Full research
Where Our Cost Numbers Come From
Why we compare against a hire, not a stack of subscriptions
What we do is human labor: real people reading, replying, qualifying, confirming, and following up. The honest comparison is what it would cost you to put a person in that seat and keep them there. Software costs are included below where you would still have to buy them on top of the salary.
Appointment setter / inside sales rep salary: $3,800 to $5,200 / mo
Posted-salary and reported-pay ranges for appointment setter and inside sales representative roles, from Glassdoor, PayScale, and ZipRecruiter (2026). We use the full-time monthly equivalent, before payroll burden. That maps to roughly $46,000 to $62,000 per year depending on market.
Payroll taxes and basic benefits: $800 to $1,800 / mo
Standard employer cost guidance: employer-side payroll taxes run roughly 10 to 15% of wages (FICA, Medicare, federal and state unemployment), plus paid time off and workers' compensation. Applied to the salary range above.
Health insurance, if you offer it: add $500 to $600 / mo per employee
Average small-group employer contribution per covered employee in 2026. We show this separately rather than folding it in, because whether to offer coverage is a real decision a contractor makes when sizing this role.
Cost-per-hire and turnover: $4,700+ direct, $23,000+ all-in
SHRM 2026 recruiting benchmarking data puts average direct cost-per-hire at $4,683 to $5,475. Total replacement cost, including lost productivity and ramp-up time, typically runs 50 to 100%+ of annual salary for an entry-level role, which on a $46,000 to $50,000 salary is $23,000 to $50,000+ each time the seat turns over. This is episodic, not monthly, so we keep it out of the monthly total and call it out on its own.
SMS platform, phone system, and carrier fees: $150 to $500 / mo
Published 2026 list pricing across leading platforms in this category, at contractor-scale message volume, including per-segment carrier fees and registration costs.
Homeowner data and list sourcing: $400 to $900 / mo
Published 2026 per-record pricing across leading providers in this category, at the record volume needed to keep one trade in one service area supplied.
Review request and reputation tooling: $300 to $500 / mo per location
Published 2026 pricing across the leading national reputation-management platforms, at single-location pricing. Multi-location plans price higher per account.
Management time: 5 to 10 hrs / week
Owner or manager time to recruit, train, script, monitor response times, and cover the seat when it is empty. We do not assign a dollar figure to it, because your hour is worth whatever your next job is worth.
How we cite
Named Sources and Described Categories
Where a number comes from labor-market research, we name the source: Glassdoor, PayScale, and ZipRecruiter for pay ranges, and SHRM for cost-per-hire and turnover. Those are research organizations, and you should be able to go check our math.
Where a number comes from a category of software you could buy, we describe the category and the real published range instead of naming products. Same reason we say "five or six companies" instead of naming the lead resellers: the point is the price, not the pitch.
We show ranges rather than single figures because wages and platform costs vary by market. We would rather show a range we can defend than a number that flatters us.