The Done-for-You vs in-house SDR math

Why this comparison is harder than it looks

The two most common ways teams compare in-house against Done-for-You are both wrong.

The first wrong comparison is base salary versus monthly retainer. A founder sees a $70,000 base on RepVue and a $6,000 monthly DFY quote, multiplies the retainer by 12, and concludes the in-house option is cheaper. That ignores benefits, tooling, manager time, ramp, and turnover. The real fully-loaded number is roughly 2x the base.

The second wrong comparison is cost-per-meeting at full ramp. An experienced SDR hitting their stride at month 6 does book 8 to 15 meetings per week. The cost per meeting at that point is competitive. But that ignores the first six months, when the same SDR is booking 1 to 4 meetings per week while drawing full salary. Most outbound programs we look at have never had an SDR run a full year past ramp, which means the headline cost-per-meeting was never actually achieved.

The honest comparison is total-cost-of-ownership over a 24-month window, against cost-per-qualified-meeting delivered. That accounts for ramp, churn, and the fact that the meeting quality from a managed program at month 2 is roughly equivalent to the meeting quality from an in-house SDR at month 8. This playbook walks through that math line by line.

Part 1: The full fully-loaded cost of one in-house SDR

The seven cost layers, all of them real, all of them recurring.

Base salary

The most-quoted number, and the only one most teams budget. Bridge Group's 2025 SDR Report puts the median base salary for a U.S. mid-market SDR at $74,000. RepVue's crowdsourced data shows roughly the same band. Geographic premium for San Francisco and New York runs 15 to 25 percent above the median. Remote-first companies tend to anchor closer to the median by hiring nationwide.

By segment:

• SMB SDR (deals under $25,000 ACV): $60,000 to $80,000 base.
• Mid-market SDR ($25,000 to $100,000 ACV): $70,000 to $90,000 base.
• Enterprise BDR ($100,000+ ACV): $80,000 to $100,000 base.

Variable compensation

Standard comp design for an SDR is 70 percent base, 30 percent variable, tied to qualified meetings or accepted opportunities. In budgeting you should assume reps hit 80 to 100 percent of variable at full ramp. Top performers blow past OTE by 20 to 50 percent. For a $100,000 OTE plan, that is $20,000 to $40,000 in actual variable spend.

Benefits and payroll taxes

U.S. fully-loaded burden runs 25 to 30 percent of comp. That covers FICA, FUTA, SUTA, health insurance, 401(k) match, PTO accrual, and workers comp. For a $100,000 cash-comp SDR, this is $25,000 to $30,000.

Tooling

The sales tech stack that makes an SDR functional:

Annual: $4,800 to $13,800 per seat. Underbudgeted at almost every Series A company we have looked at.

Manager overhead

An SDR without a manager regresses to the mean in 60 days. The healthy ratio is one SDR manager per 6 to 10 SDRs. At 8-to-1, each SDR consumes 12.5 percent of a $150,000 manager. Round to $15,000 to $25,000 per SDR per year in manager time.

Below 4 SDRs, you either pay for a fractional manager or the founder or sales VP absorbs the management work. Founder management of an SDR pod is typically 5 to 10 hours per week, which is real opportunity cost we account for in scenario 1 below.

Ramp cost

A new SDR ramps over 4 to 6 months. During ramp they produce 30 to 80 percent of full quota while drawing 100 percent of salary. The lost-output cost:

• Average pay during ramp: $7,500 per month (combined base and accrued variable).
• Average output during ramp: 50 percent of full quota.
• 5-month ramp at 50 percent output: 2.5 months of lost output, or roughly $18,750 per new hire.

Annualized across a 24-month average tenure, ramp adds $9,000 to $10,000 per year per seat to the loaded cost.

Turnover replacement

Annual SDR turnover in B2B SaaS runs 35 to 60 percent. Median tenure is 14 to 24 months. Bridge Group's 2025 numbers put this at 14 months for SDRs and 17 months for BDRs. Every seat gets replaced every 18 to 24 months.

Replacement cost per turn:

• Sourcing and recruiting: $5,000 to $15,000 (recruiter fees, internal recruiter time).
• Onboarding and training: $5,000 to $15,000.
• Productivity gap during vacancy and ramp of replacement: $5,000 to $20,000.

