Bold Agent Kit vs Podium
with the price on the page.

Bold Agent Kit vs Podium is a choice between two shapes of product: Podium is a communication platform for local businesses, spanning texting, webchat, reviews, phones and payments, with an AI Employee add-on and pricing by quote, while Bold Agent Kit is one AI agent that answers and follows up on text, calls, email, website chat and eleven DM platforms, at a published $25 a month with a 7-day free trial. The agent answers from your own material, books real slots into your calendar or CRM, and keeps going until the customer books, buys or opts out.

7-day free trial · Cancel anytime

Every channel wired into one agent and out to the tools behind it: email, SMS, phone, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, LINE, Slack, Discord, X, Reddit, Bluesky, website chat, campaign sequences and follow-ups on one side; HubSpot, GoHighLevel, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan, Jobber, Google Calendar, Microsoft 365, Calendly, HubSpot Meetings, Zoho Bookings, Acuity Scheduling, Cal.com, Square Appointments, Stripe, Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix and Squarespace on the other.

Texts and calls on your own number, answered by the agent

Podium puts texting at the centre of how a local business talks to its customers. Its phone system runs on the web, on desk phones and in a mobile app, with call routing, AI call summaries and an automatic text to missed and after-hours calls, and its AI Employee works across phone calls, text, email and social from one inbox, with real-time access to the calendar and customer records.

Bold Agent Kit answers on a number in your own carrier account. Texts run through Twilio, Telnyx, SimpleTexting, Plivo, Vonage, Sinch, Bandwidth, MessageBird or ClickSend, and calls run on Twilio, with separate switches for answering and dialling. With answering on, the agent picks up in real time on your provider's fastest model, answers from your price list and Q&A pairs, and books a slot while the caller is still on the line; the recording and transcript land in the inbox. The text step of a campaign carries the sending window, the texts-per-hour pace and the Reply STOP line. It is not a phone system for your staff, with desk phones and extensions; it is the agent that answers and places calls itself, and a person takes over any thread from the inbox.

The text messages card in the campaign builder: which agent's number sends, texts per hour per number, a TCPA consent tick with the 9am to 8pm sending window and the Reply STOP line, and the opening text of the sequence.

The website visitor gets an answer, and a booking, in the chat

Podium's webchat is designed to make a website textable: it captures the visitor's details before the conversation starts, can answer with automatic AI replies, and moves the conversation to text so it carries on from the customer's phone.

Bold Agent Kit's widget goes on with one line of script, in your colour, with your image and a greeting you write. The agent answers in the chat from the knowledge base, how much it costs, how soon you can come, whether you cover their area, links only to the pages of your site you allowed, and asks for an email address or phone number when the conversation is worth keeping. That handle ties the visitor to the rest of their history, so when they text or call next week the agent already knows what they asked. It can offer real open slots in the chat itself and book the one they pick, rather than sending them to a form.

A website chat conversation in the Inbox: the visitor asks how much it is, the agent answers with the price and a link, the visitor's story is drawn across the top, and a reply box lets a person take the thread over.

Follow-up across email, text and calls, from your own mailbox

Podium offers text marketing campaigns and automations, and describes its AI Employee as confirming, reminding and re-engaging the customers in your database. Bold Agent Kit treats follow-up as a campaign that spans channels: an email on day 0, a text on day 2, a call on day 5, each step with its own delay and a send condition such as opened, not opened, clicked or not clicked, inside the days, hours and time zone you allow. A campaign is created as a draft, shows its whole plan on a review screen, and sends nothing until you press Start.

Email goes out through your own mailboxes, Gmail or Outlook with an app password or any other provider as SMTP and IMAP, not through a shared relay. Each mailbox carries a health score out of 100, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC checked, opt-in warm-up on a ramp that starts at five a day, and automatic resting when bounces or spam placement pass a threshold. Every campaign email carries a one-click unsubscribe, and a reply, a booking or an opt-out on any channel ends the sequence everywhere.

An agent's Email tab with three mailboxes connected, each showing a Good 90 health score, warm-up day and inbox placement, SPF, DKIM and DMARC checks, and an Active toggle.

