Ask what it costs to run B2B outbound and you get a shrug, a range, or a demo booking form. The pricing pages that do exist are written to be hard to compare: seats here, credits there, "contact us" for the one you actually need. So founders budget for the tool they can see and get surprised by the four layers underneath it.
This is the priced version. Every number below is either a vendor's own published list price or a figure reported by third parties, and each one is labelled so you know which you are reading. Prices are as of October 2026 and will drift; the structure underneath them will not.
How these numbers were gathered, and how much to trust them
Worth stating up front, because pricing content is usually written by someone selling one of the options.
- Published list price. Where a vendor publishes a number on its own pricing page, that is what is quoted. Apollo, Clay, Instantly, Smartlead and Cafiyn are in this category.
- Reported price. Where a vendor does not publish, the figure comes from third-party reporting and is marked as reported. ZoomInfo is the main one: it quotes custom, every time.
- A caveat on the secondary sources. A large share of competitor pricing on the open web is published by competitors. Instantly writes about Smartlead, 11x writes about Apollo, and roughly everyone writes about Clay. Those pages are useful and they are also motivated. Where a reported figure mattered, more than one independent source had to agree on it, and where sources disagreed the range is given rather than a midpoint.
- What is excluded. Annual-discount pricing is noted but monthly list is quoted, because monthly is what an early team actually pays before committing. Negotiated enterprise pricing is excluded entirely: it exists, it is real, and it is unknowable from the outside.
Nothing here is a Cafiyn customer number. One section at the end covers where Cafiyn sits, clearly marked, and you can skip it.
The only number that matters for comparison: one SDR
Every tool on this page is implicitly bidding against a person. So start with the person.
A US sales development rep in 2026 earns roughly $50,000 to $68,000 base and $65,000 to $95,000 on-target earnings, with $85,000 OTE on a 70/30 base-to-variable split reported as the standard shape. Add benefits, payroll taxes and overhead and the fully loaded cost lands around $85,000 to $120,000 a year. Count the tooling that rep needs, onboarding, and the productivity lost to ramp, and the reported range widens to $115,000 to $165,000. Recruiting adds a further $8,000 to $28,000 per placement depending on whether you use an external recruiter.
Call it $8,000 to $12,000 a month for one person, and remember they are not productive for the first quarter.
That is the number to hold in your head for the rest of this piece. It is why a $500 a month AI SDR sounds like a bargain, and it is also why the churn figure later in this piece matters so much: a tool that is cheaper than a person but produces nothing is not cheaper than anything.
Layer 1: data and research
Finding and verifying who to contact. The widest price spread of any layer.
| Tool | Entry price | What you get | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apollo | $0 free, then $49/user/mo annual | Basic $49, Professional $79, Organization $119 per user per month on annual billing. Monthly billing adds roughly 20 percent, taking them to about $59, $99 and $149. | Published |
| Clay | $185/mo | Launch from $185/mo (2,500 data credits, 15,000 actions), Growth $495/mo (6,000 data credits, 40,000 actions). Restructured March 2026; the old $149 / $349 / $800 tiers are retired but honoured for existing customers. | Published |
| ZoomInfo | Reported from about $14,995/yr | Professional near $14,995, Advanced near $24,995, Elite $39,995 and up. Annual contracts, three-seat minimum. Extra seats reported at $2,000 to $5,000 a year. | Reported |
The number that reframes this layer: Vendr's 2026 data is cited at a median ZoomInfo contract of $31,875 a year across 1,313 verified purchases. That is roughly a third of a fully loaded SDR, for data alone, before anyone sends anything.
The trap here is credits, not price. Apollo's headline is $49, but active teams are reported to land at $150 to $400 per user per month once credit overages and add-ons are counted. Clay's March 2026 restructure split credits into two currencies, Data Credits and Actions, which makes the sticker clearer and the forecasting harder: you now have two meters to run out of. Any tool priced in credits should be budgeted at its realistic consumption, not its entry tier, and the only way to know that number is to run a month.
Layer 2: sending infrastructure
The layer founders forget entirely, then discover the week their main domain gets burned.
You cannot send cold email from your company domain at volume without risking the deliverability of every invoice and password reset you send. So outbound runs on separate domains with their own mailboxes, each warmed before use. The constraint that drives the whole cost model is this: a fully warmed mailbox safely sends roughly 30 to 50 cold emails a day. Not more, regardless of what the plan allows.
That means volume is bought in mailboxes, not in a bigger software plan. Want 1,000 sends a day? That is somewhere around 20 to 30 warmed inboxes, with the domains, warmup and rotation that implies.
| Component | Cost | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | $10 to $20 per year each | .com averages about $16.44 a year. You need several, not one. |
| Mailbox | About $7 per inbox per month | Google Workspace Business Starter at list, $8.40 billed monthly. Reported at roughly $2.60 to $3.80 per inbox through a reseller. |
| Warmup | $0.60 to $96 per inbox per month | A 160x spread for nominally the same job. Many sequencers now bundle it. |
Put together, the reported all-in costs are: roughly $60 to $100 a month for one inbox on one domain including a sequencer, $250 to $450 a month for twenty mailboxes across ten domains, and about $420 to $490 a month for fifty inboxes in infrastructure alone, before sending anything.