At 50 percent annual turnover, the expected replacement amortizes to $15,000 to $25,000 per seat per year.

The fully-loaded number

Add the layers and the math is unforgiving. The midpoint, weighted to mid-market B2B SaaS, is roughly $150,000 per SDR seat per year. Some teams hit $200,000+ in high-cost cities or with hiring missteps that drag ramp past 6 months. The $70,000 base is a starting point, not the budget.

Part 2: The full cost of a Done-for-You SDR program

A managed SDR program is a service contract that bundles list building, copywriting, sending infrastructure, reply triage, and meeting booking into a monthly fee. The fee structure varies by provider, but the bands are consistent across the category.

What is typically included:

• List building and firmographic enrichment against an agreed-on ICP.
• Secondary sending domains set up, authenticated (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), warmed.
• Copy iteration on the sequence, typically a 4 to 6 step multi-channel flow.
• Sending infrastructure, with deliverability monitoring built in.
• Reply triage: positive replies routed to the client's calendar, negatives suppressed, ambiguous replies escalated to a human.
• Meeting booking onto the AE or founder's calendar.
• Weekly or biweekly reporting against meeting and pipeline targets.

What is typically not included, and worth checking line by line in any contract:

• CRM seat for the client. The client provides the CRM.
• Phone calls. Some programs include a calling layer; many do not.
• LinkedIn touches. Most programs include connection requests but not deep LinkedIn nurture sequences.
• Strategic ICP definition. The provider helps refine; the client owns the choice.

For a like-for-like comparison against one in-house SDR (8 to 15 meetings per week target at full ramp), the Growth tier at $5,000 to $8,000 per month is the right band. Annualized: $60,000 to $96,000.

Part 3: Side-by-side, the honest comparison

The honest reading: DFY wins on year-one cost, time-to-first-meeting, and predictability. In-house wins on long-run unit economics (years 2 to 3, if the SDR stays), on institutional knowledge, and on direct buyer relationships. Neither option dominates the other across every dimension.

Part 4: Break-even and when each option wins

The cost-only break-even is misleading because the two options are not producing identical outputs in month 1. Here is a more useful framing.

The 12-month total-cost-of-ownership view

Assume a goal of 25 qualified meetings per month at full program output.

In-house path:

• Months 1 to 2: Recruiting and onboarding. 0 meetings booked. $25,000 spent (recruiter, salary, tooling).
• Months 3 to 5: Ramp at 30 to 60 percent output. 5 to 15 meetings per month booked. $60,000 spent.
• Months 6 to 12: Full output, 25+ meetings per month. $90,000 spent.
• Year 1 total: roughly $175,000 spent, roughly 200 meetings booked. Cost per meeting: $875.

DFY path:

• Month 1: Domain warmup and list build. 5 to 10 meetings booked. $6,000 spent.
• Months 2 to 12: Steady-state, 20 to 30 meetings per month. $66,000 spent.
• Year 1 total: roughly $72,000 spent, roughly 245 meetings booked. Cost per meeting: $294.

The DFY model wins year 1 cost-per-meeting by roughly 3x. The gap narrows in year 2 because the in-house SDR is past ramp. By year 3, if the SDR has stayed, in-house can pull ahead. But the median SDR tenure is 14 to 24 months, so most year-3 numbers should be discounted by the probability of replacing the seat.

When DFY wins

• Sub-Series-B, no proven repeatable motion. You are still figuring out which ICP, which message, which channel mix works. Hiring an SDR before you know the answer locks you into a 24-month commitment against unknown unit economics. DFY is the right call until the motion is proven.
• Vertical-expansion test. You have a working outbound motion in vertical A and want to test vertical B. DFY lets you run a 90-day test in vertical B without hiring against an unproven hypothesis.
• Hiring uncertainty. The SDR market is competitive. If you cannot reliably hire mid-market SDRs in your geography in under 60 days, the math gets worse fast. DFY removes that risk.
• Cash-constrained burn budget. $6,000 a month is easier to defend in a board deck than $150,000 a year against a 5-month ramp. DFY converts a heavy fixed cost into a variable one.
• Founder still doing outbound personally. Founders running outbound themselves are usually doing it in 5 to 10 hours a week, which is the worst possible allocation of founder time at any stage. DFY frees that time without committing to a hire.
• You do not yet have an SDR manager. Hiring an SDR without a manager produces a 50 percent chance of regression by month 4. If you have no manager and cannot hire one yet, you are not ready to hire SDRs.