Every conversation, and one row per customer

Podium brings calls, texts, reviews and messages from its lead channels into one inbox for the team. Bold Agent Kit's inbox is where every conversation the agent is having ends up: email, texts, call transcripts and recordings, website chat and eleven DM platforms, newest first, each row tagged with the channel it came in on, and filterable by channel, number, mailbox or agent.

The cookie, email address, phone number and social account id belonging to one customer are merged into a single contact, and the agent reads the whole history before it replies, so nobody is asked for their details twice. Reply in any thread yourself and the agent stands down on that conversation; hand it back when you are done and it picks up where you left it. Every reply the agent wrote is stored with the material it was generated from, so you can always read back why it said what it said.

The Inbox as one list: web chat, texts and calls together, a call marked no answer, a completed call that booked a roof inspection, texts confirming a Thursday appointment and asking the price, each row tagged with the channel it arrived on.

How Bold Agent Kit and Podium compare for a local business

Podium is a lead management and communication platform for local businesses, and on its own site it names the industries it serves: automotive, home services, HVAC and plumbing, dental, med spas and aesthetics, furniture, jewellery, mattresses, appliances and other retail. Its products cover an inbox for every lead channel, texting and text marketing, webchat, reviews with textable invites and AI-written replies, a phone system, payments and automations, and its AI Employee answers and follows up across calls, text, email and social. Its site says it connects to more than 200 third-party tools. Pricing is by quote: its pricing page says plans are fitted to your business through its sales team, and that the AI Employee can be added on to any plan.

Where the two differ is scope. Podium brings the customer-facing tools a local front desk uses, reviews, payments, phones and texting, into one platform, and the AI sits on top of it. Bold Agent Kit does one job: an AI agent that answers every enquiry, books the appointment and follows up until there is an answer, on every channel the customer might use. It does not manage reviews, take payments or give your staff a phone system. What it does instead is answer from your own material on fifteen channels, book real slots into the calendar or CRM you already run, and run multichannel follow-up campaigns with email deliverability built in.

The price structure is the other difference, and for many owners it is the first one they notice. Podium publishes no price on its site; you ask for a custom quote. Bold Agent Kit publishes its price on this page: $25 a month or $200 a year for the account, with a 7-day free trial, unlimited agents, contacts and lists, and no per-seat, per-message or per-minute charge. The AI runs on your own key from one of sixteen providers, and texts and calls run on your own carrier account, each billed directly to you at the provider's rates, usually a few dollars a month.

Neither is the right answer for every business, and a fair comparison says so. If you want reviews, payments, a staff phone system and texting from one vendor, with the AI as part of that bundle and a sales team to fit it to you, Podium is built for that. If you already have a phone system and a way to take payments, and what you want is an agent that answers everything and chases everyone, at a price you can read before you speak to anyone, Bold Agent Kit is built for that, and you can have it answering this afternoon.

A published price$25 a month or $200 a year, with a 7-day free trial. No quote and no sales call required.
The AI on your own keySixteen providers, billed by the provider at cost. The AI is part of the plan, not an add-on.
Fifteen channelsEmail, text, calls, website chat and eleven DM platforms, from one knowledge base.
It books the slotReal open times from your calendar or CRM, and only a slot it offered can be booked.
Follow-up across channelsEmail, text and call steps in one campaign, stopping on a reply, a booking or an opt-out.
No reviews, payments or desk phonesIt sends a review request or payment link you wrote. It does not manage reviews, take payments or run office phones.

Why a Podium customer starts looking at other options

None of these is a criticism of what Podium does. They follow from how it is packaged and sold, meeting a business whose main need is the answering and the follow-up.

01

The price starts with a sales conversation

Podium does not publish its prices. Its pricing page says its plans are designed to fit the business and asks you to talk to its sales team, and its quote page begins by asking for your industry. That is a common way to sell a platform with many parts. It does mean that an owner comparing options on a Sunday evening has no number to write down until after a demo, and nothing to test the quote against except other quotes.

