What to Charge for Lead Generation (Four Pricing Models, Honestly Compared)

Pricing a lead generation service is harder than pricing design or development, because you are selling an outcome that depends partly on the client. They control the follow-up, the offer, and whether anyone answers the phone. Price it as though you control all of it and you will lose money on the clients who do not.

Four models, what each actually costs you, and how to find your floor before quoting.

Work out your floor first#

You cannot price anything until you know what one delivered lead costs you. Most people guess, and the guess is always low, because they count the tool subscription and forget the hours.

Take a real month:

Cost	Example
Data and tooling — collection, verification, sending platform	£120
Mailboxes and domains	£40
Your time building and qualifying lists	6 hrs
Your time on copy, sending and follow-up	10 hrs
Your time on replies and booking	6 hrs
Total hours	22

At £50 an hour that is £1,100 of time plus £160 of tooling, so £1,260 a month. If that work produces 400 contacts and converts at the typical outbound rates — say 12 positive replies and 8 booked calls — your cost is about £105 per positive reply and £158 per booked call.

Now you have a floor, and three things become obvious:

• Tooling is noise. It is 13% of the cost. Choosing a cheaper tool that produces a worse list is a false economy of a spectacular kind, because the hours are the expensive part and a bad list wastes all of them.
• The hours are the product. Anything that cuts list-building or reply-handling time changes your margin directly.
• Volume improves the margin sharply, because the setup hours are mostly fixed. The second 400 contacts in the same niche cost far less than the first.

Do this arithmetic with your own numbers before reading the rest. Every model below is priced off that floor.

Model 1: monthly retainer#

You charge a fixed monthly fee for a defined amount of activity — so many contacts, so many campaigns, an agreed reporting rhythm.

Price it on: your floor plus margin. If a niche costs you £1,260 a month to run, £2,000–£2,500 is a normal retainer, and the second client in the same niche is far more profitable than the first because the research is done.

Suits: clients who understand marketing spend, and any market where the sales cycle is long enough that leads and revenue are separated by months.

Advantages: predictable for both sides, and the only model that survives a bad month without a fight. You are paid for the process, which is the thing you actually control.

The risk: you carry the performance expectation without the performance pricing. Mitigate it by defining the deliverable in activity terms — "400 qualified contacts, verified, contacted, with replies routed to you within one working day" — and by reporting on leading indicators weekly, not on revenue monthly.

Do not offer a retainer with an implied lead guarantee. That is pay-per-lead pricing with retainer risk, which is the worst of both.

Model 2: pay per lead#

You are paid a fixed amount per lead delivered, against an agreed definition.

Price it on: your cost per positive reply, times two to three. If a positive reply costs you £105, £250–£350 a lead is a working range for a service business. In markets where a client is worth five figures, higher.

Suits: trades and local services who think in jobs rather than in marketing budgets, and clients who have been burned by an agency retainer before.

Advantages: the easiest model to sell. The client's risk is visible and bounded, and the conversation is about a number they can compare to their job value.

The traps, and they are real:

• Definition disputes. "A lead" has to be written down in painful detail: what counts, what does not, what happens with duplicates, what happens when the client does not call back for four days and the lead goes cold. Every unhappy pay-per-lead relationship ends in this argument.
• You carry all the risk. A dud month means you worked for nothing. In a market you have not run before, that is a genuine possibility.
• The incentive drifts toward volume. Paid per lead, the rational move is looser qualification. That is the exact opposite of what makes outbound work, and clients notice within two months.

If you use this model, charge a setup fee — the first month is where all the research cost sits, and you should not be funding a client's market test out of pocket.

Model 3: pay per appointment#

Same idea, further down the funnel: you are paid when a qualified prospect actually books.

Price it on: cost per booked call, times two and a half to four. From the example above, £158 becomes £400–£600 an appointment.

Suits: high-value services — commercial contracts, professional services, B2B software — where one closed deal is worth thousands.

Advantages: the cleanest definition of the four. An appointment either happened or it did not, and a calendar entry is difficult to argue with.

The traps: no-shows, which you must define up front — the standard is that you are paid for the booked appointment and offer a replacement for a no-show, rather than not being paid. And the qualification bar, which needs to be agreed in writing before the first booking, not after a client rejects one.

