Prialto sells support in blocks of 55 hours. We sell the whole person.

At a glance

Every Prialto figure below came off their pricing page on 17 September 2026. Where their page carries two different numbers for the same thing, we show both rather than choose.

Where Prialto is the better choice

The backup assistant is the part we would copy if we could. Prialto assigns a primary and a second assistant who knows your account, so the Tuesday your assistant is ill is not a Tuesday nothing happens. Almost nobody else in this category answers the absence question at all, and a dedicated seat, ours included, is one person with one set of holidays. If continuity keeps you awake, that structure is a real answer and you should weigh it heavily.

No overage fees is the second thing worth respecting. Their pricing page says support is not switched off when you pass your hours, and episodic overflow is included (read on 17 September 2026). Anyone who has bought hours in blocks knows the anxiety of the twenty-eighth of the month. Prialto removed it, and they removed it in writing.

They also publish how long their people train before touching a client account: a month-long programme, on top of a degree and/or extensive business support experience. Most competitors describe training as a vibe. A stated duration is checkable, and checkable claims are worth more than impressive ones.

Then there is the management layer. An Engagement Manager sits on the account, which means someone other than you is responsible for whether the work is going well. If you are a founder who dislikes managing people and knows it, paying for that layer is rational. We do coach the person we place, but you are still the one setting the work.

Their coverage window is stated precisely too: 9am to 6pm, Monday to Friday, in US and UK timezones. You know when someone is at the desk, which matters if your day has a hard 9am start.

The core difference

A unit is 55 hours a month. That is roughly 13 hours a week, or two and a half days. It is a real amount of support and, for a founder who needs a calendar defended and an inbox triaged, it may be all the support the job requires.

It is not a teammate. If you want someone in your Slack at 9am Eastern who owns the AP inbox all day, who learns your customers' names, who you can hand a project to on Monday and get back on Thursday, you are buying three units or more, and their page puts that at a starting price of $3,600 a month.

We only sell the whole person. One hire, full-time, dedicated to you, working your hours, on one flat monthly rate. Executive and virtual assistants from $2,400 a month, operations and admin from $2,500, SDR, BDR and CSR from $2,500, finance and accounting from $2,800. Those are on our pricing section and they are what you pay.

The second difference is what happens before anyone starts. With Prialto you pay a $250 set-up fee (waived on a one-year agreement) and you commit to 90 days per unit. With us you pay nothing until the person's first day, then month to month with 30 days' written notice. Neither approach is wrong. A three-month floor lets them invest in training someone for your account, and they do train. It also means that if the fit is poor in week two, you are still paying in week eleven.

What you get for the money

What Prialto publishes

One fractional dedicated assistant is $1,600 per unit per month. Full-time, which they define as three or more units and 165-plus hours a month, starts at $3,600. Enterprise is ten units and up, priced on request. All of that is on their pricing page, read on 17 September 2026.

Two things are worth noticing in those numbers. The first is that the per-unit rate falls as you buy more: $1,600 for one unit, but $3,600 for the three that make a full-time seat. Volume is rewarded, which is normal and fair.

The second is that their pricing page carries both $1,500 and $1,600 as an entry figure, in different places on the same page. We are not going to pick one and call it Prialto's price. Both appear. If you are close to buying, ask them which one applies to your unit count and get the answer in the proposal.

What the same money buys here

At $3,600 a month you are at the top of our band and past it. Finance and accounting, our most expensive seat, starts at $2,800 a month for a full-time, dedicated person: a bookkeeper running AP and AR, working the close, producing the monthly reporting pack. An executive assistant starts at $2,400. The difference between $2,400 and $3,600 a month is $14,400 over a year, which in most small businesses is a second part-time hire or a year of software.

We are not the low-cost option offshore and we do not claim to be. What the rate covers is headhunting for your particular role instead of assignment from a bench, the contracting and payroll of that person so you get one invoice, and an AI layer that trains them on the tooling before day one and captures how your seat is actually run into a living playbook, with weekly coaching on top. If someone has to be replaced, their replacement inherits that playbook instead of starting from a blank page.

If you want to see either number against the loaded cost of a US employee, our cost calculator runs it without a call.

Speed, and who you actually meet

Prialto is quick by the standards of this category. Their page says onboarding for individuals and small teams typically begins within 3 to 5 days. That is a real number and most competitors do not publish one at all.

What it does not tell you is who. There are no assistant profiles on the site, and the primary and backup are assigned to you after you have signed and onboarding has started. You are buying the process and the training programme, and trusting the match to the Engagement Manager. Given that they train for a month before anyone reaches a client, that trust is not unreasonable.

We do it the other way round. You send the brief, and inside 48 hours you get three candidates whose availability we confirmed that week, with names and backgrounds, before you commit to anything. On recent placements it has run 4 to 7 days from brief to first day of work. We measure time-to-fill as brief to first day rather than brief to shortlist, since the shortlist date is the easy one to flatter.

You can also look before you talk to us at all. The featured people on our front page are a selection of who is free this week, each with the date they were last confirmed, and we re-check it weekly. It is a selection, not the whole bench, so read it as a sample of who we find rather than the answer for your seat.

The trade is visible in both directions. Their way, you skip the interviewing and someone else carries the matching risk. Our way, you spend an hour on three calls and you know exactly who is turning up on the first morning.

How your risk is covered

Prialto does not publish a named replacement guarantee, and that is less alarming than it sounds, because their model answers the underlying worry differently. The backup assistant covers absence. The Engagement Manager is the escalation route when the work is not landing. What is not published is what happens if the assistant is simply wrong for you: no stated window, no stated conditions, no stated refund. If you buy, ask for that in writing, because their 90-day minimum per unit means an unhappy match is a three-month problem rather than a thirty-day one.

Our answer is a free replacement, as many times as it takes, with no cap and no window. The four conditions are published on our guarantee section: the replacement is for the same role and scope, you gave the person defined work and written feedback, you tell us at least 10 working days before the change, and after three replacements either side can walk away on the standard 30 days' written notice.

Conditions in public look weaker than a bare promise of unlimited anything. We think they are stronger. An unconditional guarantee with nothing written down is an argument waiting to happen on the day you need it, and you will be having that argument while short an assistant.

On continuity, we will concede the point rather than dress it up. We place one person, not a pair. If yours is out for a week, that week is thin, and the honest mitigation is the playbook the AI layer keeps for the seat, which makes someone else picking up the basics faster than it would otherwise be. A backup assistant who already knows your account is better cover than that. It costs what it costs, and Prialto charges for it.

On commitment: month to month, billed in advance, 30 days' written notice, nothing paid before the start date. Their terms are on their pricing page, ours are on ours, and they are worth reading side by side before you sign either.

Which one should you pick?

Questions people ask when comparing

Sources and how this page was written

We read Prialto's public pages ourselves on 17 September 2026 and quote what they publish, not what a third party says about them. We describe their claims rather than reproduce their copy. If something here is out of date, tell us and we'll correct it. Our own numbers come from our pricing section and our published guarantee.

1. 01Prialto pricing, units, commitment, set-up fee, coverage hours and training, prialto.com/pricing, read 17 September 2026
2. 02Our own rates, terms and guarantee, contractanaut.com/#pricing, current on 17 September 2026