A first SDR costs a growing company about $139,000 in the first twelve months if you pay $85,000 at target, and that SDR books almost nothing in the first month or two. An AI salesperson costs from $12 to $1,499 a month depending on how many people it should reach (this page uses a $79 plan), starts sending in week one, and does not take a meeting or negotiate. This page puts the two side by side, quarter by quarter, with every assumption written out so you can change it.
An SDR is a sales development rep: the person who finds buyers, writes and calls them, and hands the interested ones to whoever closes. If you only want the definition, read SDR vs BDR. If you want the full cost of a general salesperson, that is on how much it costs to hire a salesperson. This page is narrower: it is for a founder or manager choosing between the two specific options for the first outbound seat.
What the SDR costs, line by line
The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not publish a separate line for SDRs, so there is no government wage figure for the job itself. The closest it has is wholesale and manufacturing sales representatives (except technical and scientific products), with a median of $72,080 a year in May 2025, from the Occupational Outlook Handbook. That figure is wages, commissions included, and leaves out benefits. Pay for an SDR usually mixes a base salary and a variable part tied to meetings, so this page assumes $85,000 on-target earnings. That is an assumption for the sake of arithmetic. Replace it with the offers you actually see in your market.
On top of wages the employer pays benefits and payroll taxes. The BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for June 2026, published September 9, 2026, shows private industry employers paying $32.82 an hour in wages and salaries and $14.07 an hour in benefits, which makes benefits 30.0 percent of total compensation. If $85,000 is the 70 percent that goes to the person, the whole cost is $85,000 divided by 0.70, or $121,429. Benefits and taxes are the $36,429 difference. BLS counts paid leave as a benefit, and a salary already pays for vacation days, so treat this as the high end.
| Line | Assumption | First year |
|---|---|---|
| Pay at target | Base plus variable, assumed | $85,000 |
| Benefits and payroll taxes | BLS: benefits are 30.0% of total compensation, so total is $85,000 / 0.70 | $36,429 |
| Tools | CRM seat, email account, data subscription at $300 a month | $3,600 |
| Your time hiring | 30 hours at $75 an hour | $2,250 |
| Management time | 3 hours a week for 52 weeks at $75 an hour | $11,700 |
| Total | About $11,580 a month | $138,979 |
The $75 an hour is a stand-in for what your own time is worth. If you are the manager, it shows up as work you did not do, not as an invoice. If you find the person through a recruiter, add a fee on top; the hiring-cost page shows how.
What the first three months look like
An SDR starts by learning, not by selling. In the first weeks they sit in on your calls, read your product pages, argue with you about who the buyer is and build a list. The first emails go out after that. Mailboxes also need time. A brand-new inbox that sends 200 messages on day one looks like spam to the receiving servers, so most tools, and any careful person, build a new inbox up to its daily limit over a few weeks. Nobody reaches full volume in week one.
The ramp in the table below is an assumption: no meetings in month 1, two in month 2, four in month 3, then eight a month. Eight is a modest figure for a person working a good list by email and phone, and your real number depends on your price, your buyer and the quality of the list. For the AI side, the table assumes it reaches 375 people a month (what 1,500 credits buy at 4 credits for each person found with an email), half that in month 1 while the inbox builds up, and turns one in fifty into a meeting. That rate is an assumption too. The page what is a good cold email reply rate shows how to count your own.
Year one, quarter by quarter
| Quarter | SDR: cumulative cost | SDR: cumulative meetings | SDR: cost per meeting | AI salesperson at $79 a month: cumulative cost | AI: cumulative meetings | AI: cost per meeting |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 | $34,745 | 6 | $5,791 | $237 | 19 | $13 |
| Q2 | $69,490 | 30 | $2,316 | $474 | 41 | $11 |
| Q3 | $104,234 | 54 | $1,930 | $711 | 64 | $11 |
| Q4 | $138,979 | 78 | $1,782 | $948 | 86 | $11 |
The arithmetic. SDR: $138,979 spread evenly is $34,745 a quarter, and the meetings are 6 (0+2+4), then 24 each quarter. AI: $79 times 3 months is $237 a quarter; 375 people a month at 1 in 50 is 7.5 meetings, with 3.75 in month 1, which gives 18.75 in Q1 and 22.5 in each later quarter. The per-meeting numbers are the cost divided by the meetings, rounded.
If the meeting rate is lower, the AI line moves. At 1 meeting in 100 people, the year yields about 43 meetings and costs about $22 each. At 1 in 25 it is about 173 meetings at about $5.50 each. Even the bad case is far below the SDR, which tells you how much the comparison depends on a different question: whether the meetings are equally good.
Where the comparison stops being fair
Cost per meeting treats every meeting as equal, and they are not. A person on the phone can hear hesitation, reroute a call to the right person and decide in the moment that an account deserves a handwritten note. An AI salesperson works from what is written on a buyer's website and in your rules. It does not hold a video call, negotiate or close, so someone still has to take every meeting it books. If that someone is you and your calendar is already full, a cheap meeting is not free.
Count what the meeting costs you. Say it takes 45 minutes of your time with prep and notes. Eighty-six meetings a year is 64.5 hours. At the same $75 an hour that is $4,838, which you would add to the AI side, bringing the year to $5,786 and about $67 a meeting. The SDR's meetings also need a closer, so that cost belongs on both sides, but it is useful to see that the closer's time is the real limit on either route.
When the SDR is the better first seat
- You sell to a few dozen named accounts, each worth tens of thousands of dollars, where a thoughtful phone call and a mailed letter beat volume.
- Your buyers do not read cold email and decide on the phone, as with many local trades or independent practices.
- You already have a repeatable close and a person who takes the meetings, but the founder is still the only one writing outreach.
- You can afford a nine-month experiment and have someone who will coach the new hire every week.
When the AI salesperson is the better first seat
- You do not yet know which buyer or message works, and want to test five versions in a month without paying a salary to find out.
- The buyers are many and reachable by email: owners of small and mid-size companies, agency heads, practice managers.
- You want the job to continue without anyone to hire, train or replace if they leave.
- The founder or a salesperson can take the meetings that come back.
The plans can also change as you grow. Many companies start with the software to learn what a good meeting looks like, then hire the person to take those meetings and work the best accounts by hand. That order puts the cost of the miss-hire later, when you have evidence of what the hire should do.
Where a bigger plan makes sense
If you were going to hire three SDRs, the same arithmetic gives about $417,000 for the year. A plan sized for several people's worth of outbound costs $1,499 a month, $17,988 a year, or $14,990 on annual billing, which is about 4 percent of that. The higher volume matters only if you can take the meetings it produces, so scale the number of meetings you can handle first and the number of people reached second.
Rocketship, which we make, is the AI salesperson in this comparison. Frontier is $79 a month ($780 on annual billing) and includes 1,500 credits, up to 210 emails a day from up to 3 inboxes, and one teammate, and Mission Control is $1,499 a month with 30,000 credits, up to 3,500 emails a day from up to 50 inboxes and 25 teammates. It finds the buyers, reads their websites, emails them from your Gmail, follows up and books the meeting on your calendar; you or your closer takes it from there. See what each plan includes, or start the 7-day trial on Frontier (card required) and set your own numbers against the table.