rates and per-credit details are in the guide.

2. Comparison

   Bland — pricing, features, and fit

   Bland repositioned upmarket this year, so every claim is re-sourced to its live site and the full ladder is public: Start is free with call time at $0.14 a minute, Build drops that to $0.12 behind a $299 monthly platform fee, Scale runs $0.11 at $499 a month, and Enterprise is contracted to your volume [2].

3. Comparison

   Best CRM platforms for startups (HubSpot, Pipedrive, Attio, Close, folk, Zoho)

   Six CRM platforms compared on visual pipelines, native email sync, bundled marketing, and free tiers. HubSpot is the platform default with a real free tier (2 users, 1,000 contacts); Pipedrive owns the single-pipeline job from US$14 per seat; Attio bends its data model to your business. HubSpot Professional's $3,000 mandatory onboarding fee is on its own pricing page.

4. Comparison

   Best marketing automation platforms (Klaviyo, Omnisend, Customer.io, ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, Braze)

   Six marketing automation and lifecycle platforms split by where their triggers live: storefront (Klaviyo, Omnisend, Mailchimp), product events (Customer.io), builder-first (ActiveCampaign), or enterprise cross-channel (Braze). Free tiers: three are real, one of those has no automation flows, and Braze publishes no prices at all.

5. Original data

   AI crawler access test: can answer engines read these vendors?

   Six CRM vendors probed three times each on 2026-09-30. Attio and folk block all seven AI crawlers while selling themselves as the CRM for agentic revenue; HubSpot, Pipedrive, Close, and Zoho are fully open. Five of six ship an llms.txt.

6. Original data

   AI crawler access test: can answer engines read these vendors?

   The whole marketing-automation category is open to AI crawlers: zero robots blocks across all six vendors, llms.txt on five of six. If LLMs under-recommend a tool in this category, it is not a robots problem.

7. Head to head

   Pipedrive vs HubSpot — pipeline or platform

   Pipeline or platform. Pipedrive's bill grows with seats (US$14 to start); HubSpot's grows with seats, contacts, hubs, and onboarding fees, and its free email sync is the zero-cost logging layer Pipedrive only matches at US$39 per seat.

8. Head to head

   Klaviyo vs Mailchimp — ecommerce engine or email app

   The entry bands tie at $20/mo, then diverge on what is inside: Klaviyo's free plan runs flows and includes $5 of mobile messages, Mailchimp's free plan includes no automation flows at all. Mailchimp's own homepage advertises switching savings of up to 42 percent, which tells you who it is fighting.

9. Head to head

   Jan vs LM Studio — the open-source app or the model workbench

   The two open-source desktop apps for running local models, compared on licence, interface, model management, and API serving. Jan if you want a free MIT-licensed app that stays out of the way; LM Studio if you want the deeper workbench and its bundled Bionic agent, and will confirm the workplace licence term first.

10. Comparison

    opencode pricing, free software with a pay-per-request model gateway

    opencode costs nothing to install or run: the agent is free and open source and connects to 75+ model providers you bring yourself. The only money path is Zen, an optional model gateway billing per request at provider rates with the markup capped at processing fees.

11. Comparison

    Fathom pricing, a real free plan and paid tiers from $15 a user

    The meeting notetaker with a free plan that works rather than teases: unlimited recordings, transcriptions, and AI summaries for individuals. Paid tiers add depth from $15 a user (Team, annual) to $20 a month Premium, and the guide marks where the free plan genuinely ends.

12. News

    Mixmax retires its SMB tier, leaving Copilot and Suite only

    Mixmax's pricing page now lists Copilot at $49 and Suite at $89 per user per month, and no longer offers the $29 SMB tier that appeared in our 2026-09-24 check. The cheapest listed path into paid Mixmax is now $49 a user.

13. News

    Aleph Alpha ships Kolibri: Apache 2.0 open-weight MoE with 1M-token context

    Aleph Alpha released Kolibri, an English-German Mixture-of-Experts model with 78.1B total parameters (3.46B active), full weights on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0, and 262K native context extending to 1M via a serve-time flag. A permissive, self-hostable option for EU-data-residency stacks.

14. News

    DeepKeep ships AI Lens: a security control plane for coding agents

    DeepKeep announced AI Lens for Developers: policy enforcement, audit visibility, and runtime security over coding agents, supporting Cursor and Claude Code today. The coding-agent security lane is forming fast, two weeks after StackHawk's Wingman landed at $10 per user per month.

15. News

    Underdog launches a fully local personal AI agent, no cloud

    Underdog announced a fully on-device personal AI agent: it reads email, takes meeting notes, handles dictation, manages the calendar, and drives the browser, asking before it pays, with nothing uploaded. Invite-only beta, no pricing disclosed.

16. News

    Deepslate raises €7.7M seed for European speech-to-speech models

    Berlin voice-AI lab Deepslate raised a EUR 7.7 million seed led by 42CAP, claiming 440 ms speech-to-speech latency. More model choice and a potential EU-hosted vendor for voice-agent platform buyers at a time when data residency is a real procurement question.