02

The AI is an add-on to the plan

Podium's pricing page describes its AI Employee as something you can add on to any plan. For a business whose main reason for looking is an AI that answers the call and the text at 9pm and books the appointment, that puts the thing it wants most on a second line of the quote, on top of a plan chosen for the rest of the platform: reviews, phones, payments and texting.

03

The bundle overlaps with what you already run

Podium is built around a set of products, reviews, phones, webchat, an inbox, payments, text marketing, automations and lead consolidation, and it is at its best when they are used together. A business that already has a phone system it likes, takes payments through its store or its field software, and handles reviews its own way may find much of the bundle overlaps with what it runs today, when the part it wanted was the answering and the follow-up.

04

It describes itself as built for local businesses

Podium's site presents it as a platform for local businesses and is organised by local industries: automotive, home services, dental, med spas, retail and the like. That is a clear focus. An agency running agents for twenty clients from one account, or a business that sells online to customers across the country, is a different buyer from the one Podium describes, and will want to weigh something built for that shape of work.

One agent that answers, books and follows up, at a price on the page

You build the agent once. From then on it answers on every channel you connect, books into the calendar you already run, and follows up on a schedule you wrote, fetching a person only for the conversations that need one.

01 / Answers

On the channel the customer chose

A text, a call, a website chat, an email or a DM on any of eleven platforms is answered by the same agent from the same material: your price list and hours as data points, your documents, your Q&A pairs and the pages of your site it may link to. "How much is it?", "are you open Saturday?" and "can you do it today?" get the answer you wrote, and a question that is not in the material is handed to you rather than guessed at. Every reply is stored with the source it came from.

02 / Books

Real slots, in the calendar you already run

Connect Google Calendar, Microsoft 365, Calendly, Acuity, Square Appointments, Zoho Bookings, Cal.com or HubSpot Meetings, or a CRM such as HubSpot, Jobber, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan or GoHighLevel, and the agent is given the slots that are genuinely open for the week ahead. It offers a few, writes the one the customer picks, and confirms it in the reply. It cannot book a time that was not free, and every booking is logged against the contact.

03 / Follows up

Until they book, buy or opt out

A new lead who went quiet, a quote that was never answered, a customer who has not been back in a year: each is a campaign across email, text and calls, in your words, inside the hours you allow, with its own delay and send condition per step. A reply, a booking or an opt-out on any channel ends the sequence on all of them and cancels anything queued, and replies are worked by the agent rather than left waiting in an inbox.

Every channel and every agent, in one published price

The single biggest difference between Bold Agent Kit and Podium is how you buy it. Podium is quoted to your business by its sales team, with the AI Employee as an add-on. Bold Agent Kit has one plan, published on this page: $25 a month or $200 a year, with a 7-day free trial. That plan includes every channel, email, text, calls, website chat and eleven DM platforms, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, LINE, Viber, Slack, Discord, Bluesky, Reddit and X, each connected with your own app credentials, and unlimited agents, contacts and lists.

The AI is not an add-on because it is not ours to sell: each agent runs on your own key from one of sixteen providers, billed by that provider directly at its own rates, usually a few dollars a month for a busy agent. Texts and calls run on your own carrier account in the same way. Nothing is metered, marked up or sold as credits on our side, so a busy month costs you what your providers charge and nothing more from us. You can change provider or model whenever you like without touching anything else.

The agent's Social tab: Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, LINE, Viber, Slack, Discord, Bluesky, Reddit and X as a grid of platform cards, each connected with your own app credentials.

The four things a local business needs from its front line

Each one answers a reason owners look past a bundled platform, and each one runs without anybody remembering to do it.

Speed

Answered in seconds, at any hour

A text at 9pm or a DM on Sunday is answered then, on the channel it arrived on, from your own material. A call is picked up in real time on your number, with no silences while the model thinks.

Booking

The appointment, not a link

The agent offers real open slots from your calendar or CRM and writes the booking in while the customer is still in the conversation. The confirmation goes out from your own number.

Persistence

Every lead followed up

Email, text, call, email again, on the days you set, until the customer replies, books or opts out on any channel. The quiet lead from Tuesday is chased on Thursday without anybody remembering.

