Almost every managed cold email arrangement has the same three parts, whether or not the proposal separates them. Once you can see the parts, comparing two quotes gets much easier.
1. A build fee
Setting up outbound is real work that happens once: buying sending domains, provisioning and authenticating mailboxes, running warmup, defining the targeting, pulling and verifying the first list, and writing the offer and sequences.
An agency that charges nothing for this is either doing it badly or recovering the cost by locking you into a long retainer. Ours starts at $2,500 and the machine is documented, so a client who leaves can run it themselves.
2. A monthly management fee
This is the ongoing labour: daily sending and monitoring, fresh prospect data every month, testing, deliverability management, reply handling, booking, and reporting.
The reason we start at $2,000 a month rather than lower is arithmetic rather than positioning. Underneath a managed programme sit list and data costs, verification credits, sending software, a person reading replies every business day, and the deliverability work that stops a domain going bad. Below roughly this number, one of those things is quietly not happening — usually the reply handling, which is the part that actually produces meetings.
A quote well under that is worth taking seriously as a signal. Ask who reads the replies and how quickly, and ask what happens when a sending domain starts slipping. The answers tell you what you are buying.
3. Infrastructure, which should be billed at cost
Domains, mailboxes and verification credits are pass-through expenses. They scale with your volume, so they cannot sensibly be inside a flat fee, and there is no good reason for an agency to mark them up.
Ask for them itemised and ask for the expected monthly figure before launch. An agency that will not separate them is either marking them up or does not know what they cost.
What should be included that often is not
Two things are worth checking specifically.
- Reply handling. Plenty of "managed" services stop at sending and forward you an inbox. Sending is the cheap half. Someone reading every reply the same business day, categorising it, answering the interested ones and pushing them to a booking link is where meetings come from.
- The website. Prospects who have never heard of you search your company name before they reply. If the page they find is thin, the campaign underperforms for reasons no amount of copy testing will surface. We include the website in management for exactly this reason — it is part of the campaign, not a separate project.
What you should expect to commit
Outbound cannot be judged in a month. Warmup takes two weeks before anything sends, and follow-ups do most of the work, so the first meaningful data arrives well after the first send.
A minimum term is reasonable, and so is asking what it actually covers. Ours is three months of live sending — management is not billed during warmup, so the minimum buys you three months of real campaign data rather than three months that include setup.
Questions worth asking any agency
- Are you sending from my domain or separate ones? (The answer should be separate.)
- Who reads the replies, and how fast?
- Is infrastructure billed at cost, itemised?
- Whose name are the domains, mailboxes and lists registered in?
- What happens to all of it if I stop?
The last two matter more than they sound. Your sending domains and lists are business assets. They should be in your name from day one, and they should stay with you.