This is the cheapest layer in absolute terms and the one most likely to be skipped, which is precisely why so many first outbound attempts end with a founder wondering why nobody replied. Nobody replied because nothing arrived.
Layer 3: the sequencer
The software that actually sends, rotates inboxes and tracks replies. Competitive, commoditised, and cheap relative to everything around it.
| Tool | Entry | Mid | Top self-serve |
|---|---|---|---|
| Smartlead | Basic $39/mo (2,000 leads, 6,000 emails) | Pro $94/mo (30,000 leads, 150,000 emails) | Unlimited Prime $379/mo (unlimited contacts, 500,000 emails) |
| Instantly | Growth $47/mo (1,000 contacts, 5,000 emails) | Hypergrowth $97/mo (25,000 contacts, 100,000 emails) | Light Speed $358/mo (adds dedicated IPs) |
Both include unlimited email accounts and built-in warmup on every plan, which is the detail that matters: it folds part of Layer 2 into Layer 3 and is the main reason the sequencer layer looks cheaper than it used to. Annual billing takes roughly 15 to 20 percent off both.
What to notice: the leads and emails ceilings move far faster than the price. Smartlead's Basic to Pro step is 15x the leads for 2.4x the money. If you are choosing on price alone you are probably choosing wrong, because the binding constraint is your mailbox count, not your plan's email allowance.
Layer 4: AI SDRs
Here the pricing stops being comparable and starts being a statement about how much of the work the vendor is willing to do.
| Product | Reported or published price | Shape |
|---|---|---|
| Apollo | $49 to $119 per user per month | You operate it. Data plus sequencing in one seat. |
| Salesforge | Pro $40/mo, Growth $80/mo; Agent Frank from $499/mo billed quarterly | Self-serve tooling, with the agent as a separate paid tier. |
| SalesboxAI | From $499/mo | Multi-channel agent plus intent signals. |
| AiSDR | $900/mo | Autonomous, HubSpot-native, transparent flat price. |
| 11x | Reported at $5,000/mo | Fully autonomous agent. |
That is a roughly 100x spread for a similar-sounding promise. The spread is not capability in any measurable sense. It is the division of labour: at $49 you get tools and do everything, at $5,000 the vendor claims to do it for you. Everything in between is a different answer to "who runs this on Tuesday".
The category is growing fast. MarketsandMarkets sizes AI SDR at $4.12 billion in 2025 rising to a projected $15.01 billion by 2030. Which makes the next number the most important one on this page.
The churn figure to weigh before you buy
Managed autonomous AI SDR contracts of the 2025 to 2026 vintage are reported to run a 50 to 70 percent annual cancellation rate, a figure attributed to UserGems data in 2026. More than half the buyers do not renew.
The reported reason is the useful part. The cancellations are described as CFO-driven rather than sales-driven: budget was pulled when attributable pipeline came in at under 2x spend. Secondary reporting also points at data and brand-safety failures, agents referencing incorrect company information or striking the wrong tone, as a primary driver.
Treat the precise percentage with appropriate suspicion. It originates in one vendor's dataset and reaches you through blogs with their own positions. But the direction is corroborated across independent accounts, and the mechanism is plainly stated and easy to check against your own numbers: if attributable pipeline is not clearing 2x spend by the end of a quarter, you are in the half that cancels. That is a test you can run in a spreadsheet before you ever sign.
The honest read on this layer is not that AI SDRs do not work. It is that the category sells an outcome and bills for a subscription, and the gap between those two is where the churn lives. We take a specific position on this at what an AI SDR actually is, including why Cafiyn FlyWheel is deliberately not sold as one.
The other route: agencies
Buying the outcome instead of the stack. Priced four ways.
| Model | Reported price | When it fits |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly retainer | $3,000 to $12,000/mo | Cold email $2,000 to $8,000; LinkedIn $3,000 to $10,000; multi-channel $5,000 to $15,000 and up. Around $6,000 to $8,000 is reported as the level that sustains experienced SDRs plus infrastructure. |
| Setup fee | $5,000 to $15,000 one-time | Added by many retainer models for strategy, infrastructure and onboarding. |
| Pay per appointment | $80 to $250 per qualified meeting | BANT-verified appointments reported at $300 to $600. General range $50 to $300. |
| Hybrid | $2,000 to $4,000 base plus $150 to $400 per meeting | Splits the risk. |
| Revenue share | 5 to 25 percent of new revenue | Cheapest upfront, most expensive if it works. |
The comparison people get wrong: a $6,000 monthly retainer looks absurd next to a $200 software stack until you divide by outcomes. At $80 to $250 per qualified meeting, an agency delivering 30 meetings a month is in the same cost-per-outcome territory as a stack you half-operate and a tool you cancel in month seven. The software is cheaper per month. It is not automatically cheaper per meeting, and meetings are the thing you are buying.
Three worked budgets
List prices are abstract. Here is what the layers add up to in practice.
