Trellus

What it is

Trellus is a Chrome extension that turns the sales engagement platform you already pay for into a parallel dialer with an AI coach listening on every call. It does not replace Salesloft, Outreach, HubSpot, or Apollo — it renders inside them, executes the dial tasks already sitting in your cadences, and adds up to 5 parallel lines, voicemail drop, number rotation, and live in-call guidance without a second tab. Around that core sit automatic scoring on every call, practice voice bots built from your team’s own recordings, a virtual sales floor, and a consolidated LinkedIn and Sales Navigator inbox marketed as Superhuman for LinkedIn. The company is Outpost Labs Inc., trading as Trellus — a Y Combinator W22 startup in New York founded by Craig Bonnoit and Ajinkya Nene.

Why it shows up in RevOps stacks

• It is an overlay, so the dial stack does not change. Reps keep working the cadences they already have and the CRM stays the system of record — no migration, no second task list, no retraining on a new dialer UI. Supported surfaces include Salesloft, Outreach, HubSpot, Apollo, Salesforce, Gong Engage, Close, Attio, lemlist, Clay, Unify, Zoho, Amplemarket, and Google Sheets.
• Coaching lands during the call, not in Monday’s review. Live guidance fires on objection handling and competitor positioning while the prospect is still on the line, from prebuilt scenarios or talk tracks you write yourself. Post-call scoring runs on 100% of calls rather than on the handful a manager spot-checks.
• Phone numbers and spam hygiene are inside the price. Power bundles 5 additional numbers, Parallel bundles 8, both with spam remediation, plus automated number-health checks and rotation as you dial. Dialer platforms that leave you to buy and babysit your own numbers push another $10-$15 per number per month onto the invoice.
• Voice agents share the same surface. The same product deploys practice bots that imitate your prospects for ramp, and inbound agents for call handling, qualification, and appointment setting — so a team that wants both practice and deflection does not buy twice.

Pricing reality

Trellus publishes per-seat prices, which is rare in this segment. Power is $99.99 per user per month — power dialing on every supported platform, voicemail drop, 5 extra numbers with spam remediation, and the LinkedIn inbox. Parallel is $149.99 per user per month and adds multi-line dialing, unlimited AI practice calls, and 8 extra numbers. Business is quote-only and adds customizable AI research and coaching, team analytics, and custom reporting. The pricing page carries a monthly/annual toggle. The free entry point is the extension itself: install it from the Chrome Web Store and start, no demo required — the vendor’s own contact form tells small teams to skip the call and buy a self-serve license.

At list, a 10-rep team on Parallel is roughly $18,000 per year. Nooks quotes about $4,000-$5,000 per user per year with a 5-seat minimum, so the same team lands at $40,000-$50,000; Orum Launch starts near $3,000 per seat per year. Trellus runs about a third of a Nooks quote and half an Orum seat, before the phone numbers those two bill separately. Treat the band as live, not fixed: the current tier list still references a cheaper BYOD plan the pricing page no longer displays, and third-party review sites are quoting stale figures against it.

Best for

• SDR and BDR teams of 2-25 reps already living in Salesloft, Outreach, HubSpot, or Apollo that want more connects per hour and live objection coaching without buying a dialer platform or migrating cadences.
• Sales managers ramping new reps who want practice bots cloned from real recorded calls and a score on every call, at a price that survives a headcount freeze.

Do not buy Trellus if your calling list lives outside a supported platform — there is no standalone CSV-upload dialer, and Google Sheets or Clay are the only spreadsheet-shaped paths in. Do not buy it if you want one vendor to own dialing, coaching, and prospecting under an enterprise support contract; that is the argument for Nooks.

Versus the alternatives

Nooks is the top alternative by share and the bundling play: dialer, AI coaching, salesfloor, and an AI prospector in one quote-based platform with a roughly $25,000 annual floor. Pick Nooks when you want a single vendor accountable for the whole outbound calling surface and the budget to match; pick Trellus when the dial stack already works and you are buying speed and coaching on top of it.

Orum is the dialer-first incumbent and the pick when raw connects-per-hour is the only goal — more mature dialing infrastructure, but coaching lives elsewhere and seats cost roughly double. Koncert is the third established multi-line option, worth a quote if you want higher line counts than Orum’s entry tier and are price-shopping the dialer alone. On the coaching flank, Balto and Abstrakt are the established real-time-guidance vendors — Trellus publishes head-to-head pages against both — and both aim at contact-center agent assist, so they win when the job is script adherence and QA across a support floor rather than cold-call connects. Trellus is itself the fast-growing entrant in the overlay category, which is why every alternative here is either a full dialer platform or a contact-center coaching tool rather than a like-for-like competitor.

Watch-outs

• It is a browser extension, and that is the whole failure surface. Everything runs inside a Chrome tab on a supported page; a managed-browser policy, a blocked extension ID, or a locked-down profile stops the product cold, and there is no mobile path. Guard: have IT allowlist the extension ID and pilot on one rep’s actual managed Chrome profile before you buy seats for the team.
• The vendor is very small. The company’s own team page lists four people and its Y Combinator profile lists three. That buys you fast, direct support and no account-management theater, but it is a real concentration risk on a system your reps use every hour. Guard: keep recordings, transcripts, and dispositions syncing back to the CRM or Gong so the call record never lives only in Trellus, and start on monthly billing until you have run a full quarter.
• Parallel dialing trades connect quality for volume. Stale numbers drop connect rates and dead air when two prospects answer at once burns the human connect — the same physics that applies to every multi-line dialer. Guard: verify numbers before a session, cap parallel lines at 3 when list quality is unknown, and measure connects-per-hour rather than dials.
• The published price band has drifted. The pricing page shows $99.99 and $149.99 while its own feature copy references a BYOD tier it no longer lists, and review sites still quote lower legacy numbers. Guard: confirm the number at the Stripe checkout and the exact annual-toggle amount before you forecast the line item, not from a comparison site.
• Real-time coaching only helps if someone writes the talk tracks. Prebuilt objection scenarios ship out of the box, but the guidance is generic until your positioning is loaded in. Guard: budget an hour of a sales manager’s week for the first month to encode real objections and competitor responses, and treat the prebuilt set as a pilot default rather than the deployment.