What a B2B lead actually costs, priced line by line

The number nobody publishes

Ask what a lead costs and you get a range wide enough to drive a bus through. Here is the actual arithmetic for one pass over a Reddit thread, enriching 25 of the people who commented, at the prices suppliers charge.

Reading the post is a fifteenth of a penny. Looking people up is a quarter of a dollar. Enrichment is 99.4% of the bill.

Why that ratio changes what you should optimise

Most of the anxiety in this category goes on scraping: which tool, which platform, how many rows. That anxiety is misdirected. At these prices you could read four times as many posts and it would move your bill by less than a cent.

The lever is how many people you enrich, and more precisely how many of those enrichments come back with anything. A lookup that returns an empty record costs exactly as much as one that returns a job title, a company and a city.

The part that is really expensive

Run the same pass where 40% of lookups return nothing useful. You still paid for all 25. Ten of them bought you an empty object.

That is $0.10 of a $0.2515 bill spent on nothing, and at scale it is the entire difference between a tool being worth running and not. On a thousand passes a month it is $100 for records that do not exist.

Most tools bill you for those ten anyway. It is worth knowing whether yours does, and the way to find out is to compare the credits deducted against the rows that actually came back populated.

Flat rate against per result

One more distinction that matters more than it sounds. Suppliers bill one of two ways:

• Per call: one charge, however many rows come back
• Per result: one charge for every row

Two endpoints return the same Reddit comments. One charges $0.0015 for the call. The other charges $0.0125 for each comment. On a fifty-comment thread that is $0.0015 against $0.625, which is four hundred times the money for identical data.

Nothing on either product page tells you this is the choice you are making. You find out on the invoice.

What to do with this

Three things, in order of how much they will save you.

1. Count your hit rate. Divide populated records by lookups attempted. If you cannot get that number out of your tool, that is itself the answer.
2. Ask what happens on a miss. Some tools charge, some do not. It is usually not on the pricing page.
3. Check the billing unit before the price. A cheap per-result endpoint is more expensive than a dear per-call one on any thread with more than a handful of replies.