How Much Does B2B Lead Generation Cost?

Most articles answering this question give you an industry average cost per lead and a range that spans an order of magnitude. We went the other way. Every figure below comes from a page a vendor publishes about its own service, read on September 3, 2026, or from a tool's pricing page fetched the same day. Where a vendor publishes nothing, we say so and leave the cell empty rather than filling it with a guess. That makes the sample smaller than a survey and a lot more useful, because you can click through and check any number in it. Disclosure first: Sales.co publishes this article and Sales.co is one of the vendors priced in it.

Where these numbers come from

We read the pricing pages, service pages and vertical pages of the lead generation, appointment setting and cold calling firms we could find with public sites, on September 3, 2026. We did not use directory listings or aggregator scorecards, because those recycle each other and the figures drift year over year with no way to trace them back. Where a vendor states something about itself that we cannot verify independently, we label it as a claim and name the vendor.

The first thing worth reporting is how few numbers exist. Across the sets we have compared on this site, the ratio holds steady: four vendors in eleven, five in thirteen, three in twelve will publish a figure you can act on. The rest quote after a call. That is not a scandal, but it does mean any published-price benchmark, including this one, is a sample of the companies willing to print a number, which skews toward the ones selling a defined scope rather than headcount.

The second thing is that the units are not comparable without work. One vendor prices per month, one per four-week cycle, one per SDR seat per month, one per appointment, one per contact dialed, one per year. Two of those look similar and behave completely differently. Most of this article is about turning them into the same unit so you can put quotes side by side.

If you want the vendor-by-vendor version of this rather than the pricing version, we keep separate comparisons of B2B lead generation agencies, appointment setting companies and outsourced SDR companies. For the email channel specifically, how much a cold email agency costs covers the four price tiers in that narrower market.

The six pricing models, and who carries the risk in each

Almost every quote you will get is one of six shapes, or a blend of two. The shapes differ less in what they cost than in who is exposed when the campaign underperforms, and that is the part buyers usually skip.

1. Monthly retainer for a defined program

You pay a flat monthly fee and the vendor runs a scope: sourcing, copy, sending, deliverability, reply handling. Volume is described in inputs rather than outcomes, so the contract says how many contacts get worked, not how many meetings arrive.

Published examples: Sales.co at $1,000, $2,000 and $2,500 a month. Abstrakt Marketing Group at $5,000 to $7,000 a month for outbound programs. LevelUp Leads from $5,000 a month. Prymatica at $495 a month for its Professional plan.

Who carries the risk: you do. The invoice is the same whether the month produces twenty meetings or two. What you get in exchange is a predictable number for budgeting and, usually, a lower cost per meeting than performance pricing when things work. The failure mode is a vendor with no incentive to fix a flat month, which is why the contract term matters more here than in any other model.

2. Per-SDR, per-month

You rent named headcount. The unit is a seat, and the price varies by the seat's seniority and where the person sits.

CIENCE publishes the only full grid we have found. Level 1 scripted SDR seats are $1,500 a month offshore, $2,500 in Europe and $4,500 in the US. Level 2 independent seats are $2,500, $3,500 and $5,500. Level 3 data-driven seats are $3,500, $4,500 and $6,500. On top of the seat sit a $5,000 one-time GTM system setup, $2,000 a month for a strategic team, $499 a month for the graph8 platform, and $1,000 one-time onboarding per seat. A single US Level 1 seat is therefore $12,999 in month one and $7,000 a month after. EBQ prices the same shape differently, publishing $5,000 a month for a half-time resource and $10,000 for a full-time one, both against an annual commitment payable monthly with no setup or cancellation fees.

Who carries the risk: you do, more directly than in a retainer, because you are explicitly buying hours rather than a program. The advantage is that the arithmetic against hiring is clean: CIENCE's $4,500 US Level 1 seat is roughly a US SDR base salary with the recruiting, dialer and management folded in. The disadvantage is that a bad seat costs the same as a good one for as long as the term runs.

3. Per meeting or per appointment

You pay for meetings that land on your calendar. Nothing else is billable, or a small base sits underneath.

