Cost Per Lead Calculator
Add your tools, your ad spend and the hours you actually put in, and see what one qualified lead costs. The hourly line is the one that usually changes the answer.
Everything you pay monthly to find and contact people.
Leave at 0 if you do not run ads.
A virtual assistant, an agency retainer, a freelancer.
Searching, writing, following up. Be honest here.
What an hour of your time is worth. This is the line most people leave out.
People who replied and actually fit what you sell.
Cash out
$120
Your time
$1,200
Cost per lead
$165
Your hours are the biggest line here, at 91% of the total. The subscriptions are not what this costs you.
The line almost everyone forgets
Most cost per lead figures are wrong in the same direction, because they only count the invoices.
A founder doing outreach personally will tell you it costs about $120 a month, meaning the subscriptions. Then they spend 5 hours a week searching, writing and chasing, which at any honest rate is several times the software bill. The work did not become free because nobody sent an invoice for it.
Put a rate on the hour even if you never bill one. It does not have to be your client rate. Use what you would pay someone competent to do the same job, and the total starts reflecting the real trade you are making between doing this and doing something else.
Then be strict about the denominator. Connections are not leads and list rows are not leads. A qualified lead replied and fits what you sell, and counting anything looser produces a flattering number you cannot act on.
What to compare the number against
A cost per lead only means something next to two other numbers, and both of them are yours.
The first is what a customer is worth. If a closed deal brings $4,000 and you close 1 lead in 10, then $400 a lead is break even and $150 is a good business. There is no universal target, and any article quoting one is describing somebody else's economics.
The second is how the number moves with volume. Software costs the same whether you contact 20 people or 200, but hours scale almost linearly, so a manual process gets more expensive per lead exactly when it starts working. That is the point where teams either hire or automate.
If the reply rate is what is hurting rather than the cost, the fix is upstream. Tighten who you approach with the ideal customer profile template, then improve what you send with the connection request message generator and the cold message templates. Both cost nothing and move the denominator, which is the half of the equation you control. See what LinkedGrow costs or browse the rest of the free tools.
How do you calculate cost per lead?
Add every monthly cost that produces leads, including tools, ads, people you pay and the value of your own hours, then divide by the number of qualified leads. Leaving your time out is what makes manual prospecting look free. This free LinkedGrow calculator adds that line back in.
Questions about cost per lead
Everything the tool does not say on its own.
Write one line about what you sell and we will answer honestly.
Email us directlyAdd everything you spend to produce leads in a month, then divide by the number of qualified leads that came out. The part people skip is their own time. An hour spent prospecting has a rate attached, and leaving it out makes manual outreach look free when it is usually the largest line.
A qualified lead, meaning someone who replied and fits what you sell. Counting raw connections or list rows makes the number look good and tells you nothing. If you would not put it in the pipeline, leave it out of the count.
It depends entirely on what a customer is worth to you. The number to compare against is your own: if a closed deal is worth $4,000 and you close 1 lead in 10, anything under $400 a lead is profitable. Judge the ratio rather than the absolute figure.
Because the denominator is small and the numerator is mostly fixed. A month with 4 replies instead of 8 doubles the cost with no change in effort. Average across a quarter before drawing conclusions, and treat a single bad month as noise.
No. It runs entirely in your browser, there is no account and nothing is stored or transmitted. You can close the tab and the numbers are gone, which is why there is no signup asking for them.
Take the hours out and see what changes.
LinkedGrow runs the searching, the invitations and the follow-ups from your own LinkedIn account on a fixed monthly price, so the line that dominated your calculation stops growing with your volume.
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