Before you post the job:
what an SDR actually costs.

What you are comparing

Rocketship is the customer acquisition engine for founders, startups and growing businesses, and the system they run the business on. It runs every step that turns a stranger into a paying customer: finding the buyers, reaching them from your own Gmail, following up, answering replies, booking the meeting, answering the phone, sending the quote and taking the payment.

Under the hood it is a lead database with filters, a full CRM, email sequences, AI replies, booking, phone answering, quotes with e-signature and payments, and team seats with reporting, all on one record of every customer. Most sales tools cover one step: a contact database, a sequencer, a CRM or a phone service. Rocketship runs every step itself and keeps them on one record. Read the table above against that list to see which steps an SDR covers and which you would still do by hand.

It is built around new customers and the money they pay, not emails sent or contacts stored. Every step writes to the same record, so the pipeline you see is the revenue you will collect.

The cost math

The salary is the smallest line. Median base sits near $60,000 and median OTE near $85,000 per RepVue and Visdum, but the number that leaves your account adds benefits and payroll taxes at roughly 25 to 30 percent, $3,000 to $9,000 a year in tools and data, a slice of the manager time it takes to run a rep, and the recruiting bill. SalesHive and Martal both land between $110,000 and $160,000.

Then there is the part no spreadsheet models: you pay all of it during ramp. Trellus benchmarks put first qualified meeting at about 3.2 months and full quota productivity at about 5.5 months, with reported quota attainment between 60 and 80 percent. With annual turnover around 40 percent, a meaningful share of teams restart that clock before it ever finishes.

The hire also lands on a blank page. A rep is a multiplier: aim one at a motion that works and you get more of what it already produces, aim one at a blank page and you get activity. Take a $60,000 base. That is $5,000 a month in salary and near $6,000 once employer taxes, benefits and a laptop go on top. Decide not to judge results for a full quarter and you have committed about $18,000 to find out whether a motion exists. Spread $6,000 across a working month and the rep runs near $35 an hour fully loaded. A month of Launch costs less than an hour of that.

Before you hire, you should be able to hand a rep four answers in writing: who you sell to (a title, a size band, an industry, and a reason this month is the month), what gets a reply, the objections in the order they arrive with responses that have worked more than once, and what a conversation is worth. Those come from doing the work yourself. A new hire three weeks in, with no product intuition, can't derive them for you. They will do what they were trained to do, which is send more. You can run that loop yourself, with the AI workers doing the mechanical parts and every reply readable by you for a couple of months.

Against that, $24.99 a month is not really a price comparison, it is a different category of decision. The honest framing is not that software replaces the rep. It is that first touches and reply handling are volume work with a right answer, and paying six figures for volume work before you have proven the message is the most common way a seed-stage sales budget disappears.