Revenx publishes $90 to $150 per appointment on monthly and quarterly plans, plus a $2,000 onboarding fee it says is waived on quarterly and annual agreements, in the retail financial-advisor market. In B2B, Outbound Sales Pro's public rate guide puts pay-per-meeting at $125 to $250 entry level, $250 to $450 mid-market and $450 to $800 and up for enterprise, and puts its own per-meeting price at $150 to $600. Beyond published rates, buyers commonly report being quoted $500 to $1,000 per booked meeting with a setup fee on top, which is a buyer-side anchor rather than anything printed on a vendor page.

Who carries the risk: the vendor, on volume. That is why the unit price is higher than a retainer implies. The risk that moves to you is quality. Per-meeting billing creates pressure to book meetings that hold badly, so the two questions that decide whether this model works for you are how a meeting is defined in the contract and what happens when one no-shows. Revenx is unusually specific here, stating that it replaces cancellations and no-shows up to 30 percent, which at least puts a ceiling on the exposure. Most vendors say nothing.

4. Per lead or per contact

You pay per record or per person contacted. This is the model where the word "lead" does the most damage, because it means four different things across the vendors that use it.

Upcall publishes $3.50 to $7.50 per lead on its Standard plan and $3.50 to $5.00 on its SMB plan, with a 1,000-lead project minimum. That price is per contact dialed, not per qualified opportunity. Superhuman Prospecting publishes $3.00 per contact for list building, which is data with no outreach attached. Sales.co sells static email lists at $295 one-time per list. In retail financial services, Retirement Prospects publishes $32 per exclusive annuity lead plus a one-time $299 set-up and exclusivity fee, and Skyline Social publishes $5 to $50 per lead with roughly $200 per booked appointment when it runs ads, and states that leads start flowing after $1,000 to $3,000 of paid ad spend.

Who carries the risk: depends entirely on the definition. A dialed contact puts all conversion risk on you. A qualified, exclusive inbound lead puts more of it on the vendor and prices accordingly, which is why $32 and $3.50 can both be honest prices for something called a lead. Ask what has to be true before the vendor invoices you for one.

5. Hybrid: base plus performance

A smaller monthly fee covers the program, and a per-meeting or per-close component sits on top. Revenx's $2,000 onboarding plus $90 to $150 per appointment is a version of this. Sales.co's plan-plus-add-on structure is a different version, where the base is the program and the add-ons are channels rather than outcomes: cold calls at $1,500 a month, LinkedIn at $1,000, ads at $1,000, on top of a $1,000 to $2,500 plan.

Who carries the risk: it is split, which sounds ideal and is the hardest of the six to compare across vendors. Two hybrid quotes with the same headline base can differ by a factor of two at your actual volume. Ask each vendor for a worked total at a low, expected and high meeting count before you sign one, and compare those three totals rather than the base fees.

6. Pure performance or commission

The vendor takes a share of closed revenue, or is paid only on qualified outcomes with no base at all. None of the vendors we have read publish a rate card for this, which is worth knowing on its own.

Who carries the risk: the vendor, up front, and you later. Pure performance deals are rare in outbound because the vendor is underwriting your product, your pricing, your sales team and your close rate, none of which it controls. When one is offered, it usually comes with a long term, a wide definition of an attributable deal, and a total cost above what a retainer would have been if the campaign works. Intelemark argues the opposite side of this publicly, saying its time-based fixed-cost approach can be 30 to 50 percent cheaper than performance-driven competitors, though it publishes no figure to check that against.

Benchmark table: published prices only

Every row below is a price the vendor publishes about its own service on its own site, read on September 3, 2026. The one exception is labelled. Vendors that publish no price are not in the table, which is most of them.

Two rows deserve a note. Belkins is the only figure here that does not come from a page a buyer would naturally look at: its pricing page has four plans and no numbers, while a Belkins blog post about outsourced SDR companies lists Belkins' own starting price at $5,500 to $7,995 a month. Some Belkins vertical pages also carry a "from $5,000" floor. And Prymatica's $495 is the cheapest managed number in this market by a wide margin, but its own pricing page states that domains, mailboxes and sending software are billed separately at market rate on the Starter and Professional plans, so it is not a like-for-like comparison with a retainer that includes infrastructure.