Proof

What it earned, by channel

A funnel of people, not messages: reached, replied, visited, converted and the value won, with the channel each customer was on when they converted.

And you can see which channel brought each customer in

Every text, call, chat, email, booking and sale is recorded against a person and reported as a funnel, per agent and across all agents. For a local business, this is the part that says whether the money is in the phone, the website chat or the follow-up.

The Bold Agent Kit dashboard: 157 people reached, 89 replied, 59 visited the site, 9 converted and $4,050 of value won over the last 30 days, with a breakdown by channel and by agent, and recent journeys underneath.

The funnel counts people rather than messages: how many the agent reached, how many replied, how many went on to visit your website, and how many booked or bought, with the total value won and the median time from first contact to the sale. Goals carry a dollar value, set as a page rule or marked won by hand when the job is paid, so a win-back campaign reports what it brought in rather than how many texts it sent.

Below the funnel, a channel table shows where each customer first made contact and which channel they were on when they converted. A second table shows which pages known customers read before they bought, one row per customer shows their whole history in order, and visit triggers close the loop: when a known lead returns to your pricing page and leaves, the agent can tell you or follow up after a delay on the channel they last used. Page goals and visit triggers need a one-line snippet on your site; conversations, bookings and a manual "won" work without it.

A funnel of people, not messagesReached, replied, visited your site, booked or bought, and the total value won.
Which channel closed itWhere each customer first made contact, and the channel they converted on.
Time to convertThe median time from first contact to the sale, so you know how long to keep following up.
The pages that precede a saleWhat known customers read before they booked or bought.
One row per customerEvery text, call, chat, email and booking for that person, in order, with the recordings.
Value won per campaignGoals carry a dollar figure, so a win-back run reports what it made.
Journey view

Every event for one person

Built from the cookie, email address and phone number attached to that contact, so activity months apart on different channels appears on one row.

A journey row for one contact: their address, then every email reply in order along a single line, with earlier events folded up behind a +5.
Visit triggers

Follow up on a return visit

Page goals and visit triggers require a one-line snippet on your website. Conversations, bookings and manually marking a deal won work without it.

A saved visit trigger: when a lead visits /thank-you, email me after 20 minutes, once per 7 days, with a fired count and an on switch.

Bold Agent Kit vs Podium, side by side

The middle column is what Podium says on its own website about each job, checked on the date shown below. The right-hand column is what Bold Agent Kit does. Where Podium does something Bold Agent Kit does not, the table says so.

The jobPodiumBold Agent Kit
What it is built aroundA communication platform for local businesses: inbox, texting, webchat, reviews, phones, payments and automations, with an AI EmployeeOne AI agent across email, text, calls, website chat and eleven DM platforms, with an inbox, campaigns and analytics
How it is pricedBy quote. Plans are fitted to the business through its sales team, and no prices are published$25 a month or $200 a year, published, with a 7-day free trial
The AIThe AI Employee, offered as an add-on to any planPart of the plan, on your own key from sixteen providers, billed by the provider at cost
PhonesA business phone system on web, desk phones and a mobile app, with call routing, AI call summaries and texts to missed callsThe agent answers and dials on your own Twilio number, with recordings and transcripts. No desk phones
ReviewsAutomated review invites by text, and AI-written replies to reviewsA review request as a campaign step, with the link you choose. It does not post or reply to reviews
PaymentsPayments built into the platformLinks to the payment page on your own site, and reads Stripe, Shopify or WooCommerce to see what was bought
Follow-up campaignsText marketing campaigns and automationsEmail, text and call steps in one sequence, with send conditions, schedules, stop rules and mailbox warm-up
Getting startedA demo, or a conversation with its sales teamSelf-serve sign-up, and answering the same afternoon

Podium is the broader product for a local front desk: reviews, payments, a staff phone system and texting from one vendor, with an AI Employee that can be added to any plan, priced by quote. Bold Agent Kit is narrower, an AI agent that answers, books and follows up on fifteen channels, with a published price of $25 a month or $200 a year for unlimited agents, the AI on your own key and texts and calls on your own carrier, both billed at cost. If reviews and payments are central to how you work, Podium covers them and Bold Agent Kit does not. Ask Podium for a current quote before you compare.

