The standard way to price outbound is a spreadsheet with five rows: lead data, a sending tool, a CRM, a scheduler, something to connect them. Cheapest paid tier of each in column B, sum at the bottom, and that sum becomes the answer to "what does it cost to start." The number comes out too low, because no tier in that column includes the hours it takes to make five products behave like one system. It also comes out too high, because you are paying five separate entry fees and not one of them was set by a company thinking about you.

Every tool sets its floor for somebody who is not you

A lead database prices its entry tier around a person who prospects for a living, forty hours a week, every week. A sending platform prices around an agency running dozens of inboxes for clients. Schedulers price per seat, which quietly assumes there are seats. Answering services price around a business with steady inbound volume: a personal injury practice, a plumbing outfit with three trucks. Nobody's floor is built for a founder who wants to write to forty specific people this month and find out whether the message lands.

You cannot buy a third of any of them. That is the actual problem with the spreadsheet. The minimum purchase of each product is set by that product's median customer, so when you assemble a stack you are not buying what you need, you are buying the sum of five companies' opinions about what a normal customer needs. Credits you will not spend. Sending capacity for volumes you are nowhere near. A second seat for a teammate you have not hired.

Fill in the shape of each row before you fill in the price

I am not going to put dollar figures in your column B, and you should not either until you have loaded each pricing page yourself, because the number on the page is often the annual-commitment number and the month-to-month one is higher. What is stable across the category is the shape of each commitment.

  • Lead data and enrichment, whether that is Apollo, Clay or Lusha: priced per seat with a credit ceiling attached, and on most plans the credits reset each month instead of rolling, so what you did not use is simply gone.
  • Cold email sending: priced by inbox or by contact volume, which means the line moves the moment you warm a second domain.
  • A CRM that sequences rather than just stores. In HubSpot the sending and automation sit above the entry tier, and the higher tiers can carry a one-time onboarding fee on top of the per-seat price. Pipedrive's cheap seats stop short of the automation you went shopping for in the first place.
  • Scheduling: per seat, per month, forever, for a link.
  • Glue. Zapier's free tier does not last, and paid plans meter task volume, so the bill rises in direct proportion to your outbound working.

Five floors, none of which you chose, before a single person has replied to anything.

The row that gets deleted is the one that answers the phone

There is a sixth row, and it is the one that comes off the spreadsheet first. Something has to pick up when a buyer calls back. A human answering service, Ruby or Smith.ai or a regional one, is billed by the minute against a monthly bundle, and next to the software rows it is not a rounding error. So it gets cut, on the reasoning that you will just answer the phone yourself.

Then the emails you spent all month paying to send ring a cell phone that goes to voicemail at 6:40 on a Thursday, which is exactly when a busy person finally gets around to returning calls. That prospect does not leave a message. They were already halfway to somebody else.

The labor never shows up on an invoice, so it never shows up in the decision

Even fully assembled and fully paid for, the stack hands work back to you at every boundary. The reply lands in the sending tool. The person who sent it lives in the lead database. The deal it might become belongs in the CRM. The call they place two days later hits your phone with no record of any of it attached. Somebody carries each of those handoffs by hand, and at a company of one to five people, that somebody is the founder.

That is the most expensive line in the whole budget and it is the only one with no price on it.

What $24.99 has to cover before I would call it cheap

Rocketship's Launch plan is $24.99 a month. It finds buyers, writes to them, reads and answers what comes back, and answers your number around the clock. One AI worker, one inbound line, a hundred lead credits a month.

The comparison worth making is not $24.99 against any single row above. It is $24.99 against six floors plus the phone row you deleted plus your evenings. One bill instead of six, and it covers the two things founders postpone longest: replies getting handled without you reading them first, and the phone being answered while you are on a job site or asleep. Calls are recorded and transcribed. A live call can be transferred to a person mid-conversation. After-hours has its own handling. Replies get classified, bounces get suppressed, and your sending domain gets checked before you burn it. Quoting, pipeline stages, tasks, custom fields, Stripe payments, custom domains, CSV import and export are already in the shed rather than being a seventh purchase with a seventh minimum.

A hundred credits is a small number and that is deliberate

Here is what I would want to know before handing over a card. Searching the lead database, counting how big your market actually is, and previewing twenty-five people by name all cost nothing, so you can size the opportunity before you spend a dollar. Adding a person to your list costs one credit. A verified phone and email costs five, charged only when they are found.

Which makes a hundred credits roughly a hundred named contacts you already have addresses for, or about sixteen people fully enriched. Small. In month one you are not testing whether you can reach ten thousand strangers, you are testing whether a particular message moves a particular kind of buyer, and sixteen real conversations answer that better than four thousand sends into a suppression list. When the answer is yes, $79 adds the scheduler so meetings land on your calendar without the email tennis, plus a second worker and 250 credits. $149 is three workers, 500 credits and unlimited apps, which is where people running this on behalf of clients tend to land.

Most of the cost is the cost of guessing wrong

Cheap has less to do with the monthly figure than with what happens when you discover you were wrong about your market, which at this stage you probably are, at least partly. An assembled stack makes that discovery expensive: the annual discount you took, the credits that expired, the domain you warmed for the wrong audience, six cancellations in six billing portals, a couple of which want you to email support.

Rocketship's price is published, you pay with a card, you are live in minutes, and you cancel from the dashboard without booking a call with anyone. The app builder on its own is $12, and building and publishing an app is free with no card at all, though the acquisition loop starts at $24.99 and I would rather say that plainly than have you find out on the pricing page.

So run the honest version of your spreadsheet before you run the cheap one. Six floors and your Tuesdays, against one price you can walk away from in thirty days. It is not a close comparison.