Solo founder, doing it yourself
- Data: Apollo Basic, $49/mo
- Infrastructure: 3 domains and 6 mailboxes, roughly $60 to $90/mo
- Sequencer: Smartlead Basic, $39/mo
- Cash total: roughly $150 to $180 a month
- Uncosted: 8 to 12 hours a week. At a notional $50 an hour that is $1,600 to $2,400 a month of founder time that never appears in the budget.
Ceiling: around 200 to 300 sends a day. Enough to learn whether the message works. Not enough to build a pipeline you can forecast.
Seed-stage team, one person part-time on outbound
- Data and enrichment: Apollo Professional plus Clay Launch, roughly $264/mo before credit overages
- Infrastructure: 10 domains and 20 mailboxes, roughly $250 to $450/mo
- Sequencer: Instantly Hypergrowth, $97/mo
- Cash total: roughly $600 to $800 a month
- Uncosted: 15 to 20 hours a week, which is half a person.
This is the configuration most startups actually land in, and it is the one where the hidden cost most exceeds the visible one. The stack bill is $700. The labour inside it is closer to $4,000.
Funded team, buying the outcome
- Option A: one SDR, $8,000 to $12,000/mo fully loaded, plus the seed-stage stack above. Productive from roughly month four.
- Option B: agency retainer, $6,000 to $8,000/mo plus a $5,000 to $15,000 setup fee. Productive in weeks, and you own none of it.
- Option C: AI SDR at $900 to $5,000/mo, with a 50 to 70 percent reported chance you cancel within the year.
There is no universally right answer. There is a right question: which of these still exists in twelve months, and what did it leave behind when it stopped?
What none of this money buys
Four things no line item on this page covers, and they are the four that decide whether any of it works.
- Knowing who to contact. Every tool here assumes you already have a defined, list-buildable ideal customer profile. None of them produces one. Point a $5,000 agent at a vague segment and you have bought expensive noise. The work that comes first is covered in defining an ICP and sizing the market.
- Something worth saying. Deliverability gets the email into the inbox. It does not make the email worth opening. That is still writing, and it is still the highest-leverage unpaid work in the stack.
- Operating hours. The single most consistently uncounted cost. Every DIY budget on this page is understated by thousands of dollars a month in time, and the understatement grows with the number of tools, because each tool adds a surface you must learn, maintain and debug.
- A feedback loop. Almost nothing in this stack writes what it learned back into what you believe about the market. Campaigns run, replies land, and the ICP document never changes. That gap is why teams repeat the same quarter three times.
Where Cafiyn sits
Marked clearly so you can skip it. The pricing below is our published list price, the same as every other published figure on this page.
Cafiyn FlyWheel prices the four layers as one line item, by volume rather than by seat. One Wheel is one target account carried through the full workflow: sourcing, verification, waterfall enrichment, per-account copy, deliverability-managed sending from provided infrastructure, and reply handling. Ignition is $29/mo for 100 Wheels, Trajectory $49 for 200, Orbit $99 for 450, Command $199 for 1,000. Extra volume is $19.99 per additional 100 Wheels, annual billing takes 20 percent off, and there is no revenue share.
Cafiyn Lens covers the work that comes before the stack, the part no tool on this page produces: structured opportunity assessment, buying-committee mapping and competitor teardowns, from $14.99/mo for five assessments. The Blueprint is the loop between them, which is the fourth missing item above: campaign outcomes revise the market model rather than evaporating.
The honest comparison: against a DIY stack, FlyWheel is competing on tool count and operating hours more than on monthly cash, because a $150 stack is genuinely cheap in cash. Against an agency it competes on cash and on ownership. Against a fully loaded SDR it is not really the same purchase, and anyone telling you software replaces a good rep is selling something. Full detail on the pricing page.
The short version
Outbound has four layers, and most budgets only see one of them. Data is $49 to a reported $31,875 a year. Infrastructure is $60 to $490 a month and almost always forgotten. Sequencers start near $39. AI SDRs run $499 to $5,000 a month with reported cancellation above half. Agencies run $3,000 to $12,000 a month, or $80 to $250 a meeting. One SDR costs $85,000 to $165,000 a year.
Price the layer you keep forgetting, count the hours you keep not counting, and measure everything against 2x attributable pipeline. That last test is the one the market's own churn data says most buyers fail.
Sources
Pricing checked October 2026. Published prices link to the vendor; reported figures are marked as such above and come from third-party reporting where more than one independent source agreed.
- Apollo pricing, Clay pricing, Smartlead pricing, Instantly pricing, Google Workspace pricing (published list prices).
- ZoomInfo contract figures and the Vendr median: reported, since ZoomInfo quotes custom and publishes nothing.
- SDR compensation and fully loaded cost ranges: reported across multiple 2026 compensation guides.
- AI SDR churn of 50 to 70 percent: attributed to UserGems 2026 data in secondary reporting. Market sizing of $4.12B in 2025 to a projected $15.01B by 2030: MarketsandMarkets.
- Agency retainer and per-appointment ranges: reported across multiple 2026 agency pricing guides.
Found a price that has moved or a figure we have wrong? Tell us and the page gets corrected with the date changed. That is the only maintenance promise worth making about a pricing teardown.