Belay vs Prialto vs Athena pricing: what each executive assistant service costs

Short answer: Prialto is cheapest per month at $1,500 to $1,600 for a 55 hour unit, Athena is cheapest per hour at about $18.75 because $3,000 buys a full time assistant, and Belay is the hardest to compare because it publishes exactly one rate across its entire website. That rate is $2,070 a month for 45 to 60 hours, and it sits on the social media assistant page rather than the executive assistant page. All three figures were read from each company's own site on September 2, 2026 from a United States address.

Last updated September 2026. We sell an AI agent that does some of the same recurring work, so check the arithmetic rather than trusting it. Every figure below is quoted only where the company prints it itself.

The three prices, side by side

Belay publishes one rate, and it is on the wrong page

This is the finding that took actual work, and it is worth explaining the method because the conclusion is easy to get wrong. Belay's pricing page is a 404. Both belaysolutions.com/pricing and belaysolutions.com/pricing/ return a page titled "Page not found". It would be reasonable to stop there and write that Belay publishes nothing, and that is what most roundups do.

So we pulled the sitemap instead. It holds 459 URLs. Searching all of them for anything matching pricing, price, cost or plans returns nothing at all. Then we loaded every one of the 17 service pages and scanned each for a dollar figure. Fifteen have none: the executive assistant page, the personal assistant page, and the operations, sales and marketing assistant pages all describe the role in detail and never mention money. The financial services pages, covering bookkeeping, accounting clerk, controller and fractional CFO, are the same.

Exactly one page quotes a rate. It is the social media assistant page, and it carries two tiers. "Operator Support" is 45 to 60 hours a month, about 10 to 15 hours a week, starting at $2,070 a month. "Social + Content Engine" is marked most popular at 60 to 100 hours a month, starting at $4,500.

Now read what Operator Support actually includes: inbox triage, calendar scheduling, meeting prep, follow ups, task tracking, reminders and coordination with vendors and internal stakeholders. That is executive assistant work, described in executive assistant language, and the only place on Belay's website you can find a price for it is the page about social media. If you want a Belay EA and you want a number before a call, that $2,070 tier is the closest published comparison you have, and it is fair to quote it back.

Prialto shows two different prices for the same unit

Prialto is the most transparent of the three about structure. It sells a "unit", which is 55 hours of support a month with free episodic overflow, an engagement manager, and a team of backups trained on your processes. Full Time Dedicated Assistant is 3 or more units and 165 or more hours, starting at $3,600 a month. Custom Enterprise is 10 or more units and 550 or more hours.

It is less consistent about the number. On the same page, on the same day, one block shows $1,500 a month for a 55 hour unit and another shows $1,600 a month for a 55 hour unit. The FAQ underneath says flat monthly pricing starts at $1,500 per month with a 90 day minimum per unit, plus a $250 initial set-up fee in the first month that is waived with a one year agreement. The plan cards say $1,600 per unit. One block also claims 14+ years of experience while another claims 15+, which suggests part of the page simply did not get updated.

Neither figure is wrong in the sense of being fabricated. Both are printed. The practical point for a buyer is that if you are being quoted $1,600, the $1,500 in Prialto's own FAQ is a legitimate thing to raise in the conversation.

The ranking flips depending on which unit you use

Sorted by what leaves your account each month: Prialto at $1,500 to $1,600, then Belay at $2,070, then Athena at $3,000. Sorted by what an hour of help costs: Athena at about $18.75, then Prialto at $27.27 to $29.09, then Belay at $34.50 to $46.00. The order reverses completely, and both orderings are correct.

Which one matters depends on a question only you can answer: do you have enough work to fill the hours? Athena is cheapest per hour precisely because it only sells full time. If you genuinely have 35 to 40 hours a week to hand over, that is the efficient purchase. If you have six hours a week, buying full time to secure a good hourly rate is the most expensive thing you can do in this market, and the $3,000 will feel very different in month four than it did on the call.

The trap nobody puts in the comparison: unit rounding

Prialto's 55 hour unit has a sharp edge. Suppose you need 60 hours a month. You cannot buy 60. You buy two units, 110 hours, and at $1,600 each that is $3,200 a month for 60 hours actually used. Your effective rate is $53.33 an hour, not $29.09, and you have just become more expensive than Athena's full time assistant while getting a fraction of the coverage.

Nothing improper has happened. The published rate is exactly what it says. But your demand did not land on a unit boundary, and the 90 day minimum per unit means you cannot flex out of it quickly either. Before comparing any retainer service on its headline rate, ask where its boundaries sit and what happens in the month you cross one.

What the price gap actually buys

Search this topic and you will find offshore assistants quoted at $3 to $15 an hour, which makes all three of these look expensive. The gap is mostly not labour. Athena says it receives 30,000 to 60,000 applications a month and accepts about 1 percent, and its price covers vetting, training, equipment, algorithmic matching, tailored onboarding and performance management, with the assistant employed by Athena rather than by you. Prialto's price covers an engagement manager and documented processes that a backup can pick up when your person is out. Belay's covers a US bench and recruiting.

Hire direct and you keep the difference. You also keep the recruiting, the onboarding, the process documentation, and the Tuesday when nobody logs on. That is a reasonable trade for some businesses and a bad one for others, but it should be a decision rather than an accident.

Match the service to the work, not the price

The most expensive mistake in this category is not picking the pricier vendor. It is handing a person the work that never needed one. Judgement, relationships, phone calls, anything where being wrong is costly and the context is unwritten: that is what you are paying $2,000 to $3,000 a month for, and it is worth it. The same retainer spent on inbox sorting, list building, follow up sequences and the same report every Monday is an assistant rate paid for work that follows a fixed path every time.

It is worth being honest about where the line falls in your own business, because it is rarely where people assume. If what you actually want off your plate is the monthly close, for instance, an assistant is the wrong shape entirely and you would be better served by software that matches transactions against your bank feed automatically and hands a person only the exceptions. Belay and Prialto both sell bookkeeping alongside assistants, so this is a real fork in the road rather than a hypothetical one.

Most businesses have both kinds of work and end up buying both. The useful exercise before any of these calls is to write down two weeks of what you would delegate, then mark each line as judgement or routine. The judgement column tells you how many hours you actually need, which tells you which of these three is cheapest for you. The routine column usually does not need an assistant at all.

What to ask on the call

Since only part of this market publishes rates, get these in writing rather than from a deck. What is the minimum term and the notice period. Is there a setup fee and is it waived on an annual agreement. What is the smallest block I can buy, and what happens when I need slightly more than it. Who covers the work when my assistant is unavailable, and is that included. Which of the tasks on my list are out of scope.

The full breakdown of published rates, including the per hour arithmetic and a calculator that shows what unit rounding does to your real cost, is on our virtual assistant cost page. If you are weighing a person against software, AI executive assistant and AI virtual assistant cover what the software side does and does not do, and AI vs hiring a virtual assistant works through the decision itself.