We checked Podium’s public website on 11 September 2026 for this comparison. Plans and features change, so check podium.com for the current detail. Podium is a trademark of its owner, and Bold Agent Kit is not affiliated with or endorsed by it.

Three ways a local business weighs Bold Agent Kit against Podium

Some businesses move their answering and follow-up across, some keep Podium for what it does that the agent does not, and some are better served by Podium outright.

A business whose main use of Podium is answering and following up with leads, moving that job onto a published plan. Build the agent from what your front desk already says, connect a number on your own carrier account, the chat widget and your calendar, and switch answering on one channel at a time. Bring your customer list across as a CSV, and decide separately how you will handle reviews and payments outside the agent.

A business that keeps Podium for what it does that Bold Agent Kit does not, reviews, payments and the office phones, and puts a Bold Agent Kit agent on a separate job: outbound follow-up from its own mailboxes, a win-back campaign at past customers, or an agent for a second brand. The two do not connect to each other, so give the agent its own mailbox and number, bring contacts across by CSV, and keep the jobs apart so a customer never hears from both.

A local business that wants reviews, payments, a phone system for its staff and texting from one vendor should look hard at Podium. If collecting Google reviews by text and replying to them is central to how you win work, if you want to take payments inside the same platform, or if your team needs desk phones, call routing and a mobile app on the business number, Podium covers ground Bold Agent Kit does not, and its AI Employee can be added to the same plan.

It books your calendar, updates your CRM and knows what they bought

Connect the tools you already run and the agent works them like an assistant would: it takes appointments straight into your calendar, writes notes and outcomes back to the CRM, and reads your store to see what somebody has bought before it answers them.

Bookings are real, not guesses. It is only ever given slots that are genuinely free, and it can only take one it actually offered — so it cannot invent a time or double-book you. The same connection pulls a segment of past customers into a list when you want to run a campaign at them.

It books the slot itselfReal open times offered, and only a slot it actually offered can be booked.
Eighteen toolsHubSpot, GoHighLevel, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan, Jobber, Stripe, Shopify and more.
It reads the customer firstWhat they bought, what is still open and what they are worth, before it replies.
Pull a segment into a listTake past customers straight out of the CRM and run a campaign at them.
Every action loggedBookings, cancellations and notes all recorded against that contact.

Eighteen CRMs, calendars and stores

  • HubSpot
  • GoHighLevel
  • Housecall Pro
  • ServiceTitan
  • Jobber
  • Google Calendar
  • Microsoft 365
  • Calendly
  • HubSpot Meetings
  • Zoho Bookings
  • Acuity
  • Cal.com
  • Square
  • Stripe
  • Shopify
  • WooCommerce
  • Wix
  • Squarespace

Powered by your own keys

Each agent uses a model on your own API key, in the same way it sends from your own mailbox and your own phone number. Sixteen providers are supported: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI and Mistral; DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi, Qwen and MiniMax; Groq, Together, Fireworks and OpenRouter; and Ollama or any other OpenAI-compatible endpoint you host yourself.

Bring your own credentials and you own the whole stack: your model provider, your mailboxes, your carrier, your CRM. We charge for the software and nothing else — no token markup, no metering, no credit packs — so your provider bills you direct at their rates, usually a few dollars a month per agent.

Your key, sixteen providersOpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI, Mistral, DeepSeek, Groq, OpenRouter and more.
Or a model you hostOllama, vLLM, or any other OpenAI-compatible endpoint of your own.
The fast model on callsIt switches automatically, because a phone call cannot wait for a sentence.
No metering from usNo markup, no credit packs, no per-message billing. A busy month costs no more.
Keys stored encryptedYour credentials are yours; we never send them anywhere but your provider.

