· 7 min read · strategy
Ask what a cold email campaign costs and you usually get one of two answers. A tool vendor quotes a monthly subscription, as if sending were the whole job. An agency quotes a retainer, often without saying what the money buys. Neither answer helps you budget.
A campaign is not one purchase. It is six, and each has a market price whether you pay it in cash or in your own hours. Below we walk through all six, using the same ledger we publish on our home page. The figures are typical 2026 market prices for buying each part yourself, not quotes from a specific vendor, and your own numbers will move around inside the ranges.
The six line items
Every cold email campaign that books calls needs the same parts, in the same order. Skip one and the others stop working.
- Leads: $750–1,500. A campaign of 10,000 sends with a four-step sequence needs 2,500 contacts. Buying a list that size, matched to one buyer and checked so the addresses actually exist, lands in this range. The cheap end is a raw database export; the expensive end includes verification and someone filtering by title, company size and region. Our lead sourcing service verifies every contact with two providers before it reaches your list.
- Domains and mailboxes: $160. You should never send cold email from your main domain. That means four lookalike domains, twelve mailboxes across them, and authentication records (SPF, DKIM and DMARC) set up correctly on each. We explain why that is the right size for 10,000 sends in how many mailboxes and domains you need.
- Warmup: $60 a month. New mailboxes have no reputation, so they need fourteen days of gradual, low-volume sending before a campaign starts. Warmup tools charge monthly.
- Sequence writing: $200–500. Four emails written by hand for one specific buyer, each under 80 words. That is the typical market range for a freelance cold email sequence. A researched first line for every account is often priced separately, if it is offered at all.
- Sending tool: $97 a month. The software that schedules sends across twelve mailboxes, stops follow-ups when someone replies, and tracks bounces. This line is the tool only, with nobody running it.
- Reply handling and running it: 40+ hours of your time. Someone has to set everything up, check deliverability daily, and answer interested replies quickly. That someone is usually the founder.
The DIY total
Add the cash lines and you get $1,267–2,317, plus 40 hours of your time. That total counts one month of the warmup and sending tool. If your campaign runs longer, or you keep the setup running afterwards, those two lines repeat each month.
The hours are the line people underestimate. Forty hours is a working week spent on DNS records, list cleaning, warmup checks and copy, before a single prospect has read anything. Whatever you value an hour of your time at, multiply it by forty and add it to the cash total. For most founders that number is larger than the invoice.
There is also a cost the ledger cannot price: getting a part wrong. A good sequence sent from an unwarmed domain lands in spam, and the dashboard rarely tells you. We cover the setup that keeps mail in the inbox in our 2026 deliverability guide.
What agencies charge, and how the model works
If you search for cold email agency pricing, you will mostly find the retainer model. It usually looks like this:
- A monthly retainer. You pay every month for the agency to run campaigns, whether a given month produces many replies or none.
- A setup fee. Often charged on top of the first month, to cover domains, mailboxes and onboarding.
- A minimum term. Often several months, because warmup alone uses the first two weeks and the agency needs time to recover its setup costs.
- Pay per meeting, sometimes. Some agencies charge per booked call instead of, or as well as, a retainer. The definition of a qualified meeting matters a great deal here, so read it closely.
We will not quote a typical agency number, because prices vary too widely to state honestly and we have no survey to cite. What we can say is that a retainer has to cover the same six lines in our ledger, plus the agency's staff and margin, every month. So a retainer cannot sensibly cost less than the parts, and over a minimum term the total you commit to matters more than the monthly figure.
Two questions are worth asking any agency before you sign. First, who owns the domains, mailboxes and lead list when the contract ends? With many agencies the answer is the agency, which means you start from zero if you leave. Second, is the sequence written for your buyer, or adapted from a template the agency sends for every client?
What crowdsX costs
We sell the whole ledger as one fixed package. Launch is $199, paid once. For that you get 2,500 verified leads, four lookalike domains with twelve mailboxes, a fourteen-day warmup, a four-step sequence written by hand, and 10,000 emails sent over 28 days. We launch on day 16 and send the final report on day 44. Replies are forwarded to your inbox within a minute.
There is no retainer and no minimum term. The domains, mailboxes and lead list are bought in your name on day one, and they stay yours after day 44 whether or not you work with us again.
Managed is $499 a month, for after the first campaign. You hand the system back to us and we keep it running: 2,500 new leads and 10,000 emails each month, written and monitored by us, with replies still going to you.
The full breakdown, including add-ons, is on the pricing page.
How to decide
The useful comparison is not $199 against a tool subscription. It is $199 against the full DIY total and your forty hours, or against several months of a retainer you cannot easily leave.
As a planning assumption, take the threshold we use for every client: a B2B offer with a deal value above $1,000. At that deal value, a single closed deal from one campaign covers the Launch price several times over. That is not a promised result; it is the arithmetic that tells you whether the campaign is worth running at all. If your deal value is lower than that, cold email is hard to justify at any price, and we say so on the kickoff call.
If you want to compare cold email against the other main way B2B services buy attention, we cover that in cold email vs paid ads. And if you want to see the part of the ledger that is hardest to buy cheaply, our worked first line example shows what a researched opener looks like from start to finish.
Start with one campaign
You can price the parts yourself and buy them one by one. Plenty of people do, and the ledger above is an honest guide to what it will cost. If you would rather pay once and have the whole thing built, warmed, written and sent for you, start a $199 Launch campaign. You keep everything we build.