Lead generation companies price four different ways, and the quotes are close to impossible to compare on purpose. Here's what each one costs and, more usefully, what each one does to the incentives.
The four models
| Model | Typical range | You pay for | Risk sits with |
|---|---|---|---|
| Per lead | $30–$200 per lead | Contact details | You |
| Per meeting | $150–$500 per meeting held | A booked call | Them |
| Monthly retainer | $2,000–$8,000/month | Capacity | You |
| Share of pipeline | 10–20% of closed revenue | Outcomes | Shared |
Same category, four different businesses.
Per lead is the cheapest and usually the worst value
A "lead" can mean almost anything. Sometimes it's a verified contact matching your ICP. Sometimes it's a name scraped from a directory with a guessed email address.
At $30 a lead, you are buying data, not demand. Nobody has expressed interest in anything. You still have to run the entire outbound motion yourself, and you're now doing it against a list whose quality you can't see until your bounce rate tells you.
Worth it only if you have a working outbound engine and genuinely just need more rows. Not worth it if you're hoping the leads arrive warm.
Per meeting looks safest and often isn't
Paying only for meetings that happen feels like the provider carries the risk. On paper they do. The problem is what it does to their incentives.
A provider paid per meeting needs meetings, not qualified meetings. The bar drops accordingly. You end up with calls booked with people who agreed because the email was persuasive, not because they have a problem, a budget or the authority to sign.
I've watched a client pay $400 a meeting for twenty-two meetings, four of which were with anyone who could sign. That's $8,800 for four real conversations, and they sat through the other eighteen.
If you buy per meeting, define "meeting" in the contract before you start: held not booked, a specific seniority, a specific company size, no-shows excluded.
Retainers are the honest model if the scope is written
A fixed monthly fee for a defined scope is the cleanest arrangement, because nobody is gaming a count.
The catch is that "we run your outbound" is not a scope. What should be in writing:
- Contacts built and verified per month
- Domains and inboxes, and who owns them
- Number of sequences, and how often copy is rewritten
- Who reads and classifies replies
- What the weekly report contains
Without those, you're buying effort and hoping.
Share of pipeline aligns incentives and rarely survives contact
Ten to twenty percent of closed revenue sounds like perfect alignment, and conceptually it is. In practice it breaks on attribution.
If a prospect gets a cold email in January, downloads something in March and closes in June after a referral, whose deal is it? The argument is unwinnable and it poisons an otherwise good relationship.
It works when the sales cycle is short and the attribution is clean. It fails everywhere else.
The number that makes them comparable
Work out cost per held meeting with someone who could actually buy.
Take last quarter's spend. Divide by the number of meetings that happened with a real buyer. Not leads, not replies, not meetings booked.
Most companies have never calculated it, which is exactly why four models can be priced so differently and all still sell.
For grounding: 13,700 emails on a recent campaign produced 202 replies, 107 of them positive, and 75 held meetings. Work the same arithmetic on whatever a provider quotes you and the comparison stops being a matter of opinion.
What I'd recommend
Never run outbound before? Pay for a build, not a lead-gen retainer. You need the engine to exist before paying someone to operate it, and you'll learn enough to judge the retainer later.
Engine works but nobody has time? A retainer with a written scope is the right shape.
Just need more rows in a working system? Per lead is fine, as long as you know that's all you're buying.
Tempted by per meeting? Define the term in writing first. Almost every bad engagement I've seen went wrong there, not on price.
If it's specifically cold email you're pricing, I've broken that down separately in what a cold email agency costs and what appointment setting actually costs.