Separately, one vendor publishes a market rate card rather than its own price, and it is the most detailed public benchmark in the category. Outbound Sales Pro's outsourced SDR pricing page lays out monthly retainers at $2,500 to $4,000 entry level, $4,000 to $7,500 mid-market and $7,500 to $15,000 enterprise, pay-per-meeting at $125 to $250, $250 to $450 and $450 to $800+, and expected meetings per month at 8 to 12, 12 to 20 and 20 to 35+. It also gives cost-per-meeting benchmarks of $357 to $500 outsourced against $821 to $1,150 in-house, and puts a fully loaded in-house SDR at $9,800 to $14,200 a month. Those are its numbers, not ours, and they describe the market rather than what Outbound Sales Pro charges, which it separately gives as $3,000 to $8,000 a month or $150 to $600 per meeting.

What actually drives the price

Five variables move a quote more than anything else, and four of them are visible in the published data above.

Channels. Email is the cheapest channel to run because sending scales without headcount. The phone is the most expensive because dialing is staffed work that does not scale, and every vendor's pricing reflects it. At Sales.co the calling add-on is $1,500 a month on top of a $1,000 plan, which means adding the phone more than doubles the invoice. Superhuman Prospecting, which is calls-first, starts at $1,998 a month for calls only. Cleverly, which is LinkedIn-only, starts at $397. If a quote looks unusually cheap, check which channels it actually covers before you compare it to anything.

Seniority. CIENCE's grid prices this explicitly. A Level 1 scripted seat and a Level 3 data-driven seat differ by $2,000 a month in every region. The Level 1 rep follows a script; the Level 3 rep builds the approach. For a simple, high-volume qualification motion the cheaper seat is often the right buy. For a complex product with a technical buyer, a scripted rep will burn the list.

Onshore versus offshore. This is the largest single multiplier in the published data and almost nobody prints it. CIENCE does: $4,500 a month for a US Level 1 seat against $1,500 for the same level offshore, a three times premium stated in public by a vendor that sells both. Europe sits in the middle at $2,500. Whether the premium is worth paying depends on who picks up. For US enterprise executives who screen calls hard, accent, local knowledge and the ability to hold an unscripted conversation matter more than dial count. For a high-volume SMB list where the job is qualification against a short script, offshore capacity buys a lot more dials for the money.

Data. Contact data sets a floor under every model, and it is priced separately more often than buyers expect. Superhuman Prospecting charges $3.00 per contact for list building on top of its subscriptions. Prymatica includes 10,000 monthly targeted, verified prospects in its $495 Professional plan, which is what makes that price look different from the rest of the table. Sales.co includes list building, enrichment and validation in every plan, and also sells static lists at $295 one-time for buyers who only want the data. Ask every vendor whether data is in the retainer or billed on top, and what happens to the list when you leave.

Volume and contract length. Volume is priced in inputs by the vendors who publish activity levels at all. LevelUp Leads publishes 150+ calls per business day on its Fractional SDR tier, 300+ on Full-Service and 700+ on Growth, alongside 180+, 230+ and 460+ emails per business day. That is unusual and it is the only published data we have found that lets you compute a cost per dial: at roughly 21 business days a month, 150 calls a day is about 3,150 dials, and $5,000 across 3,150 dials is roughly $1.59 each. Contract length moves price in the expected direction. SalesHive states annual rates below month-to-month. Revenx waives its $2,000 onboarding on quarterly and annual agreements. EBQ's whole price structure assumes a year.

Cost per lead and cost per appointment

These are the two numbers buyers search for, and both are unstable in ways that matter when you are comparing proposals.

Start with cost per appointment, because the arithmetic is the clearest. A retainer converts into a per-meeting cost only after you assume a meeting count, and the assumption swings the answer more than the price does. A $5,000 monthly retainer producing 12 meetings costs $417 a meeting. The same retainer producing 4 costs $1,250. A SalesRoads engagement at $9,950 per four-week cycle producing 15 meetings is $663 each; at 25 meetings it is $398. So when a vendor quoting a retainer tells you its cost per meeting beats a per-meeting vendor's rate, the claim rests entirely on a volume assumption that is not in the contract.

