Pricing guide

Cold email agency pricing and what the setup really costs

Cold email has a hard infrastructure cost before anyone writes a sentence. The agencies quoting the lowest retainers are usually the ones passing that cost to you separately.

Editorial update: 2026-09

Calculate your costs ↓Discuss your outbound plan →

Managed, from: $999
Domains and mailboxes: Bundled
Bounce rate target: <2%

Build your cold email budget

All starting values are illustrative assumptions, not vendor prices, a LeadFlow quote, or expected results. Replace them with your costs. If your retainer bundles infrastructure, software or data, enter those costs once only. Taxes and currency conversion are excluded.

Planning scenario

Recurring monthly cost: $1,370.00
First month including setup: $1,870.00
First three months including setup: $4,610.00
Monthly cost per unique prospect: $1.37
Modeled booked meetings / month: 10
Modeled held meetings / month: 8
Recurring cost per booked meeting: $137.00
Recurring cost per held meeting: $171.25

Booked = unique prospects × booking rate. Held = booked × show rate. Unit costs use recurring monthly spend; setup is shown separately. Fractional meetings are planning estimates. A zero denominator displays “Not applicable”.

Itemized budget examples

Illustrative: single-market pilot

One segment, one language, modest volume — the scope most teams should start with.

LeadFlow Pilot retainerOur published price: $999 / mo
Sending infrastructure (domains, mailboxes, warm-up)Bundled in ours; ask any agency to state it: estimate — include in retainer scope
Data and enrichment credits: estimate from your provider quotes
CRM seat you already pay for: unchanged

$999 / mo plus whatever your own data and CRM contracts cost

Illustrative scope, not a quote. Your data cost depends entirely on segment difficulty.

Illustrative: multi-segment programme

Several segments or markets, more mailboxes, faster list refresh.

LeadFlow Business retainerOur published price: $2,990 / mo
Additional sending domains and mailboxes: scales with volume — included in our scope
Data and enrichment at higher refresh: estimate from your provider quotes
Optional: enterprise data contract in your name: vendor-quoted, not resold by us

$2,990 / mo plus your own data contracts

Illustrative scope, not a quote.

The infrastructure line most quotes hide

Sending domains, mailboxes per domain, warm-up, authentication and monitoring. It is a modest monthly number, but it scales with volume and should be stated in the proposal, not discovered on invoice two.

Data cost scales with list difficulty

Standard segments verify cheaply. Hard segments — small companies, non-English markets, niche roles — need three to five providers per row. Ask how enrichment is billed before you scope volume.

What management actually buys

Copy per segment, weekly iteration on angles, placement monitoring, mailbox rotation and a human replying within hours. Remove those and you have a sending tool with a markup.

Compare three quotes on the same scope

Ask each supplier to price the same segment and first three months. Mark a bundled line as included instead of adding it again in the calculator.

One-time setup: research, sender setup and campaign build; identify what can be reused if the engagement ends.
Recurring delivery: management, copy, data refresh, mailbox subscriptions and software.
Human work: qualification, reply coverage, booking and reporting; define the handoff to your sales team.
Exit and changes: notice period, asset ownership, replacement costs and charges for extra markets.

Read the calculator as a scenario, not a forecast

The default example spends $1,370 per month plus $500 in setup. At 1,000 unique prospects and a 1% booking assumption, that models 10 booked meetings. With 80% attendance, it models eight held meetings and $171.25 in recurring cost per held meeting. If the booking assumption falls to 0.5%, the same spend models four held meetings and $342.50 per held meeting. These are arithmetic examples, not expected campaign outcomes.

Assumptions behind any cost-per-meeting number

Cost per meeting is only comparable if the assumptions are visible. Ours are below — change them to yours before you compare agencies.

Reply rate is a target we work towards, not a guarantee, and it varies by segment more than by copy.
A reply is not a meeting: only a share of replies show positive intent, and only a share of those book.
Booked is not held. Some booked meetings no-show; budgets that ignore this overstate value.
Setup work lands in month one but earns across the whole engagement, so a single-month cost per meeting always looks worse than a quarter.
Total cost includes your own data, CRM and internal time — not just the retainer.

Questions that expose a thin quote

Are domains, mailboxes and warm-up inside the retainer, or billed separately later?
Who owns the sending domains if we stop working together?
How is enrichment billed — bundled, at cost, or with a markup?
Who replies to a positive reply, and within what time?
What happens to the invoice if deliverability drops and mailboxes need replacing?

Define the scope before comparing quotes

Included scope to confirm

Sending domains, mailboxes, authentication and warm-up
List building, waterfall enrichment and verification
Copy per segment and weekly iteration on angles
Inbox placement monitoring and mailbox rotation
Human reply handling and meeting booking
Monthly reporting on reply rate, positive rate and cost per meeting

Outside this scope

Paid advertising and content production
Your CRM subscription and its administration
Enterprise data contracts you already hold or want in your own name
Sales calls themselves — we book them, your team runs them
Per-meeting success fees; we do not bill that way

Who this helps

Founders comparing an agency against a first SDR hire
Sales leaders building next quarter's pipeline budget
Marketing leaders funding outbound alongside paid channels
Operators who want cost per meeting, not a vague retainer

How to scope a budget

01
Scope
Channel mix, sender count and target volume agreed before a number is quoted.
02
Setup
Infrastructure, profiles, domains and list build — included in month one, not billed separately.
03
Run
Sequences live, replies handled by humans, meetings landing on your calendar.
04
Review
Monthly read on reply rate, positive rate and cost per meeting; scope adjusted from data.

Tools for this workflow

Related campaign examples

Logistics SaaS campaign →
Existing case study on this site.

Questions and answers

Are domains and mailboxes included?: Yes, in every scope we quote — including warm-up and monitoring.
How many emails per month for the base scope?: Volume is set by mailbox count and safe per-mailbox limits; we scope it to your list size rather than promising a headline number.
What happens if deliverability drops?: Affected mailboxes are rotated out and replaced. It is our cost, not an extra line on your invoice.

Sources and editorial notes

Our own retainers are stated exactly as we quote them. Every other number on this page is an illustrative estimate you should replace with quotes from your own suppliers — we do not publish other vendors' prices.