A done-for-you service sells hours and judgement, not software. Published prices run from about $397 a month at the low end to $25,000 for full agency retainers, and the difference is almost entirely how much of the thinking is yours. Decide what you want to keep before you compare quotes.
Disclosure: we sell one of these. Signl's managed service is $2,000 a month (founding clients $1,000 plus $250 per booked meeting), so treat the recommendation accordingly. Every competitor figure below comes from that company's own published page with the date it was read, and the case for not buying any managed service is made properly rather than for form.
Key facts
- The price range in this market is roughly 60x between the cheapest and the most expensive published offers.
- What you are buying is attention per account, and the cheap end of the market cannot provide much of it.
- A guaranteed meeting count is a promise about someone else's buying behaviour.
- Content and listening belong together. A service that only sends is working with half the inputs.
- Ownership of the ICP, the leads and the posts should be in writing before the first collection.
What "done for you" actually contains
Six components. Providers bundle them differently, and the gaps between quotes are usually a component someone left out rather than a price difference.
| Component | What it means in practice | Commonly missing at the low end |
|---|---|---|
| ICP and positioning | An hour of real work defining who you sell to and what you lead with | Often a form rather than a conversation |
| Sourcing | Choosing and pruning which profiles, competitors and topics to watch | Frequently fixed at setup and never revisited |
| Qualification | Judging each person against the ICP, with a reason | Often replaced by a job-title filter |
| Content | Posts and lead magnets that bring the right people into the comments | Usually absent, and it is the biggest gap |
| Outreach | Sequences sent from your accounts, replies handled | Present, and usually the only thing present |
| Reporting | What was sourced, what replied, what booked, what changed | A volume dashboard rather than a decision record |
The fourth row is the one to interrogate. Engagement-led outbound depends on there being engagement, and a service that watches competitors but never helps you post is harvesting other people's audiences only. That ceiling arrives in month three.
What the market charges
Figures as published on each provider's own pages, read 24 October 2026. Prices in USD. Check them before committing budget; everyone in this market changes pricing.
| Provider or model | Published price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Cleverly, organic outreach | From $397 a month | Targeting, outreach, follow-ups and booking. A $397 to $697 range appears on their pricing guide |
| Signl, Signal Engine | $2,000 a month; founding clients $1,000 + $250 per booked meeting | Content, sourcing, qualification, outreach, replies and booking. Ours |
| SalesBread | $3,000 a month plus a one-time setup fee | Done-for-you LinkedIn lead generation. Their page states roughly 20 or more qualified leads a month and a guarantee of one lead or booked meeting a day, terms applying |
| Agency retainers, market range | $3,000 to $25,000 a month | Cleverly's cost guide, published 11 August 2025 and modified 3 June 2026, citing Callbox |
| Pay per appointment | $50 to $500 a qualified meeting | Same guide |
| Pay per lead | $20 to $200 a lead | Same guide |
Two observations about that table that matter more than the numbers.
The pay-per-meeting models transfer risk and distort incentives at the same time. You pay only for results, which sounds strictly better, and the provider is then optimising for anything that counts as a meeting. Read the definition of qualified very carefully, because it is the entire contract.
The low end is a volume product. At $397 a month nobody is reading your buyers' comments and deciding which five people deserve a considered message this week. That is not a criticism of the price, it is a description of what it buys.
The in-house comparison, done honestly
The software is cheap. Here is the real arithmetic for a team running this themselves, with every figure either published or clearly labelled as your own input.
| Line | Monthly cost |
|---|---|
| Listening and qualification. Signl Self-serve, 25 sources, 500 verified emails | $99, or $79 billed yearly |
| Sales Navigator Core, if you also need list building | $119.99 per seat, LinkedIn's published price on 24 October 2026 |
| An email sequencer or a LinkedIn sender | Low tens to low hundreds, depending on the tool |
| Your own time | 4 to 8 hours a week of someone competent |
Software lands somewhere around $200 to $400 a month. The time is the real line, and it is the line people leave out of this comparison in both directions: agencies leave it out to make retainers look expensive, and software vendors leave it out to make themselves look cheap.