When in-house wins

• Post-product-market-fit, repeatable ICP. You know who your buyer is, what message lands, what the conversion rates look like. The work is now compounding skill rather than discovery. SDRs build institutional knowledge that compounds across years.
• Scaling past 4 SDRs. At 4+ SDRs, the per-seat fixed costs (manager, tools, sales ops) get amortized efficiently. Programs at this scale are typically cheaper in-house than across multiple DFY contracts.
• Enterprise sales with multi-stakeholder coordination. Enterprise BDRs doing complex account-based work need access to internal product, customer references, and engineering. That coordination is hard to outsource.
• Direct AE-to-SDR pairing. In a pod model where each AE has a dedicated SDR, the SDR needs deep knowledge of the AE's pipeline, deal preferences, and discovery style. Outsourced SDRs rarely build that depth.
• Long sales cycles where the SDR is the first deep buyer touch. If the SDR conversation has to be 20+ minutes of qualifying discovery, you need a senior SDR you trained yourself. A DFY meeting-booking model targets the calendar handoff, not the discovery call itself.

When both wins

The configuration we see at healthy B2B SaaS between $5M and $30M ARR: in-house SDRs handling the strategic accounts and enterprise tier, DFY running the volume layer for the mid-market and SMB segments. The in-house team builds long-term relationships and account expertise. The DFY layer provides flat-rate, predictable pipeline volume on top.

This is what ReachIQ's Done-for-You program is built for: it sits underneath an existing in-house team as the volume engine, not in place of it. See Meet Your SDR for what that looks like operationally.

Part 5: Three worked scenarios

Scenario 1: Series A B2B SaaS, $4M ARR, 1 AE, founder doing outbound

Setup. Vertical SaaS company at $4M ARR. One AE who closes from inbound demos and warm referrals. Founder runs all outbound personally, spending roughly 7 hours a week on list pulls, sending, and replies. ACV is $24,000. Sales cycle is 45 days. Goal: free founder time and add 15 to 20 qualified meetings per month.

In-house option.

• Hire one mid-market SDR at $80,000 base + $30,000 OTE.
• Fully loaded: $155,000 in year 1.
• Add a fractional SDR manager at $40,000 annualized.
• Total year 1: $195,000.
• Time-to-first-meeting: 75 days (45 days hiring + 30 days ramp).
• Expected meetings booked year 1: 180 to 220.
• Cost per qualified meeting: $885 to $1,083.

DFY option.

• Growth-tier engagement at $6,500 per month.
• Year 1: $78,000.
• Founder time: 1.5 hours per week of review.
• Time-to-first-meeting: 21 days.
• Expected meetings booked year 1: 225 to 290.
• Cost per qualified meeting: $269 to $347.

Decision. At this stage, DFY is the clear answer. The company has not yet proven the outbound motion at scale, the founder is the bottleneck (not the budget), and the cash savings are $117,000 in year 1 against more meetings booked. Revisit at $10M ARR.

Scenario 2: Established agency, $12M revenue, scaling outbound to support 3 AEs

Setup. Digital marketing agency at $12M revenue. Three AEs each handling 8 to 12 active opportunities. ACV is $48,000 annual contract. Sales cycle is 75 days. Currently using one outsourced lead-gen vendor that delivers low-quality leads. Goal: replace the vendor with a predictable 30+ qualified meetings per month engine.

In-house option.

• Hire 2 mid-market SDRs at $80,000 base + $30,000 OTE each.
• Hire 1 SDR manager at $130,000 base + $40,000 OTE.
• Tools and sales ops: $20,000 per year.
• Year 1 fully loaded: $440,000.
• Time-to-first-meeting: 90 days from hiring decision.
• Year 1 meetings booked: 350 to 450.
• Cost per qualified meeting: $977 to $1,257.

DFY option.

• Scale-tier engagement at $11,000 per month.
• Year 1: $132,000.
• Time-to-first-meeting: 21 days.
• Year 1 meetings booked: 360 to 480.
• Cost per qualified meeting: $275 to $366.