Sixteen model providers, on your own key

  • OpenAI
  • Anthropic
  • Gemini
  • xAI
  • Mistral
  • DeepSeek
  • GLM
  • Kimi
  • Qwen
  • MiniMax
  • Groq
  • Together
  • Fireworks
  • OpenRouter
  • Ollama
  • Any OpenAI API

None of it matters if the email lands in spam

A new address sending forty cold emails a day gets filtered, and takes the domain with it. Mailboxes that opt into warm-up send each other ordinary mail on a ramp, starting at five a day. The receiving mailbox finds each message, moves it out of spam if it landed there, marks it read and replies to a share of them.

Each mailbox carries a health score out of 100 — SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the sending domain, seven days of real sends and bounces, and where its own warm-up mail is landing — with the reasons listed. A mailbox whose bounce rate or spam placement passes a threshold is pulled out of campaign rotation automatically, before it damages the domain.

Warm-up on a rampOpted-in mailboxes send each other ordinary mail, starting at five a day.
A health score out of 100SPF, DKIM and DMARC, seven days of real sends, and where the mail is landing.
A failing address rests itselfCross the bounce or spam threshold and it leaves campaign rotation on its own.
One-click unsubscribeHonoured automatically, including on messages already sitting in the queue.
Caps you cannot overshootOne reply per thread, a daily cap per sender, hourly caps per channel.

From Podium to a running agent this afternoon, and nothing sends until you say so

Three steps. Inbound answering can be switched on channel by channel with no campaign at all, and a campaign is created as a draft that shows the whole plan before it sends anything.

Load what your team already says on the phone

Name the agent, choose a model and paste your API key. Then give it what your front desk knows: your prices, hours and service area as data points, your price list, policies and menu of services as documents, your answers to the questions you get every day as Q&A pairs, and the pages of your website it may link to, which it reads, stores and links verbatim. If you wrote saved replies and templates for your team, they are a good place to start.

Write the instructions last: how it should talk, what it may offer, which questions it must ask before it books, and the exact situations in which it should stop and fetch a person. A complaint, a request for a discount and anything to do with a payment dispute are the usual three.

Model16 providers, on your own key
Documentsprice list, policies, menu of services
Q&A pairsthe questions the front desk gets
Data pointsprices, hours, service area
Your pagesbooking and service pages, linked verbatim
Instructionstone, offers, when to hand over

Connect a number, the chat and the calendar

Add a number on your own carrier account for texts and calls, your mailbox, the chat snippet for your website and the social accounts customers actually message. Each runs on your own account, so the rates and the sending reputation stay yours, and nothing about the number or the mailbox is tied to us.

Then connect the calendar or CRM the agent should book into, from Google Calendar, Microsoft 365, Calendly or Acuity to HubSpot, Jobber or Housecall Pro, and bring your customer list across as a CSV or a segment from the connected CRM, ready for the first follow-up campaign.

Numberone of nine SMS carriers
CallsTwilio, answering and dialling
Mailboxapp password, or SMTP + IMAP
Websiteone line of script
CalendarGoogle, Microsoft 365, Calendly, Acuity and more
Lista CSV, or a CRM segment

Switch answering on, then run the first follow-up

Switch auto-reply on for the number and the chat and the agent starts answering what already arrives. Watch the first day's conversations in the inbox, and add a Q&A pair wherever it handed over something it could have answered.

Then build the first campaign, the leads who went quiet or the customers who have not been back, across email, text and calls. Set the days, hours and time zone it may contact anyone, read the whole plan on the review screen, and press Start. Pause it whenever you like and resume it later.

Auto-replya separate switch per channel
Draft firsta campaign sends nothing until started
Scheduledays, hours and time zone
Conditionsopened, not opened, clicked
Stop rulesreply, booking or opt-out
Pauseresume any campaign at any point

One account, unlimited agents

One account runs unlimited agents, one per client, and nothing is shared between them. A knowledge base belongs to a single agent, and content from one agent is never used to generate replies for another.

Invite a client by email address and they get their own login, which opens onto the one agent you gave them: its conversations, its numbers, its analytics and a reply box. They cannot see your other clients, your API keys, your settings or your billing. Access is deny-by-default.

One agent per clientUnlimited agents on one account, and nothing crosses between them.
They see one agent, not your accountTheir own login, onto the conversations, numbers and analytics you gave them.
Deny by defaultNo settings, no API keys, no billing, no sight of your other clients.
Reporting they can readThat agent has its own funnel, so the client sees what it actually produced.
$50 a year per referralOr $5 a month on the monthly plan — on every payment, for the life of the account, not just the first.

