Published: [October 27, 2026]
StartupFeed Quick Take
- StartupFeed checked six hiring tools sold in India. One lists rupee prices, one lists dollar prices, three list no price at all.
- Keka Hire starts at Rs 999 a month. Zoho Recruit starts at $30 per user a month, and its candidate matching sits at $60.
- Full DPDP duties start on 13 May 2027. Penalties reach Rs 250 crore.
In This Article
AI hiring tools are software that read resumes, score candidates and rank them before a recruiter opens a single file. Most Indian startups buy one before they hire their tenth person.
The trouble starts at the price. StartupFeed checked the public websites of six tools sold to Indian companies in October 2026. One of the six prints a rupee figure you can put in a budget.
What We Found When We Checked Six AI Hiring Tools
The market is large enough that these tools are no longer a choice. Naukri holds more than 118 million candidate profiles.
Info Edge’s exchange filing of 6 July 2026 shows the company spent about Rs 70 crore on AI in FY26. It expects about Rs 150 crore in FY27.
Hiring mandates through its AI-Rex product grew 3.7 times between February and June 2026. The product is live with more than 4,000 enterprise customers. A second product, PremiumX, serves over 1,800.
Hitesh Oberoi, who runs Info Edge, described what the company has built:
“India’s deepest AI and data platform for recruitment”
Hitesh Oberoi, managing director and chief executive, Info Edge (India) Limited. From the company statement, 6 July 2026.
None of that tells a 20-person startup in Indore what it will pay. So we checked each website ourselves. Here is what the six publish.
| Tool | What it publishes | Currency | Data location published? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Keka Hire | Three plans, all priced | Rupees | Runs on Azure and AWS, no India-only claim |
| Zoho Recruit | Four plans, all priced | US dollars | Yes, India data centre |
| SpringRecruit | Free forever, no paid tier | Not applicable | No |
| TurboHire | No price on its own site | Not applicable | No |
| HirePro | Quote only | Not applicable | No |
| Naukri AI-Rex | Sales contact only | Not applicable | No |
Three of six hide the number. That is the finding.
The Rupee Prices You Can Actually Budget From
Keka publishes rupee prices for Keka Hire in its own support documents. Three plans, billed monthly, priced for small teams.
| Plan | Price a month | Active jobs | What it adds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | Rs 999 | 2 | Career portal, resume parsing, employee referrals |
| Pro | Rs 1,999 | 10 | AI assistant for job descriptions, candidate portal |
| Advanced | Rs 2,999 | Unlimited | Custom reports, interview scorecards, job board links |
Read the active-jobs column before the price column. Rs 999 buys two open roles at a time. A startup hiring across engineering, sales and operations is already on the Rs 1,999 plan.
One warning. That Keka page carries no date. Prices on an undated page may have moved, so confirm the figure in writing before you sign.
The second rupee answer is zero. SpringRecruit, built by Springworks, runs a free-forever applicant tracking system with no paid tier published. It parses resumes and schedules interviews. It does not publish an AI scoring layer.
For a team making its first ten hires, free is often the honest answer.
What the Dollar Price Costs You
Zoho Recruit publishes prices on its own plan pages. It sells two editions, and the split matters more than the tiers.
The Corporate HR edition runs Free, then $30 per user a month, then $60. The Staffing Agency edition runs Free, $30, $60, then $90 per recruiter a month.
Here is the trap. Candidate pre-screening sits in the $30 plan. The machine-learning candidate and job matching, the feature most founders mean when they say AI screening, sits only in the $60 Enterprise plan.
So the real entry price for AI matching is double the advertised one.
A dollar price carries a second cost. Your rupee bill moves every month with the exchange rate, and you cannot forecast it. Rs 999 stays Rs 999.
Add GST on top of every figure here. Software subscriptions sold to Indian customers are taxed at 18%, and published prices rarely show it.
Where Does Candidate Data Sit?
A resume is personal data. Where it sits decides your legal exposure, and most vendors say nothing about it.
Zoho is the clearest of the six. Its published data centre list covers the United States, Europe, India, Australia, Japan, Canada and Saudi Arabia. Indian sign-ups land on the India data centre, and you can check yours by looking for zoho.in in the browser address bar.
Keka’s own security page says the product runs on Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS. That page names GDPR. It does not promise that Indian candidate data stays in India.
Those two are the transparent ones. TurboHire, HirePro, SpringRecruit and Naukri’s AI products publish no data location a buyer can read before a sales call.
This is not a small gap. Interview recordings, scores and rejection reasons all count as personal data under Indian law.
The DPDP Clock Every Hiring Team Should Mark
India has no dedicated AI hiring law. The Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, published by MeitY on 13 November 2025, are the rules that bite instead.
They arrive in three stages across 18 months.
| Date | What starts | What a hiring team should do |
|---|---|---|
| 13 November 2025 | Definitions, Data Protection Board, government powers | Nothing yet, start the file |
| 13 November 2026 | Consent manager provisions | Fix your candidate consent notice |
| 13 May 2027 | All substantive duties and penalties | Vendor contracts and deletion must work |
Penalties reach Rs 250 crore. The date to mark is 13 May 2027, now about 18 months away.
The duty that catches hiring teams is deletion. A rejected candidate can ask you to erase their data, and you must erase it everywhere it travelled.
If your screening tool copied a resume to a server you cannot name, you cannot prove you deleted it.
What to Ask Before You Sign
Six questions, in writing, before money moves. A vendor who answers all six is worth paying more for.
- Give me the price in rupees, before and after GST, for my exact seat count.
- How many active jobs does that plan allow at once?
- Is AI scoring in this plan, or in the tier above it?
- Which country holds our candidate data, and name the city.
- When a candidate asks for deletion, what do you delete and in how many days?
- Does the tool screen in Hindi or any regional language, and can you show me?
That last question matters and almost nobody publishes an answer. None of the six vendors documents regional-language screening on its own website. Ask for a live demo in the language you actually hire in.
About AI Hiring Tools
An AI hiring tool reads resumes, scores candidates against a job description and ranks them for a recruiter. Some also run a first-round interview by video or voice. In India these tools are sold as monthly subscriptions, priced either per recruiter seat or per open job. The scoring is a shortlist, never a final decision.
StartupFeed Insight
The pricing silence is a sales tactic, not an accident. Three of six vendors hide the number so a founder has to book a call, and the quote then gets shaped by how big your team looks. Keka at Rs 999 and Zoho at $30 both prove a published price is possible. Expect that to change by mid-2027. Once DPDP penalties of Rs 250 crore start on 13 May 2027, buyers will demand written data terms, and written terms are hard to sell without a written price.
By Saraswati Chaubey, Writer
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