Here's the trap. You price the sequencer, tell your founder fifty dollars a month, and start setting things up. Then you learn you need separate domains, and each domain needs mailboxes, and the mailboxes need warming, and none of that was on the page you budgeted from.
The real floor to send 6,000 emails a month is about $73.67, not $39. That's $0.0123 an email, and the sequencing tool is 53% of it.
Buying a sequencer is like buying a car stereo. The unit is priced clearly, and it doesn't play anything until somebody has fitted speakers, run the wiring and cut a hole in the dashboard.
The itemised floor at 6,000 emails a month
Smartlead's Base plan is $39 a month and caps sending at 6,000. To actually send 6,000 you need somewhere to send them from.
| Line | Rate | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| Sequencer (Smartlead Base) | $39/mo, 6,000 sends | $39.00 |
| 10 mailboxes (Mailforge) | $3/mailbox, billed yearly | $30.00 |
| 4 domains (Mailforge) | $14/year each, once | $4.67 |
| Total | $73.67 | |
| Per email | $0.0123 |
Ten mailboxes isn't a choice, incidentally. Mailforge states plainly that it sells a minimum of ten slots, so ten is the floor whether you need them or not.
Two things that table leaves out on purpose, because they're optional rather than structural: SSL and domain masking at $2 a domain monthly or $6 yearly, and warmup if your sequencer doesn't bundle it. MailReach is $25.
What happens when you scale?
The ratio inverts, and this is the part that catches teams planning a year ahead.
Sequencer pricing rises in steps and fairly gently. Mailbox pricing rises linearly with sending volume, because volume means more identities and identities are billed per unit.
Maildoso's published ladder shows the shape: $2.50 a mailbox at 30 mailboxes, $0.75 at 300, and $0.49 at 1,000. The unit price falls, but 1,000 mailboxes is still $499 a month, against a sequencer that has not tripled.
So at entry volume the software is half the bill. Somewhere above roughly 30,000 sends a month the infrastructure costs more than the software, and it keeps pulling away. If you're modelling growth, model the mailbox line, not the subscription.
The line I could not price, and why that matters
Plenty of teams run mailboxes on Google Workspace rather than a specialist provider. I could not verify what that costs.
workspace.google.com/pricing served this machine prices in Indian rupees, with no US business tier visible. Rather than convert a foreign-currency figure and present it as a dollar price, the honest record is that it is geo-served and was not read.
That's worth knowing beyond this post. If you're pricing infrastructure from a different country to the one you sell into, the number you're reading may not be the number your card is charged. It's the same class of problem as the pricing pages whose numbers aren't offers, arriving from a different direction.
Why does nobody publish this arithmetic?
Because neither side of the market has both halves.
Sequencing vendors don't sell mailboxes. Mailbox vendors don't sell sequencing. Each publishes an accurate price for its own layer, and the sum is nobody's job. It isn't concealment so much as a gap nobody is paid to close.
Which is why every roundup of cheap cold email tools ranks on the sequencer sticker. That ranking is real and it is answering a narrower question than the one you asked, because the cheapest sequencer does not make the cheapest stack.
How to budget it properly
Four steps, in this order, and it takes about twenty minutes.
- Start from your send volume, not from a tool. Emails per month is the only input that determines everything else. Every other decision follows from it, and choosing a sequencer first means choosing a cap first by accident.
- Work out mailboxes before software. Practitioner convention is a few hundred sends per mailbox per month; divide your volume by that and you have your mailbox count, which is your biggest variable line.
- Then pick the sequencer whose cap fits. All 12 in this category publish a price and all 12 sell self-serve, so this is the one step you can price in five minutes.
- Add verification separately and treat it as consumption. NeverBounce is $49 and Clearout is $23 at entry, but both meter by list size, so this line grows with your prospecting rather than your sending.
The mechanics of why you need separate domains at all, and what actually keeps mail out of spam, are a different subject and we cover them in the deliverability chapter. This post is only the bill.
So what does cold email really cost?
About $0.0123 an email at the entry floor, and the sequencer you budgeted for is roughly half of that.
The useful reframing is that you aren't buying software with some setup attached. You're buying sending capacity, and the software is one line on it. That's why the $39 and $47 tools sit so close together on price and why choosing between them matters far less than choosing how many mailboxes you run.
Budget the identities first. Everything else is a rounding error until you are sending a great deal more than you probably are.