One plan. Everything in it. Monthly or yearly.

No seat tiers, no credit packs, no per-agent or per-channel pricing, and nothing held back behind an enterprise call.

Agents
How manyUnlimited — one per business, brand or job
Shared brainThe same identity, instructions and knowledge on every channel
Knowledge baseDocuments, Q&A pairs, data points and pages of your own site
IsolationOne agent's content is never used to reply for another
Client seatsInvite a client into one agent, with their own login
Channels
EmailAs many mailboxes per agent as you connect, rotated by campaigns
Text messagesNine providers — Twilio, Telnyx, SimpleTexting, Plivo, Vonage, Sinch, Bandwidth, MessageBird, ClickSend
Phone callsAnswering and dialling, with recordings and transcripts
TranscriptionGoogle, or Deepgram nova-3 on your own key
VoicesGoogle, Amazon Polly and ElevenLabs, or your own ElevenLabs / Fish Audio account
Voice cloningRecord a voice in the browser and clone it on your ElevenLabs or Fish Audio key
Website chatA widget on your site with your colour, image and greeting
Social DMsMessenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, LINE, Viber, Slack, Discord, Bluesky, Reddit, X
Inbox
One listEvery channel's conversations together, newest first, tagged by channel
FiltersBy channel, by mailbox or number, or by agent
TakeoverReply yourself and the agent stands down on that thread
Hand backReturn the thread to the agent when you are done
Campaigns
Multichannel sequencesEmail, text and call steps in one campaign, each with its own timing
Send conditionsSend a step only if they opened, did not open, clicked or did not click
ScheduleThe days, hours and time zone anything may be sent
Stop rulesA reply, a booking or an opt-out on any channel ends the sequence
PacingPer-mailbox and per-number hourly limits, pausable and resumable
Review before startThe full plan is shown; a campaign sends nothing until you start it
TemplatesEmail, text and call scripts, saved once and reused
Analytics
FunnelReached, replied, visited, converted, plus value won and time to convert
By channelWhere each person started, and the channel they converted on
PagesWhich pages known people read, and how many of them converted
JourneysOne row per person: every message, visit, call and booking in order
GoalsA page rule or a manual "won", each with a dollar value
TriggersA known person returns to a page — notify you, or send a follow-up
Open and click trackingRecorded per campaign and added to that person's history
Integrations
CalendarsGoogle, Microsoft 365, Calendly, Cal.com, Acuity, Zoho, Square, HubSpot Meetings
CRMs and commerceHubSpot, GoHighLevel, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan, Jobber, Stripe, Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, Squarespace
BookingReal open slots offered, and only an offered slot can be booked
CRM importImport a segment of customers into a contact list
Deliverability and compliance
Mailbox warm-upRamped sending across the network, with spam rescue and replies
Health scoreSPF, DKIM, DMARC, bounce rate and inbox placement, with reasons
Auto-restA failing address is removed from rotation automatically
UnsubscribesOne click, honoured automatically, including on queued mail
Reply limitsOne reply per thread, per-sender daily and per-channel hourly caps
FilteringBounces, out-of-office and no-reply addresses ignored
List building
Contact extractionEmails, phone numbers and social profiles, on any site. Unlimited.
Deep scanFollows the pages of a domain most likely to carry contact details
Domain queueLoad a CSV of sites and work through them one at a time
Contacts and listsUnlimited, by email or phone, with CSV import and export
AI
Your own keySixteen providers, including any OpenAI-compatible endpoint you host
What we charge for AINothing — no markup, no metering, no credit packs
On callsUses your provider's fastest model automatically
Account
PlatformsChrome side panel and web dashboard on one login
Members' forumSix boards, visible only once you are signed in
Referral program$50 a year per referral ($5 a month), recurring for the life of the account
Supportsupport@boldagents.co
$25/ month
$200/ year

Billed monthly. No add-ons, no seat tiers. Cancel anytime.

