A founder who is still the sales team has four ways to get cold conversations started: put someone on payroll, buy tooling and run it yourself, buy a loop that somebody else operates, or buy that loop together with a person who owns the strategy. The prices sit far apart, from a couple of hundred dollars a month to the cost of a salaried seat. What separates them is where your own hours go, and that part is hard to see from a pricing page.
So here are the four with numbers attached. The operated figures come from our own pipeline over thirty days, 15 September to 15 October 2026: 17 sending profiles across 8 active workspaces, 1 632 LinkedIn invitations, 1 213 direct messages, 2 802 people sourced, 651 candidates set aside before anybody was contacted. The self-run figures come from our self-run tier since 17 August: 192 access keys issued, 1 235 tool calls.
The five steps, and who runs them
Every route does the same work. The five steps of outbound are sourcing a list that deserves to be written to, checking one fact per person, writing the first touch, pacing the sending so the platform stays calm, and answering replies the same day. The route you pick decides which of those five lands on your calendar.
Two of the five run on a clock. Pacing happens every working day inside a window, and replies arrive on their own schedule: the median first reply in our window landed 3.0 days after the invitation across 107 people, with a quarter of them past twelve days. A step that needs attention on Tuesday at 11am is a different purchase from a step that can wait for Sunday night.
Route one: put someone on payroll
Public compensation work puts a US SDR seat in a wide band. The Bridge Group's SDR Metrics and Compensation reports have tracked the role for years, and posted ranges sit in the same neighbourhood: roughly $70 000 to $95 000 on target for a mid-market seat, with base at about two thirds. Add employer costs, tooling and data, and the monthly number lands around $7 000 to $9 000. Pull the current edition for your own market before you commit to a figure, because the band moves every year.
The second cost is the calendar. Benchmark reports have put ramp for this role at several months, and the founder supplies the script, the list criteria and the reply judgement for most of that time. The mechanical half of ramp is quick to measure: across 16 sending profiles connected since 1 August, the median time from a profile being connected to its first invitation was 2.95 days, and the slowest took 18.9. The human half is longer, and it stays yours on every route.
A hire pays off when the volume is already there and the market is proven. For a first push into cold, a salary is buying the answer to whether the segment replies at all.
Route two: run the tools yourself
The cheapest route is to point your own assistant at a stack and work it. Our self-run tier starts at $199 a month for one connected sending account and goes to $499 at four; email adds six cents per message sent. Setup takes about ten minutes and the ceiling is your own time.
Our own usage numbers are the most useful thing we can publish about this route, because they describe what people did with it. Since 17 August we issued 192 keys. 62 are live. 41 ever made a call. Those 41 made 1 235 calls across 34 tools, with 68 failures, 5.5% of the total. People start fast: the median gap between a key being issued and its first call is 0.4 minutes, 28 of the 41 started inside ten minutes, and 33 inside a day.
Then the pattern turns. The median key made 9 calls, the busiest made 304, and the median key was used on exactly one calendar day. 33 of the 41 keys that ever ran were used on a single day. One key was used on five days or more. Account connection shows the same shape: 21 connect links went out, 15 were opened, 5 were carried to a connected account.
That is what the self-run route asks for, stated plainly. The tooling answers in 479 ms at the median and returns real rows, 14 100 of them across 958 calls. The daily return visit is the hard part, and it is the part that produces invitations. With a standing half hour every working morning and some appetite for the work, this route is the best value on the list. When the half hour stays theoretical, the keys in our table show the result.
Route three: buy the operated loop
Our operated tier is $2 000 a month and it covers the five steps end to end, with the client holding price, contract and the first campaign of a new market. Here is the thirty-day shape of it.
Throughput per sending profile: median 104 invitations per active profile in the window, range 4 to 210. Across 63 profile-weeks with 20 or more invitations since 15 August, the median week was 45 invitations, the average 42.1, the range 24 to 62. Those ceilings come from the platform's own pacing rules, and we hold under them on purpose.
Outcomes on a matured cohort, invitations sent 15 September to 7 October so each had a week to be accepted: 1 387 invitations, 379 accepts, 27.3%, and 70 first replies, 5.0% of invitations and 18.5% of the people who accepted. Inside the window 142 people replied for the first time, and 4 of them have reached a qualified conversation or a booking so far. Across all history the same ratio is 19 of 264 people who ever replied, 7.2%.
