Four routes, honestly compared
Hiring a cold caller
You can put someone on payroll, rent someone by the hour, retain an agency, or use a platform that already owns the infrastructure. They cost between $29 a month and $65,000 a year, and the right choice is decided almost entirely by your average deal size.
We are the fourth option, so read the first three with that in mind — but they are described as we would describe them to someone we had decided not to sell to.
An in-house SDR
$45–65k salary, plus tooling and ramp- Strong at.
- Full control, learns your offer deeply, can handle complex or high-ticket sales conversations.
- Costs you.
- Three months to productivity, and the role has notoriously high turnover — you may ramp twice in a year. You still own the lists, domains, dialler and compliance.
- Right when.
- Your deal size is comfortably into five figures and a single extra close pays the salary.
A freelancer or offshore VA
$8–20/hour- Strong at.
- Cheap per hour, fast to start, easy to stop.
- Costs you.
- You own every bit of the compliance exposure — A2P 10DLC registration, calling windows, DNC scrubbing, suppression that holds across channels. A freelancer dialling from an unregistered number is your liability, not theirs. Quality swings hard, and script discipline tends to drift once nobody is listening.
- Right when.
- You have the infrastructure and the compliance already handled and you are buying hours, not a system.
A cold calling agency
$1,500–5,000/month, often with a setup fee and a minimum term- Strong at.
- Buys strategy and senior attention. Good ones genuinely improve your offer, not just your call volume.
- Costs you.
- The retainer is the same in a slow month. Minimum terms are common, you are rarely the biggest client, and the list of who they contacted is frequently theirs rather than yours.
- Right when.
- You want a thinking partner on positioning as much as a dialler, and the retainer is small next to your deal size.
A platform that runs it
This is us $29–99/month, no contract- Strong at.
- The infrastructure is already standing — domains, warm-up, authentication, registration, DNC, suppression, placement monitoring. Email, SMS, voice and social all run off one suppression list. Replies land in your inbox.
- Costs you.
- It is a system, not a strategist. It will not sit on a discovery call with you or rebuild your positioning from scratch.
- Right when.
- You sell a repeatable service, you want volume without hiring, and your deal size does not justify a salary.
The number that decides it
Work out what one new client is worth to you in their first year, then ask how many extra closes each route has to produce to pay for itself.
| Route | Annual cost | Closes needed at $2k/client |
|---|---|---|
| In-house SDR | ~$60,000 all-in | 30 |
| Freelancer, 20 hrs/week | ~$15,000 | 8 |
| Agency retainer | ~$30,000 | 15 |
| Platform, full volume | ~$1,200 | 1 |
That table is why the comparison is rarely close for a service business with a two-to-five-thousand-dollar client. It flips the other way fast as the deal size climbs: at $50,000 a client, an SDR who closes three more deals a year is obviously worth having, and the monthly cost of anything else is a rounding error against their quota.
The cost nobody quotes you: compliance
The hourly rate on a freelancer looks like the cheap answer until you notice what is not included. In the US, calling and texting on a business's behalf needs A2P 10DLC brand and campaign registration, numbers that have not already been flagged as spam, DNC scrubbing against the federal and state lists, calling windows observed per time zone, and a suppression list that applies the instant somebody asks to be left alone — across every channel, not just the one they replied on.
None of that transfers with the hire. TCPA exposure follows the business the calls are made for, and the damages are statutory and per-call. A $12-an-hour dialler working from an unregistered number is not a cheap cold caller, it is an uninsured one.
Email is less dangerous and no less fiddly: a separate sending domain so a bad month cannot take your real mail down with it, SPF, DKIM and DMARC set correctly, three to four weeks of warm-up before the first real send, and placement monitoring so you find out you are in spam before the replies stop rather than after.
What we actually do
We source the companies in your niche and market, write the email, SMS, voice and social outreach, send it on a schedule with quiet hours and pacing built in, own the deliverability and the registrations, and forward replies to your inbox. One suppression list covers every channel, because a list that stopped the email and not the call is worse than none — the client believes their customer was excluded.
There is no dashboard you have to operate. If you would rather drive it from a conversation, it exposes an MCP server, so the assistant you already pay for can read the pipeline, build a campaign, suppress someone or place a test call so you hear the script before a prospect does.
And if you would rather run the whole thing yourself, the method is free and complete: the Outreach Skill is about 6,500 words covering message structure, sequencing, deliverability, the funnel arithmetic and the compliance floor. No email address required, and it holds nothing back for a paid tier.
When not to hire anybody
One case worth stating plainly, because it is the one where every option above loses money: a low-ticket, one-off sale. If a client is worth a few hundred dollars once and never comes back, the arithmetic does not close at any price — not in-house, not offshore, not us. Outbound needs either a repeat relationship or a deal big enough to carry the acquisition cost. Spend the money on something with better odds.
Questions
How much does it cost to hire a cold caller?
Four routes, four prices. An in-house SDR runs $45–65k a year plus tooling and a three-month ramp. A freelancer or offshore VA is $8–20 an hour. An agency is typically $1,500–5,000 a month, often with a setup fee and a minimum term. A platform that runs the outreach for you starts around $29 a month for email and $59–99 with calling. The right answer depends almost entirely on your average deal size.
Is it cheaper to hire a cold caller or use a service?
A service is far cheaper in cash terms — tens of dollars a month against thousands. A hire is better value when your deal size is large enough that one additional close pays the salary, and when the sales conversation itself needs a person who understands the product deeply. Below that line the fixed costs of outreach — domains, warm-up, registration, lists, suppression — cost the same whether you send 200 emails a month or 2,000, and a service is already carrying them.
What do I need to set up before anyone can start cold calling for me?
For calling in the US: A2P 10DLC brand and campaign registration if you are also texting, numbers that have not been flagged, a dialler, DNC scrubbing against the federal and state lists, calling-window rules by time zone, and a suppression list that applies the moment somebody asks to be left alone. For email: a separate sending domain, SPF, DKIM and DMARC, three to four weeks of warm-up before a real send, and placement monitoring. A freelancer does not bring any of this — you do.
Who is liable if a cold caller breaks the rules?
You are. TCPA exposure follows the business the calls are made on behalf of, not the person dialling, and it is strict — statutory damages are per call. This is the part that makes the cheapest hourly rate expensive: an unregistered number, a call outside the permitted window, or a contact who had already asked to be removed are all your problem.
See it on your own market first
The free tier gives you 10 real companies that need what you sell, their contact details, and a written pitch for one of them. Nothing goes out until you say so.
No credit card · No contract