Then the held-meeting problem. Booked and held are different numbers, and per-meeting pricing puts pressure on the first one. A $150 pre-set appointment that holds three times in four costs $200 per held meeting. If it holds half the time, it costs $300. Revenx replacing no-shows up to 30 percent is the only published protection we found; most vendors do not state a policy at all. Ask what percentage of booked meetings held across the vendor's book last quarter, not how many were booked.

Cost per lead is worse, because the unit is undefined. Compare the published per-lead prices: Upcall at $3.50 to $7.50 is a contact dialed. Superhuman Prospecting at $3.00 per contact is an enriched record with no outreach. Retirement Prospects at $32 is an exclusive annuity lead with intent behind it. Skyline Social at $5 to $50 is an ad-generated lead with $1,000 to $3,000 of ad spend required before any arrive. Those four are not four points on one scale, they are four products.

The arithmetic that reconciles them is the set rate, which is the number nobody publishes. A $32 lead looks like a fifth of a $150 appointment until you assume a conversion. If one lead in ten becomes a meeting that actually happens, that $32 lead costs $320 per held meeting. At one in twenty, $640. At one in five, $160. So a cheap lead with a weak set rate can easily cost more per held meeting than an expensive pre-set appointment, and you cannot tell which you are buying from the price alone. If a vendor sells per lead, ask for its historical lead-to-held-meeting rate on accounts like yours, and treat a refusal as an answer.

One more thing to be careful about. Search for what outsourced lead generation costs per hour and you will find a tight consensus of roughly $8 to $15 offshore and $35 to $75 in the US. We looked for the vendor pages behind those numbers. None of the fifteen calling firms we read states a per-hour price on its own site. Several of the pages publishing those hourly ranges belong to agencies that publish no rate of their own. Hit Rate Solutions is the clean example: its FAQ says US hourly rates typically run $15 to $30, which is the company characterising the market while its own price sits behind a Calculate the Price flow. There is no hourly benchmark here worth planning against.

The costs that are not in the headline number

Four line items sit outside the monthly figure often enough to be worth a checklist item each, plus one cost that never appears on an invoice.

Setup fees. CIENCE publishes a $5,000 one-time GTM system setup and $1,000 onboarding per SDR seat, which is why its first month is $12,999 for a single US Level 1 seat against $7,000 thereafter. Revenx publishes a $2,000 onboarding fee, waived on quarterly and annual agreements. Retirement Prospects charges a one-time $299 set-up and exclusivity fee. Superhuman Prospecting notes that a setup fee may apply without publishing the amount. On the other side, LevelUp Leads states no onboarding charge, SalesHive states $0 setup fees ever, EBQ states no setup or cancellation fees, and Sales.co has no setup fee. This is a genuine differentiator and it is cheap to ask about.

Prepay minimums and volume floors. A starting price is not the same as the amount you commit at signature. LevelUp Leads requires three months prepaid monthly, so its $5,000 starting rate is a $15,000 commitment. Upcall's 1,000-lead project minimum turns $3.50 to $7.50 per lead into a $3,500 to $7,500 floor. EBQ's annual default term turns $10,000 a month into $120,000 for the year, which is above a US SDR salary plus tools, so that case has to rest on EBQ's management and infrastructure rather than on cost. Ask for the total committed at signature, not the monthly rate.

Tool and infrastructure pass-throughs. CIENCE bills $499 a month for its graph8 platform license on top of the team fee. Prymatica states that domains, mailboxes and sending software are billed at market rate separately on its Starter and Professional plans, and folds them into the annual fee only at Enterprise. Superhuman Prospecting prices CRM integration at $250 and list building at $3.00 per contact. Each of these is reasonable on its own, and each is a reason a $495 quote and a $2,000 quote can end up closer than they look. Ask for the fully loaded monthly invoice including data, domains, tooling and every channel, for six months, and compare those totals.

