Ask what B2B lead generation costs and you will get three answers that all dodge the question: “it depends”, a retainer figure with nothing attached to it, or a per-lead price for leads nobody defines. Here is the honest version — the full cost stack for each route, and the one number that lets you compare them.
Route one: do it yourself
The founder route looks free and is not. Tools stack up fast: sending platform, data provider, verification, a CRM, warmup — realistically $300–$800 a month before a single reply. The real cost is time: list building, copywriting, deliverability babysitting and reply handling comfortably eat 10–15 hours a week. Price a founder’s hour honestly and DIY is often the most expensive option on this page — and it usually plateaus the moment the calendar fills with the very meetings it produced.
Route two: hire in-house
A capable SDR runs $50–70k base in most Western markets, $80–110k fully loaded once you add commission, tools, data and management time. Add three to six months of ramp before consistent pipeline, and the uncomfortable industry truth that average SDR tenure is barely past a year — meaning you may be re-hiring right as the seat becomes productive. In-house makes sense at scale; as the first move, it is a $100k experiment. We break the full comparison down in SDR vs outsourcing.
Route three: an agency
Agencies range from $2k a month list-sellers to $15k+ retainers. The spread is not about price, it is about what you are buying: raw contact lists at one end, a built and operated channel — infrastructure, copy, reply handling, booked meetings — at the other. The questions that expose the difference take ten minutes to ask and can save you a six-month mistake.
The only number that lets you compare: cost per qualified lead
Retainers, salaries and tool stacks are inputs. The output is a qualified lead — a buyer who matches your profile and showed up. Across the channels we run against paid media for high-ticket brands, the pattern in our case studies is consistent: Google Ads lands between roughly $340 and $610 per qualified lead depending on the vertical, Meta Ads slightly under it, and a properly built cold email channel lands at roughly a tenth of paid. That gap is not a rounding error. It is the difference between a marketing budget and a margin.
Do the math on your own numbers
Plug your average order value, close rate and planned spend into our ROI calculator. It shows revenue, break-even, and what the same leads would have cost you through paid — in about thirty seconds, with your figures instead of anyone’s claims.
Whatever route you choose, demand the same unit of account: what does one qualified lead cost, and who carries the risk if they never arrive?