Karat pricing and Karat interview pricing compared with technical screening vendors that publish a price

Karat does not say. On October 1, 2026 the address karat.com/pricing returned a 404 page, the site navigation had no pricing link, and every product page, from the core Karat Interview service to NextGen and Karat Qualify, closed with Request a Demo. The customer FAQ covers who the interviewers are and how AI is used, and is silent on cost, contracts and billing. There is no plan table to read and no figure to quote.

You will find Karat numbers elsewhere. Procurement marketplaces, staffing blogs and rival interview services publish per-interview rates and annual contract values for Karat. Some may be close to what a given customer paid, but none of them cite Karat, they do not agree with one another, and a contract value only tells you what one company with one volume negotiated. We do not reprint them for the same reason we would not reprint a rumored price for our own product: you cannot check it.

The useful move is to size the line yourself before the call. Count the first-round technical interviews you ran last quarter, multiply by the senior engineering minutes each one took, and price those minutes at your loaded rate. That is the cost Karat is replacing, and it is the number every Karat quote will be measured against in your own approval chain.

Karat sells interviews as a service rather than seats in a tool. Its FAQ states that "Karat interviews are conducted by an Interview Engineer", drawn from a global pool of experienced engineers, and the company says it has run more than 600,000 technical interviews and handed back over a million hours to customer engineers. When a person sits in every session, the natural unit of price is the interview.

That is an inference, and it is the one most buyers reach. A Karat quote will very likely be built on expected interview volume over a contract term, with the product mix on top: the standard Karat Interview, the newer NextGen format, Partner Talent for vetting contractor engineers, Hiring Insights reporting, and Karat Qualify as a cheaper top-of-funnel screen. Ask early whether the commitment is a minimum count of interviews or a minimum spend, and what happens to interviews you paid for and did not use.

Two things on the site also shape the total. Karat says its use of AI depends on the products you buy and can often be switched off, which matters if your legal team has a position on automated tools. And Karat acquired Byteboard in January 2025, so project-based assessments may now arrive as part of the same conversation. Get every component priced on its own line.

There is no public per-candidate price, so the honest answer about the Karat cost per interview is a method rather than a number. Take the annual figure Karat quotes, divide it by the interviews it covers, and then divide again by the share of candidates who were worth a technical interview in the first place. That last step is the one most teams skip, and it usually changes the answer more than any discount.

Here is why. A Karat interview costs the same whether the candidate is strong or falls apart in the first ten minutes on fundamentals the job description listed. If, say, half of the candidates you send to a technical round turn out to lack the basics, half of your interview spend buys you a no. The per-hire cost of Karat is really a question about how good your shortlist is before it reaches Karat.

For comparison, our own plans are published per month with the interview count included. Starter is $149 for up to 100 interviews, which is $1.49 an interview if you use them all, and Scale is $999 for up to 2,000, about 50 cents each. These are not the same product as a live engineer-led coding session, and we will not pretend otherwise. They are the price of the round that decides who deserves one.

Karat launched NextGen on December 10, 2025, describing it as a human-led, AI-enabled interview. Its product page says every NextGen interview is a one-on-one session led by a Karat Interview Engineer, and that candidates are encouraged and often expected to use an integrated AI assistant to write code and understand the codebase. It scores four competencies: technical communication, AI proficiency, productivity and product sense.

There is no published Karat NextGen pricing either. Because it still puts a human engineer in every session, expect it to be priced on the same unit as the standard interview, and ask directly whether it carries a premium over the classic format. If you are moving to it, it is also the moment to renegotiate volume, because a new format is a natural point to reset a commitment you have outgrown or under-used.

Send fewer people to them, and send better ones. The expensive part of an outsourced technical interview is the engineer's hour, so the cheapest saving is to stop spending that hour on candidates a short structured conversation would have screened out. Most teams already have a recruiter phone screen in front of the technical round. The problem is that a recruiter cannot probe whether someone actually built the system on their resume.

An AI first-round interview fills that gap. InterviewAgent.ai interviews every applicant by voice or video, asks what they built, what they decided and what broke, follows up when an answer is vague, and scores each answer against anchors your engineers wrote. The candidates who clear that bar go on to the Karat round or your in-house loop. Nobody is auto-rejected, and a recruiter reviews the ranking with the transcript behind every score.

It also helps with Karat Qualify, which Karat introduced in 2023 as a 15-question adaptive multiple-choice screen to replace resume screens and code tests. A multiple-choice test checks recognition. A conversational screen checks whether a candidate can explain a decision they made. The two measure different things, and teams that want both can run them side by side. How the scoring works is set out on interview scorecard software.

Not a self-serve one that we could find. Every product page leads to Request a Demo, and there is no sign-up path for new customers on the site. A Karat evaluation therefore starts with a sales conversation and, if it goes well, a scoped pilot on real requisitions.

Plan that pilot like a purchase. Pick one role with enough applicants to matter, agree the pass bar with the hiring manager before any interview runs, and compare the Karat recommendation against your own engineers' verdict on the same candidates. If you would rather see a scored first round before any call, the interview agent at the top of this page runs one on a role you name and returns the transcript, the scores and the ranking.

Split them by what you are replacing. If you want the coding test, CodeSignal publishes its Hire plans at $79 and $479 a month billed annually, and HackerRank sells assessments on a plan page that did not render a figure for us. Neither sends a human engineer, and a timed test measures something different from a conversation. Interview-as-a-service rivals, live coding tools and async assessments are compared side by side in our guide to Karat alternatives.

If you want the first-round conversation, the AI interviewers that publish are InterviewFlowAI from $59 a month plus per-interview credits, TalentSprout from $199, and us at $149, $399 and $999 a month. If what you need is a live engineer for the final technical round, there is no software substitute that publishes a price, and Karat or an in-house loop remains the honest answer. The wider set of options is on technical screening software, and a vendor-by-vendor look at engineering hiring is in our best AI interview software for software engineers guide.

Our own plans are on the pricing page, with the interview count in every tier. The broader category, including recorded video tools, is laid out on AI interview software.

Anchor first. Before the call, work out your real technical interview volume for the next twelve months and the share of candidates who will clear a basic screen. Then pick a published vendor from the table for the round in front of Karat, and know what that round costs you per candidate. That turns the negotiation from a single number into a design decision about where each interview happens.

Then get six things in writing: the unit (per interview, per hire or a flat fee), the committed minimum and what happens to unused interviews, the price difference between the standard format and NextGen, whether Karat Qualify and Hiring Insights are bundled or extra, turnaround time for a written assessment, and the renewal uplift. Those six convert a demo quote into a three-year number.

Finally, check the rules that apply to you as the employer. If any part of the process scores or ranks candidates with automated tools and you hire in New York City, Local Law 144 requires an annual independent bias audit and candidate notice. Our page on AI hiring compliance covers what to ask any vendor, Karat included.