How much does lead generation cost for a small business?

Three ways to pay for leads

Every small business pays for lead generation one of three ways, and most pay a mix.

Your own time: costs hours, not dollars. Realistic at 30 minutes a day, slow to scale.
Software: costs a monthly subscription plus some of your time to set it up and read replies.
People or an agency: costs salaries or retainers, and someone still has to be managed.

Agency and salary prices vary too much by market for one honest figure, and published rate cards change, so this page does not quote them. Ask for a written quote and count the contract length. Then compare it to the cost per customer below.

What Rocketship costs, line by line

These are Rocketship's own prices, as listed on our pricing page:

Launch: $24.99 a month, 50 leads a month, 7-day free trial (card required).
Frontier: $79 a month, 200 leads a month, 7-day free trial (card required).
Mission Control: $1,499 a month or $14,990 a year, 6,500 leads a month, no trial.
Extra leads: $15 for 100, $35 for 300, $99 for 1,000, $399 for 5,000.
A phone line: $5 a month. Launch does not include a number.

Importing your own contacts is free. A lead is used when Rocketship starts working a contact, and finding new people uses enrichment credits (Launch includes 100 a month, Frontier 250, Mission Control 6,500).

Do the math on cost per customer

Here is a fictional example with simple numbers. Hartley Roofing sells repair jobs worth $3,000 on average. The owner, Dale, subscribes to Launch at $24.99 a month and works 50 leads a month. Say 4 of the 50 reply, 2 take a meeting and 1 signs.

Monthly cost: $24.99 plus a $5 line = $29.99.
Customers: 1 a month.
Cost per customer: $29.99.
Revenue per customer: $3,000.

Those reply rates are made up to show the arithmetic, not a promise. Yours could be half that or better. Replace the numbers with your own after the first month. If your results are weaker, double the cost and it still works. If they are much weaker, the problem is the message or the list, and more money will not fix it.

The costs people forget

1. Your own hours reading replies and taking meetings.
2. Email accounts or domains, if you add them.
3. List data, if you buy it from a separate source.
4. A CRM, if your outreach tool does not track the pipeline.
5. Contract length with agencies.

An all-in-one tool avoids stacking subscriptions. Rocketship includes the pipeline and quotes in the same product, so there is no separate CRM bill. See <A href="/answers/what-crm-does-a-small-business-need">what a small business needs from a CRM</A>.

How to decide

If you have more time than money, start by hand and use <A href="/answers/how-to-get-customers-without-a-sales-team">the steps for getting customers without a sales team</A>. If you have more money than time, software is the cheaper way to buy hours back. If you need a person to run sales conversations, you are past lead generation and into hiring, which our <A href="/answers/do-i-need-an-sdr-or-can-ai-do-outbound">SDR answer</A> covers.

All plans are on the pricing page.