So the honest question is not software against retainer. It is: do you have four to eight hours a week of someone who knows your market, and would you rather they spent it on this? If yes, run it yourself. The method is in LinkedIn social listening for B2B sales and the tool field is compared in LinkedIn engagement tracking tools.
The three questions that decide it
1. Do you know who you sell to, precisely? If not, no service can qualify for you, and you will spend the first two months discovering that through their output. Fix the ICP first; it is ten minutes of thinking and the whole thing rests on it.
2. Who is going to answer the replies? This is the most common failure, and it is on the client side. Replies arrive, nobody owns them, and by week six the pipeline is a folder of unanswered emails. If you buy a service, buy one that handles replies, or assign the person who will.
3. Is anyone at your company willing to post? Engagement-led outbound without your own content means harvesting other audiences only. Services that write posts for your approval solve this; services that do not leave the best source unavailable.
What you give up
The honest costs of outsourcing, including for our own service.
- Market feel. Reading your buyers' comments yourself teaches you things no report contains. The first month of doing it by hand is genuinely valuable education, and we would tell a founder to do that before buying anything, ours included.
- Speed of iteration. An internal change to the ICP happens in ten minutes. The same change through a provider takes a cycle.
- Voice. Someone else writing in your name is a real risk, and it is managed by approval rather than eliminated. Any provider who does not route posts to you for approval before publishing is a provider to decline.
- Lock-in through knowledge. After six months the provider knows your market better than your new hire will. Ask what leaves with them.
What to ask before signing
Nine questions. The answers separate the market faster than the price does.
- How many sources will you watch for us, and who decides which?
- Will you show me the actual comments behind the people you send?
- What is your process when a person we think is unqualified gets contacted?
- Do you write content, and do we approve before publishing?
- Whose sending accounts and domains are used?
- What happens to the lead data when we leave, and in what format?
- Which tools are in the stack, and do we keep access to them?
- What is the notice period?
- What did you drop last month because it was not working?
The last one is the best question in the list. A provider who can name something they stopped doing is running a process. A provider whose answer is that everything is working is running a report.
What ours includes, concretely
Signl's managed service is called Signal Engine: $2,000 a month, or $1,000 a month plus $250 per booked meeting for founding clients, onboarding fee waived, month to month. As published on our done for you page:
- LinkedIn content on our pillar playbook: posts and lead magnets, written by our team from your calls and notes, sent to you to approve before anything goes out.
- Up to 75 sources watched, chosen and pruned with you.
- Verified work emails included, with no separate data bill.
- Every opener written and read by a person before it goes out.
- Outreach run end to end, 400 to 600 people a month, from your own sending accounts.
- Replies handled and meetings booked into your calendar.
- A monthly report: who replied, what was booked, what we pruned and what we added.
Note what is not there: a guaranteed meeting count. We do not publish one, and we think a provider who does is pricing a promise they cannot keep.
When to buy the $99 plan instead of this. If you have someone in the team who will spend a few hours a week on it, and you want the market feel, run Self-serve and keep the $898 a month. We would rather say that here than three months into a managed engagement.
Limits
- Nobody can promise pipeline. Not us, not an agency. A good provider makes contact with better-chosen people more often; what they do next is theirs.
- Only public engagement is available. No follower lists, no connections, no post viewers, through any service.
- Automated collection is contractually contested. LinkedIn's User Agreement section 8.2 prohibits scraping and bot access (read 24 October 2026). If a provider does this on your behalf, that decision is being made for you, which belongs in the contract. The separate data protection question, including lawful basis for contacting people, is in GDPR and B2B prospecting. This is not legal advice.
- Published prices move. Everything quoted here carries its read date for that reason.
- Agencies: this article is written for buyers. The delivery-side version, including the source budget maths and reporting that renews retainers, is LinkedIn lead generation for agencies.
- Software is the third option. If the real question is whether to hire, buy an AI SDR or change who you contact, that comparison is AI SDR vs human SDR vs signal-based prospecting.