The volume that stays invisible is the editing. In the window, text addressed to a live person went through 60 514 automated checks on 13 rules across 6 surfaces, and 2 515 of those checks stopped a draft and sent it back for rewriting. Email ran 667 messages from 12 mailboxes, which at six cents each is about $40 of channel cost for the month.
Reply handling is where the operated route touches your week. 1 030 draft replies were written in the window. 299 went out: 180 released at the 48-hour deadline with nobody touching them, 118 released by a person clicking send earlier, and 112 of the 299 were edited first. 731 were withdrawn before release because the thread moved on. The design point is the 180. A client who reads the drafts gets about four decisions a day, and a client who leaves them alone still has vetted answers in the threads inside two days. Open items are tracked on both sides: 84 tasks on us in the current cabinets with 49 closed, 111 on clients with 35 closed. What the fee covers goes line by line through the rest.
Route four: the loop plus a revenue lead
At $5 000 a month a named team works the account daily with more channels and more tests, and at $10 000 a revenue lead takes the calls and owns deal strategy on top of the engine. The buying question here is where your bottleneck sits: ahead of the first conversation, or inside the second one. Cold conversations that happen and then stall at the second call point at strategy. We wrote up what the combined version delivers, including the human share of the decisions: 19 of 282 logged changes in a comparable month carried a person's name.
Cost per first reply, side by side
Take the operated tier on two sending profiles, the common starting shape. At the measured median that is about 208 invitations a month, about 57 accepts, and about 10 first replies. Against a $2 000 fee that is roughly $200 per first reply. Carry it one step further with the 7.2% figure above and 10 replies a month is about 0.7 qualified conversations, so roughly one every six weeks per pair of profiles, at something near $2 800 each. We publish that second number because it is the one that decides whether cold is worth running for your deal size. At a $30 000 contract it is obvious. At $3 000 it is a bad trade, and a different channel deserves the money.
The hire on the same arithmetic starts at $7 000 to $9 000 a month and clears months of ramp before producing a first reply of its own. The self-run tier starts at $199 and produces replies at whatever rate your return visits support. A fuller treatment of the same comparison, with the agency retainer included, sits in cost per meeting, and the plain-language version of what an AI SDR covers is on our AI SDR page.
What to measure before you choose
Two numbers decide this, and both are yours.
The first is the hours you will genuinely give it every week. Be hard about this one. Our key table is a month of founders who meant to run it themselves, started inside ten minutes, and came back on a median of one day.
The second is deal size. Multiply your average contract value by the share of first replies that turn into customers for you. When the product of those two clears a few thousand dollars, cold outbound carries its own cost at the rates above and the choice among the four routes comes down to hours. When it lands lower, put the budget where your existing customers came from and revisit cold once the contract value grows.
Then pick on hours. Half an hour daily and appetite for the work: self-run. A few hours a month and somebody else holding the daily routine: operated. Conversations happening and stalling at the second call: add the revenue lead. Proven market, known script and volume ready to scale: the payroll seat starts to make sense, and by then you have the numbers to brief them with.
Questions buyers ask
What is the cheapest way to run AI SDR outreach as a founder?
A self-run tier where you point your own assistant at the stack. Ours starts at $199 a month for one connected sending account and $499 for four, with email at six cents a message. The cost that is left over is your attention: of the 41 self-run keys that ever made a call in our data, the median key was used on exactly one calendar day.
How much does managed outbound cost per reply?
On our operated tier at $2 000 a month with two sending profiles, the measured median gives about 208 invitations, 57 accepts and 10 first replies a month, so roughly $200 per first reply. Taking it to a qualified conversation uses the 7.2% rate we see across 264 people who ever replied, which works out near $2 800 per qualified conversation.
Is hiring an SDR better than buying an operated engine?
They solve different moments. Public compensation data puts a US SDR seat around $70 000 to $95 000 on target, so $7 000 to $9 000 a month loaded, and benchmark reports put ramp at several months. A hire fits a proven segment with a known script and volume waiting. An operated engine at $2 000 fits the stage where the segment itself is the open question.
How many invitations can one LinkedIn profile send per month safely?
In our thirty-day window the median active profile sent 104 invitations, and across 63 profile-weeks with 20 or more invitations the median week was 45 with a range of 24 to 62. Those numbers sit under platform ceilings on purpose, and the matured cohort at that pace accepted at 27.3%.