Ask ten founders what software a new company needs and you get a list of twenty-something products, most of them built to run a business that already has customers. The honest list is much shorter, and it is organized around a single job: turning a stranger into somebody who pays you. Here is that list, category by category, with what each thing does, how the separate vendors tend to charge for it, and what it costs inside Rocketship.

Start by asking whether a customer arrives because of it

That question kills most of the shopping list. Analytics dashboards do not produce customers. Neither do project trackers, roadmap tools, design systems, or a warehouse built for the four hundred rows of data you currently have. All of them become worth paying for once there is volume to manage and people to coordinate. That is not month three.

What survives: something for people to look at and use, a way to know who to contact, a way to reach them, a way to answer when they respond by email or by phone, a place where all of it is remembered, and a way to book time and take money. Seven things.

You need a public surface, and something on it worth using

For some founders that means a site. For plenty of others it means an actual app: a calculator, a client portal, an intake form that does something on submit, a small tool that proves you understand the problem before anyone has to trust you.

The AI builders in this category (Lovable, Base44, Bolt) meter your generations and stop at the publish step. Whatever the app collects drops into a table with nobody watching it. You have built a front door and no way to answer it.

Rocketship publishes apps on the free plan, with no card. If the builder is the only part you want, it is $12 a month on its own. It sits at $0 because an app nobody follows up on is a demo, and the follow-up is the part we sell.

Lead data is where pre-revenue founders get billed for guessing

You cannot write to a market you cannot name, so somewhere in the first month you go looking for a contact database. This is the category where the pricing model does the most damage to a company with no revenue yet. The norms are annual commitments, per-seat charges stacked on top, a credit allowance that expires every month whether you touched it or not, and phone numbers sold as a separate purchase. Apollo, Clay and Lusha all sell inside those norms. You are paying before you know whether the market you imagined exists in the numbers you assumed.

Searching in Rocketship is free. Counting the market is free. Previewing twenty-five real people by name is free, before you spend a credit or make any decision at all. Adding one of them to your pipeline costs a credit. A verified phone and email cost five, and the charge only lands when they are actually found. Launch comes with 100 credits a month, Frontier 250, Mission Control 500.

Sending the email is the cheap half of outbound

Instantly will put mail in an inbox. So will the sequencer bolted onto your CRM. Then someone replies, and everything after that is manual: read it, work out whether it is interest or a bounce or an out-of-office or a request to stop, write back before the thread goes cold, then copy the outcome into whatever system holds the deal.

At ten sends a day you absorb that. At two hundred it is a full job, and it is the job you were trying not to hire for.

The AI worker in Rocketship writes the outbound and handles what comes back. It classifies replies, suppresses bounces, and checks your sending domain before you damage it. Launch includes that worker and one inbound line at $24.99 a month.

Somebody is calling your number right now and getting voicemail

Founders selling to trades and local businesses feel this first, because their buyers pick up phones for a living. A caller who reaches voicemail calls the next result on the page, and you never find out they existed.

Answering services like Ruby and Smith.ai bill by the minute or by the call against a monthly minimum, so your costs climb exactly when the phone starts working. The call then lives in their portal. The contact record in your CRM has no idea it happened, and neither do you until you read a summary email.

Rocketship answers your line 24/7 inside the same $24.99. Recordings, transcripts, transfer to a human mid-call, after-hours handling. The call attaches itself to the person it came from, because the same system found that person to begin with.

The pipeline should be the least interesting purchase you make

HubSpot, Salesforce and Pipedrive all open with a cheap or free seat, then put sequences, automation and real reporting several tiers above it, priced per user per month. The entry-level CRM is storage with a sales conversation attached to it.

A pipeline is a filing cabinet. Its value comes from what gets filed into it without anybody typing. Rocketship includes pipeline stages, custom fields, tasks, quotes, CSV import and export, and team seats, and the outbound, the calls and the app all write into that record by default.

Calendars, quotes, and getting paid

Scheduling is its own subscription for most teams, with Calendly as the default line item layered on top of everything above. In Rocketship the scheduler arrives at $79 with Frontier, alongside a second AI worker, and meetings get booked onto your calendar out of the conversations those workers are already having. Quotes and Stripe payments are in the box. Custom domains too. Mission Control at $149 adds a third worker and unlimited apps, which is the shape you want if you are running this for clients rather than for yourself.

Add it up, then add yourself

Price the separate stack at each vendor's cheapest published tier and you are holding six invoices: a contact database, a sending tool, a CRM seat with the automation actually switched on, a scheduler, an answering service with its minimum, and hosting for the app. Do that arithmetic off their own pricing pages before you commit to any of it.

Then add the cost that never appears on a card, which is you, moving information between six products that were each designed to be the center of everything. The reply sits in one place, the contact in another, the call in a third, the deal in a fourth. Zapier exists to cover those gaps, and it is a seventh subscription plus a maintenance job, because automations break quietly when a vendor ships a change and you hear about it from a customer.

Buy the best tool in every category and you have hired yourself as the integration layer, unpaid, with no end date.

So the list is an app, lead data, outbound that answers, a line that gets answered, a pipeline, a calendar, and a way to get paid. That is $24.99 a month to start the loop, or $0 if the only thing you want today is the app. The pricing is published, you pay by card, you are live in minutes, and you cancel from the dashboard. There is no demo call because there is nothing to explain that this page has not already told you.