Ramp. The cost that never shows up as a line item is the period where you are paying full price for near-zero output. Domain warmup alone consumes the first two to four weeks of an email program. Vendors publish launch times, not productive times: LevelUp Leads states 7 to 10 days to launch, Sales.co states live in 7 days, Hit Rate Solutions states onboarding in 7 to 14 days. Launching is not producing. Budget for the first month being setup, judge a program at 90 days rather than 30, and ask each vendor what a normal first 30 days looks like and what happens if the numbers are flat at 60.

Doing it yourself: what the tools cost today

The honest comparison to an agency retainer is not a software subscription. It is a software subscription plus a person. But the subscription half is easy to price exactly, so here it is, fetched from each vendor's own pricing page on September 3, 2026.

Two stacks worth costing. A minimum viable one is Instantly Growth at $47 plus Apollo Basic at $49 plus Clay Free at $0, which is $96 a month and enough to run a small, unenriched campaign. A working one is Smartlead Base at $39 plus Apollo Basic at $49 plus Clay Launch at $167, which is $255 a month and gives you real enrichment headroom. Neither includes sending domains or mailboxes, which are a separate cost at every vendor. Prymatica states this plainly on its own pricing page, billing infrastructure at market rate outside the $495 plan, and it is the same for anyone running the stack themselves.

So the tools cost roughly $100 to $300 a month against agency retainers of $1,000 to $10,000. The gap is the person. Someone has to build the lists, write copy that does not read like a template, warm the domains, watch deliverability daily, and answer replies the same day they arrive. A US SDR base salary commonly runs $50,000 to $65,000, which is about $4,200 to $5,400 a month before tools, management time and ramp. Outbound Sales Pro puts a fully loaded in-house SDR at $9,800 to $14,200 a month, which is its figure rather than ours, and the direction is right once you add a dialer, data, a manager's attention and three months during which the person books very little.

In-house is the better buy when you already have that person, or when a founder genuinely has ten hours a week and will spend them. It is the worse buy when the work lands on someone with another full-time job, because the campaign then gets done badly and the tool subscription is not the money you lose. What you lose is the list of accounts you cared most about, burned by copy nobody had time to fix.

How to compare quotes

Put the same eight questions to every vendor on your shortlist and lay the answers side by side. The gaps show up fast, and most of these can be answered in an email before you spend an hour on a call.

1. What is the fully loaded monthly invoice, including data, domains, tooling and every channel, for six months? One number. This is the only figure that compares cleanly across the six pricing models, and asking for it in the first email tells you a lot about the sales process you are entering.
2. What is committed at signature? Setup fee, prepay minimum, minimum term, and the earliest date you can exit. A $5,000 starting price with a three-month prepay is a $15,000 decision.
3. What am I buying: meetings, contacts worked, hours, or named reps? A vendor selling capacity and a vendor selling appointments will both say "we book meetings", and only one of them is on the hook for the count.
4. What activity level is in the contract? Dials per day, emails per day, contacts worked per month. Almost nobody publishes these, and the ones that do let you compute a cost per unit rather than trusting a promise.
5. How is a meeting defined, and what happens when one no-shows? Only relevant for per-meeting quotes, and decisive there. Get the replacement policy in writing.
6. Where does the contact data come from, and who owns it when I leave? If the vendor keeps the list and the mailboxes, leaving costs you the asset you paid to build.
7. Which team, in which country, works my account, and can I hear recordings? The onshore premium is real and priced at three times by the one vendor that publishes both. Find out which side of it you are buying.
8. What percentage of booked meetings held last quarter, across your whole book? Not on your account, and not booked. Ask for two references at your industry and company size, and call them.

One pattern worth carrying into those conversations: across every comparison we have run on this site, vendors that quote on request are usually priced above the ones that publish. That is not a rule and it is not a reason to skip them, but it is a reasonable prior when you are deciding who to call first.

What $1,000 a month buys at Sales.co, and what it does not

We are in the table above, so here is our own number with the same treatment we gave everyone else's.