This model also exposes you to a client's own weaknesses. If they cancel, reschedule and turn up late, your appointments will not convert and the relationship sours over something that was never yours.

Model 4: revenue share or commission#

You take a percentage of the revenue your leads produce.

Price it on: 10–20% of first contract value is common; recurring revenue shares run lower and longer.

Suits: almost nobody at the start, and it is worth being blunt about why.

The problems: you have no visibility of what closed. Attribution is contested by default. You are paid last, sometimes months later. And your income depends entirely on how good the client's sales process is, which you cannot see and cannot fix.

When it does work: an established relationship where you already know the client's close rate, one product with a clear price, and access to their CRM. Then it can pay better than any other model, because you are capturing the upside of your own work.

For a new relationship, it is a way of doing unpaid work for a business whose competence you cannot yet assess.

Comparison at a glance#

	Retainer	Per lead	Per appointment	Rev share
Who carries risk	Client	You	You	You, entirely
Ease of selling	Medium	Easy	Easy	Easy to pitch, hard to collect
Definition disputes	Rare	Frequent	Occasional	Constant
Predictable income	Yes	Partly	Partly	No
Margin at volume	Best	Good	Good	Variable
Right for a first client	Yes	Yes, with a setup fee	Yes	No

The hybrid most people end up at#

After a few clients, the shape that tends to survive is:

A setup fee, a lower retainer, and a performance element.

For example: £750 to set up — research, list, domains, warm-up, copy — then £900 a month for the activity, plus £100 per booked appointment above an agreed baseline.

It works because each part is priced against what it actually is. The setup fee covers the front-loaded cost that ruins pure per-lead pricing. The retainer covers the process, which is what you genuinely control. The performance element gives the client the alignment they are asking for without transferring the whole risk to you.

Five things to put in writing#

Whatever the model, these prevent the disputes that end otherwise-good relationships:

1. The definition of a lead, with examples of what does not count.
2. Who owns the data. You built the list; say explicitly whether the client keeps it if they leave.
3. Response time expectations on their side. Leads decay in hours. If the client takes three days to call back, results will be poor and it will not be your fault — but it will look like it.
4. What happens in month one. Warm-up means the first three or four weeks are setup, not sending. Say so before you start, or you will be explaining it while a client is asking about results. The reason is in the deliverability guide.
5. A minimum term of three months. Outbound cannot be judged in four weeks — see the arithmetic in getting your first ten clients.

Raising prices#

The first three clients are priced by nerves; nothing to be done about it. After that:

• Raise the price for new clients only, and leave existing ones alone until renewal. This is the least painful mechanism there is.
• Raise it when you are turning work away, not when you feel you deserve it. Demand is the signal.
• Charge more for niches you have already researched. Counter-intuitive, and correct: you deliver faster and better in a market you know, and that is worth more to the client, not less.
• Charge for the outcome's value, not your hours. A booked appointment worth £8,000 to a commercial roofer is not the same product as one worth £300 to a salon, even when the work is identical. That difference is exactly why choosing the niche is a pricing decision as much as a marketing one.

FAQ#

How much should I charge for lead generation per month?#

Work out your monthly cost to run one niche — tooling plus hours — and price at roughly 1.6 to 2 times it. For a solo operator running one campaign, that usually lands between £1,500 and £3,000 a month, with the second client in the same niche being significantly more profitable.

Is pay per lead better than a retainer?#

It is easier to sell and riskier to deliver. Pay per lead transfers all the performance risk to you, and it invites disputes about what counts as a lead. It works when you have run the niche before and know your conversion rates; for a new market, a retainer or a hybrid with a setup fee is safer.

What is a reasonable price per lead?#

Two to three times your own cost per positive reply, adjusted for what a client is worth in that market. A lead for a service where jobs are worth £300 cannot be priced like one where contracts are worth £20,000, even though the work to produce it is nearly identical.

Should I offer a guarantee?#

Guarantee activity, not outcomes — a defined number of qualified, verified contacts approached and replies routed within a working day. Outcome guarantees depend on the client's follow-up, offer and close rate, none of which you control.

How long before a client should expect results?#

Three to four weeks of setup and domain warm-up before meaningful sending, then four to six weeks of sending before the numbers mean anything. Set that expectation before the contract is signed, because it is the single most common source of an early cancellation.