$16.67 a month, billed once a year. No add-ons, no seat tiers. Cancel anytime.

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Before you sign up

Is Bold Agent Kit better than Podium?

It depends on the business. For an owner who mainly wants every call, text, chat, email and DM answered from their own material, the appointment booked and every lead followed up, at a price published before any sales call, Bold Agent Kit is the better fit, at $25 a month for unlimited agents. For a local business that wants reviews management, payments, a phone system for its staff and texting from one vendor, Podium is the better fit, because Bold Agent Kit does none of those. Agencies running agents for several clients are better served by unlimited agents and client logins.

What is the difference between Bold Agent Kit and Podium?

Scope and price structure. Podium is a communication platform for local businesses, covering an inbox, texting and text marketing, webchat, reviews, phones, payments and automations, with an AI Employee that works across calls, text, email and social and can be added to any plan. It is priced by quote. Bold Agent Kit is one AI agent across email, text, calls, website chat and eleven DM platforms, with an inbox, multichannel campaigns and analytics, at a published $25 a month, on your own AI key and carrier. It does not manage reviews, take payments or provide desk phones.

How does Bold Agent Kit pricing compare with Podium pricing?

Podium does not publish prices. Its pricing page says plans are designed to fit your business and directs you to its sales team, its quote page asks for your industry, and the AI Employee is described as an add-on to any plan. Bold Agent Kit publishes one plan: $25 a month or $200 a year for the account, with a 7-day free trial, unlimited agents, contacts and lists, and no per-seat, per-message or per-minute charge. Your AI provider and your carrier bill you directly for usage, at cost, typically a few dollars a month.

How do I move from Podium to Bold Agent Kit?

Start with the job you most want the agent to do, which is usually answering. Build the agent from what your front desk already says: prices and hours as data points, common questions as Q&A pairs, and the pages of your site it may link to. Connect a number on your own carrier account, the chat widget and your calendar, and switch answering on channel by channel. Bring your customer list across as a CSV, or pull a segment from a connected CRM. Decide separately how you will handle reviews and payments, because the agent does not take those over.

When is Podium the better choice?

When you want the whole front-desk toolkit from one vendor. If collecting reviews by text and replying to them is central to how you win work, if you want to take payments inside the same platform, or if your team needs a phone system with desk phones, call routing and a mobile app, Podium covers ground Bold Agent Kit does not. It is also the better fit if you would rather have a sales team fit a plan to your business than set the software up yourself, and its site lists more than 200 third-party integrations.

Does Bold Agent Kit manage reviews like Podium?

No, and it does not claim to. Podium sends automated review invites by text and writes replies to reviews. Bold Agent Kit can send a review request as a step in a campaign: a text or email you wrote, with the link you chose, on the day after the job you set, and the agent answers any reply. It does not connect to review sites, collect reviews, post them or reply to them. If reviews management is a large part of what you need, that is a reason to keep Podium, or a reviews tool, alongside the agent.

Can Bold Agent Kit take payments?

No. It links to a payment page on your own website that you allowed it to link to, and it can tell you when a customer says they have paid. With Stripe, Shopify or WooCommerce connected, it reads what a customer bought and what is still open before it replies, so it can answer "did my order go through?" from real data rather than a guess. Taking the payment itself is done by your store or your payment processor. Podium includes payments in its platform, so if taking payment inside the conversation matters to you, weigh that.

Is Bold Agent Kit a business phone system?

No. It is the agent that answers and places calls, not a phone system for your staff. Calls run on your own Twilio number, with separate switches for answering and dialling; the agent speaks in real time on your provider's fastest model, books the slot, and keeps the recording and transcript in the inbox, where anyone on your team can pick the thread up. There are no desk phones, extensions or call-routing groups. Podium Phones provides those on web, desk phones and a mobile app, so a business that needs its team on the phones should weigh that difference.

Other comparisons

How Bold Agent Kit compares with the other tools people shortlist for the same job.

The next enquiry is answered, whichever way it arrives.

Load your prices and hours, connect a number and the chat, switch answering on. $25 a month, published, with a 7-day free trial and nothing to negotiate.

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