Pricing
One seat costs $179 a month, or 149 € a month in the euro area. A year costs $1,790 or 1,490 €, which works out at $149 or 124 € a month and saves about 17 percent. The seat opens the whole index: 790 725 researchers read off 496 295 AI papers, with a dated end of doctorate for 9 998 of them. The seat answers two questions: who leads the work on a subject today, and which of them is about to come free. You pay by card, the account opens as soon as the payment goes through, and you cancel from your own billing page.
Two ways to pay
The same access either way. Monthly suits a search that runs for a quarter. Yearly suits a team that hires AI people every few months, and costs two months less over the year.
$179 / month
149 € a month in the euro area
$149 / month
$1,790 billed yearly, or 1,490 € in the euro area
Both plans are billed by Stripe in the currency of your country. VAT is added where it applies, and an EU company that gives a valid VAT number is invoiced without it.
What the seat opens
The index is built every night from the published AI research: arXiv for the papers, OpenAlex, ORCID and DBLP for the people behind them, Hugging Face for the models they ship. Nothing here is scraped from a professional network, and no list has been bought.
| What the index holds | Count |
|---|---|
| Papers indexed | 496 295 |
| Researchers on those papers | 790 725 |
| Profiles enriched from OpenAlex, ORCID and DBLP | 756 476 |
| Profiles with a classified research area | 786 516 |
Updated 2026-09-22
You describe the work you need done and the index matches it against the title and abstract of every paper it holds. Someone working on speculative decoding shows up whether or not a preset topic exists for it, and their position in the author list tells you whether they ran the work or supervised it.
That covers the half of hiring that has nothing to do with timing. When you need the person who already leads a field, you rank on first-authored papers at the venues that matter and write to the handful who come out on top. Their availability is a separate question, and the rest of this page is about answering it early.
The end of a PhD is public and scattered across manuscripts, thesis records and lab pages. We collect it and put it on the profile with the source attached. The index currently dates 9 998 of them, of which 899 land in 2026 and 301 in 2027. That date is the whole reason to pay for this rather than search a job board: it tells you who is worth writing to in January for a September start. The arithmetic behind it is in how long an AI doctorate takes.
A saved search becomes an alert. It fires when a new person matches it, and when a defence date on someone you already follow moves closer. A first message lands better in the weeks around that date than three months after it.
Where a researcher printed a contact address on a paper they published, the profile carries it, with the document it came from. Where none is public, the profile says so rather than guessing at one.
The index reaches 40 countries with a located affiliation for 553 497 people, and 47% of the profiles are early in a research career, which is the group that moves. The method page sets out how each field is built and what it leaves out, and the data page publishes the aggregates behind the figures on this site.
What a seat does not cover
A seat is for one person, and that person searches and reads as much as the hiring in front of them needs. There is no credit to spend and no quota to watch. What the seat does not cover is someone else using it, or a script emptying the index into a file.
Three things live outside the subscription and are priced separately. Several people sharing a workspace and a shortlist is team access. Sending the index into your applicant tracking system, your CRM or your warehouse is data integration, with its own terms on what you may do with the rows. Having us run the search, approach the people and hand you a shortlist is the recruitment agency, paid on a signed offer.
Beyond one seat
Several recruiters or hiring managers on the same workspace, with a shared shortlist, notes that carry from one person to the next, and a single invoice. Priced on the number of seats, with a purchase order where your finance team needs one.
The index served into your ATS, your CRM or your warehouse, on the refresh you need. Priced on volume and frequency, under an agreement that says what you may keep, for how long, and what may leave your walls. Aggregates and named rows are treated differently.
What else costs what
Rough figures from the market, put beside ours so the comparison is easy to make. Yours will differ, and the shape rarely does.
| Route | Typical cost | What you spend your time on |
|---|---|---|
| Founding Hires index | $179 a month, or $1,790 a year | Searching and writing the first message yourself |
| Generalist sourcing tool | Several thousand a year per seat | Filtering a database of people who already put themselves on the market |
| Bought list of contacts | A few thousand, once | Cleaning a file that ages from the day it is delivered |
| Recruitment agency on success | A share of first year salary, on a signed offer | Briefing, interviewing and closing |
The gap that matters is not the price. A sourcing tool and a bought list both describe people who have already decided to move. The index describes people who have published, and tells you when the window opens for each of them. For a fuller comparison of the firms in this market, read the best AI recruitment agencies, compared.
Before you subscribe
The account opens as soon as the card goes through, and the first search runs a minute later. If it turns out the index does not cover what you hire for, you close the subscription from your own billing page and keep access until the period you paid for ends.