$1,000 a month is Intent Takeover: up to 1,000 high-intent contacts a month, each worked five or more times. $2,000 is TAM Takeover: up to 20,000 ICP-matching contacts a month with lighter-touch personalized email at scale. $2,500 is both. Every plan includes a dedicated US account strategist, list building, data enrichment and validation, copywriting, campaign execution, deliverability management and reply handling. There is no setup fee, no hourly billing, and no minimum term. Campaigns go live in 7 days. If you only want the data, our email lists are $295 one-time per list.

What $1,000 does not buy. It does not buy phone calls, which are a $1,500 a month add-on, so a phone-led program starts at $2,500 rather than $1,000 and our headline price understates it by design. It does not buy LinkedIn or ads, which are $1,000 a month each. It does not buy a guaranteed number of booked meetings, because we do not sell one, and if a guarantee is what you want then Belkins, which structures its tiers by appointments per year, is shaped for that and we are not. It does not buy the scale of Callbox at 700+ staff or memoryBlue at 600+ SDRs, and we do not run multi-language global delivery. We publish no third-party review count and no caller location, and several vendors on this page do publish at least the second of those, which is a fair criticism of us.

The case for the $1,000 tier is narrow and worth stating narrowly: it is the cheapest published way we know of to get a managed, data-included email program with a person answering the replies, on a month-to-month term. If your buyers answer email and you want to find out whether outbound works for you before committing $15,000, that is the purchase. If your buyers only answer the phone, plan around $2,500 and read the cold calling comparison before you decide it should be us.

FAQ

How much does lead generation cost per month?

Published monthly prices in this market run from $495 to $10,000. Prymatica publishes $495 a month for its Professional plan. Sales.co publishes $1,000, $2,000 and $2,500. Superhuman Prospecting publishes $1,998 for calls only and $4,995 for a premium SDR bundle. LevelUp Leads and Abstrakt Marketing Group both start at $5,000, with Abstrakt quoting $5,000 to $7,000 for outbound programs. EBQ publishes $5,000 a month for a half-time resource and $10,000 for a full-time one on an annual commitment. SalesRoads prices in four-week cycles rather than months, at $9,950. Most agencies publish nothing, so those figures are the sample that exists, not the whole market.

What is a typical cost per appointment in B2B?

Two published anchors sit far apart. Revenx sells pre-set appointments to financial advisors at $90 to $150 each, plus a $2,000 onboarding fee it says is waived on quarterly and annual agreements. Outbound Sales Pro's public rate guide puts B2B pay-per-meeting at $125 to $250 entry level, $250 to $450 mid-market and $450 to $800 and up for enterprise. Separately, buyers commonly report being quoted $500 to $1,000 per booked meeting with a setup fee on top, which is a buyer-side anchor rather than a rate any vendor publishes. The number that matters is cost per held meeting, and almost nobody publishes a set rate you could use to calculate it.

Is a monthly retainer or pay-per-meeting cheaper?

Per-meeting pricing is more expensive per unit and cheaper when the campaign fails, because the vendor carries the volume risk and prices that risk in. A retainer is cheaper per meeting when the campaign works and costs the same when it does not. Run the arithmetic at your expected volume before you choose: a $5,000 retainer that produces 12 meetings is $417 each, and the same retainer producing 4 meetings is $1,250 each. Ask for a worked example at a low, expected and high meeting count from every vendor quoting either model.

Why do most lead generation agencies not publish prices?

Two reasons come up repeatedly. Services priced by headcount vary with seniority and region, so a single figure would be wrong for most buyers, which is why CIENCE publishes a nine-cell grid rather than one number. And a quote-only page forces a discovery call, which agencies value. Launch Leads states its position openly on its pricing page: it argues a flat published price would overcharge some buyers. None of that helps you shortlist, so ask for a range in the first email rather than the third call.

What hidden costs come on top of a lead generation retainer?

