What does outsourcing cold email cost?

There are three ways to get cold email done: do it yourself, an agency on a fixed monthly fee, or paying per result. All three cost roughly the same when things go well. They differ enormously when they do not. Below are the figures, where they come from, and the item that is missing from almost every quote.

The short answer

An agency that runs your cold email campaign end to end costs $2,000 to $8,000 per month in the US and £2,000 to £10,000 per month in the UK, based on published price ranges. Our own packages run from $1,995 to $4,495. Doing it yourself costs, in tooling, $280 to $1,375 per month, plus the hours of someone to run it. Lead data is by far the largest item in that. Result-based models charge around $150 to $500 per qualified meeting in the US, often on top of a lower base fee, and rise with what comes in, up to a cap you agree in advance.

Those are the figures. The question you are really asking is: what does a conversation with a potential customer cost me? We come back to that at the bottom.

Model 1: doing it yourself

The minimum you need to send properly without blowing up your main domain:

That range depends mainly on your volume. If you want to send 1,000 emails a day, you need 40 to 80 mailboxes and use around 10,000 fresh leads per month. That puts you at the top of the range, not the bottom. Lead providers charge per credit, and a lead with a verified address and a checked job title costs more than a row from a bought list.

On top of that comes the most important item, and it never appears in a blog: someone has to run it. Count on one to two hours per working day for list work, copy, deliverability monitoring and sorting through incoming replies. That is 20 to 40 hours per month. Put an internal hourly rate against that and you are at $1,500 to $3,500 per month in time. For a marketer who does this on top of another job, the real cost is not the salary but the work that goes undone.

And then the learning curve. A sending infrastructure you set up yourself spends the first two to three months on warmup and building reputation. Mistakes in that phase, scaling up too fast, a dirty list, a wrong DNS record, cost you domains you can throw away afterwards.

Doing it yourself is the cheapest option if you are still doing it in year two. If you want to do it yourself but not build the list yourself, you can buy just the leads from us from $0.20 each. For a three-month trial it is the most expensive.

Model 2: fixed monthly fee

You buy a package, you know how much goes out per day, and the invoice is the same every month. Published price ranges put a cold email retainer at $2,000 to $8,000 per month in the US and £2,000 to £10,000 per month in the UK. Entry-level US retainers start around $1,500. For reference, this is what our own tiers look like:

Sources: published price ranges from Cleverly and LeadHaste (US) and Modern Inbound (UK), checked on 4 October 2026. See also the full comparison of cold email agencies.

What is and is not included differs per provider and that is where the difference lies. Ask explicitly about these five:

1. Is the setup included or charged separately? Where agencies charge one, published US ranges put the one-off setup fee at $1,500 to $5,000.
2. Is the infrastructure included? Domains, mailboxes, sending software and lead data together cost $280 to $1,375 per month. Some agencies pass these on without a markup, which is fair but still comes on top of the price. Published US guides put these add-ons at $500 to $2,000 per month on top of the retainer.
3. Who handles the replies? Filtering and forwarding is something other than replying and scheduling. With many providers the latter is a separate add-on.
4. Who owns the domains and the reputation built up if you stop?
5. What is the minimum term and is it invoiced in advance? Three months is the norm. Payment in advance is common because the supplier incurs costs for domains and mailboxes straight away.

Model 3: paying per result

A lower fixed fee plus an amount per qualified reply or meeting. Published US ranges put pay-per-meeting pricing at $150 to $500 per qualified meeting for small and midsize companies, and UK pay-per-lead pricing at £30 to £200 per qualified lead. A setup fee and separate tooling often come on top. Some appointment-setting agencies work purely pay-per-meeting: you only pay once the meeting has actually taken place.

This sounds like the safest model and sometimes it is. There are three things that go wrong.

What counts as a result? If “positive reply” is not defined, you end up paying for “just send me some info” and for people who only want to know the price and then do nothing. A good definition also says what does not count: out-of-office messages, bounces, unsubscribes, privacy questions, existing customers contacted by mistake, and vague delaying replies.

Who decides? If the supplier classifies the replies itself and invoices on the basis of that classification, there is an incentive built into the model. Ask for an objection period in which you can reject an invoiced result.

Where is the cap? Without a cap, paying per result is an open-ended bill. A good month can then work out more expensive than the most expensive fixed package. Agree a maximum in advance.

The comparison that really matters

The question is not what it costs per month. The question is: what does a conversation with a potential customer cost me.

Take an agency at $3,495 per month for 15,000 emails. If that produces 45 positive replies, that is $78 per positive reply. If it produces 15, it is $233. Set a result-based model next to that of, say, $500 fixed plus $150 per reply: at 15 replies that costs $2,750, or $183 per reply. At 45 replies it would cost $7,250, and that is why there is a cap.

The pattern: a fixed monthly fee becomes cheaper per conversation the better the campaign runs. A result-based model stays roughly as expensive per conversation, but you lose nothing if it does not work.

Which model is better therefore depends entirely on how large and how reachable your target group is. With a target group of 1,500 companies you hit a ceiling quickly and a result-based model makes sense. With a target group of 20,000 companies that you can run on for months, the fixed fee wins by a distance.

The item missing from almost every quote

Sending volume that is not achieved.

With a fixed monthly fee you are in effect buying sending capacity. But almost no contract in this market states a minimum. If nothing runs in week three because a domain gets blocked, a list runs out or the infrastructure falters, you pay the same amount for half the volume, and you only notice when the replies fail to come in.

Three questions that close this off:

• Is there a minimum number of emails sent per month in the contract?
• Is volume that was not sent made up or do you lose it?
• Do I get to see the actual number of emails sent each month , not just the number of replies?

We fix that minimum, 30,000 emails sent per month on the largest package, seven days a week, and every month you see the actual number of emails sent. Not because it is remarkable to deliver what you sell. But because otherwise you cannot agree anything about it.

In summary

Frequently asked questions