Four recur. Setup fees: CIENCE publishes a $5,000 one-time GTM system setup plus $1,000 onboarding per SDR seat, and Revenx publishes a $2,000 onboarding fee. Prepay minimums: LevelUp Leads requires three months prepaid monthly, so $15,000 is committed at signature at its $5,000 starting rate. Tool pass-throughs: CIENCE bills $499 a month for its graph8 platform on top of the team fee, and Prymatica states that domains, mailboxes and sending software are billed separately at market rate on its Starter and Professional plans. Volume minimums: Upcall requires 1,000 leads per project, so its $3.50 to $7.50 per lead is a $3,500 to $7,500 floor. Ramp is the fifth cost and it is not on any invoice: domain warmup alone runs two to four weeks.

How much does a cost per lead run in B2B?

The published per-lead prices in this market are not measuring the same thing, so comparing them directly is a mistake. Upcall publishes $3.50 to $7.50 per lead, which is per contact dialed, with a 1,000-lead project minimum. Superhuman Prospecting publishes $3.00 per contact for list building, which is data rather than outreach. Sales.co sells static email lists at $295 one-time per list. In the retail financial-advisor market, Retirement Prospects publishes $32 per exclusive annuity lead plus a one-time $299 set-up and exclusivity fee, and Skyline Social publishes $5 to $50 per lead. A dialed contact, an enriched record and a qualified inbound lead are three different products at three different prices.

Does an hourly rate exist for outsourced lead generation?

Not on vendor sites. Across the fifteen calling firms we read on September 3, 2026, none stated a per-hour price for its own service. The $8 to $75 per hour ranges that fill search results come from blog rate guides, several written by agencies that publish no rate of their own. Hit Rate Solutions is a clear example: its FAQ says US hourly rates typically run $15 to $30, which is the company describing the market while its own price sits behind a Calculate the Price flow. Treat any hourly average without a named vendor page behind it as commentary.

Is it cheaper to run lead generation in-house?

The tools are cheap and the person is not. Fetched on September 3, 2026: Smartlead Base is $39 a month and Instantly's Growth outreach plan is $47 a month, Apollo Basic is $49 per user per month, and Clay's Free plan covers 500 actions and 100 data credits a month. A working stack lands near $100 to $300 a month before domains and mailboxes. A US SDR base salary commonly runs $50,000 to $65,000, which is roughly $4,200 to $5,400 a month before tools, management time and ramp. Outbound Sales Pro puts a fully loaded in-house SDR at $9,800 to $14,200 a month, which is its figure rather than ours. In-house wins when you already have someone who will do the work daily.

How long is a typical lead generation contract?

It varies more than the price does. SalesRoads states cancel anytime with no commitments. SalesHive states no long-term contracts with cancellation on written notice, no setup fees, and annual rates below month-to-month. Superhuman Prospecting states month-to-month with no long-term commitment. Sales.co is month-to-month with no setup fee. LevelUp Leads requires a three-month minimum prepaid monthly. EBQ's default term is an annual contract payable monthly, with no setup or cancellation fees. Abstrakt, Belkins and Callbox do not state contract terms on their sites.

What does $1,000 a month buy in B2B lead generation?

At Sales.co it buys Intent Takeover: up to 1,000 high-intent contacts a month, each worked five or more times, with list building, enrichment and validation, copywriting, campaign execution, deliverability management and reply handling, run by a US account strategist, month-to-month with no setup fee and live in 7 days. It does not buy phone calls, which are a $1,500 a month add-on, or LinkedIn and ads, which are $1,000 a month each. It does not buy a booked-meeting guarantee, because we do not sell one. If your buyers only answer the phone, $1,000 is the wrong number to plan around and $2,500 is the right one.

Where to start

Decide which of the six models you are buying before you collect quotes, because a per-meeting proposal and a per-seat proposal cannot be compared without converting them, and the conversion depends on assumptions neither vendor will put in writing. Then ask every vendor for one number: the fully loaded monthly invoice for six months, including data, domains, tooling and every channel. Then ask what is committed at signature. Three questions, all answerable by email, and they will cut a shortlist of eight down to three faster than any discovery call.

Everything in this article came off vendor pages on September 3, 2026, and prices move. Our own numbers are on the pricing page, the vendor-by-vendor detail is in best B2B lead generation agencies, and if the email channel is the only one you are pricing, cold email agency pricing breaks that market into four tiers. Re-check any figure here against the source before you sign anything.