Decision. DFY again, but with a clear 12-to-18-month exit path. The agency should plan to in-source the SDR function once it has run DFY for 6 months and has clear data on which segments, messages, and channels work. The DFY layer becomes a playbook the in-house team inherits.

Scenario 3: Fintech Series B, $18M ARR, scaling from 4 to 8 SDRs

Setup. B2B fintech at $18M ARR. Already has 4 SDRs in-house, an SDR manager, an enablement function. ACV is $85,000. Sales cycle is 90 days. The existing program is producing 110+ qualified meetings per month with a 2.4 percent meeting-to-opportunity-to-closed-won rate. Goal: scale outbound output by 70 percent in the next 9 months.

In-house option.

• Hire 4 additional mid-market SDRs at $85,000 base + $35,000 OTE.
• Year 1 fully loaded for the 4 new seats: $620,000.
• Time-to-first-meeting from new seats: 90 to 120 days.
• Year 1 incremental meetings: 600 to 800.
• Cost per qualified incremental meeting: $775 to $1,033.

DFY option.

• Scale-tier engagement at $12,000 per month.
• Year 1: $144,000.
• Time-to-first-meeting: 21 days.
• Year 1 incremental meetings: 400 to 560.
• Cost per qualified incremental meeting: $257 to $360.

Decision. Mixed. At this scale, the in-house path produces more meetings and builds more institutional capacity, which matters at this stage of the business. But the DFY option captures 6 months of incremental pipeline that the in-house path simply cannot deliver because of ramp. The right answer is usually both: hire the 4 SDRs and contract DFY to cover the ramp gap. The DFY engagement winds down in month 7 as the new SDRs come online.

Part 6: A decision framework you can run in 30 minutes

Answer these eight questions before you decide.

1. Is your ICP defined and validated? If you cannot name the 500 companies you want to talk to and the 2 to 3 titles inside each, you are not ready to hire an SDR. DFY can help you find the ICP. In-house cannot.
2. Have you closed at least 10 deals from outbound-style motion? If not, you are still searching for the message. DFY runs faster experiments. Hire when you know the answer.
3. Do you have an SDR manager? If no, and you cannot hire one in 60 days, do not hire SDRs. The 6-to-10-SDR-per-manager ratio is non-negotiable for performance.
4. What is your cost per closed deal threshold? Total acceptable customer acquisition cost divided by close rate gives you the per-meeting budget. If that budget is under $400, DFY is structurally easier to fit.
5. Are you cash-constrained? If 6 months of runway is the difference, $78,000 of DFY is materially less risky than $195,000 of in-house commitment.
6. How fast do you need first results? If you need pipeline this quarter, DFY books first meetings in week 3. In-house books them in month 3.
7. Will the SDR role require deep product knowledge? If meetings require a discovery layer that depends on detailed product or technical context, in-house wins. If meetings are calendar-handoff to an AE, DFY is fine.
8. Are you scaling past 4 SDRs? The per-seat fixed costs amortize favorably above 4 SDRs. Above 4 seats, in-house starts to lead on long-run cost.

If you answer "no" or "uncertain" to 3 or more of the first 5 questions, start with DFY. If you answer "yes" to all 8, you can build in-house with reasonable confidence.

Part 7: The hybrid path most growing companies actually use

The cleanest version of this we see is a phased hand-off:

• Months 1 to 6: DFY only. Use the engagement to validate ICP, prove the message, and document what works. Run weekly reviews against the provider.
• Months 7 to 12: DFY plus first in-house hire. Recruit the first SDR while DFY continues at full volume. The in-house SDR ramps inside the proven motion the DFY engagement built.
• Months 13 to 18: Reduce DFY scope as in-house team grows. DFY covers segments or geographies the in-house team does not yet handle.
• Month 18+: Either exit DFY entirely or keep it as the volume layer underneath the in-house strategic team. Many of our long-running clients keep both indefinitely because the volume layer is structurally cheaper to outsource even at scale.

The trap to avoid: don't bring DFY in for 30 days and then yank it because in-house "should be cheaper." The 30-day window is not enough to learn anything useful. Commit to a quarter, measure against a clear meeting target, and then make the staffing decision with data.

Part 8: What to ask any DFY provider before you sign

Most DFY contracts are sold against meetings-booked promises. The contracts that work in practice are sold against meeting-quality, and the quality is auditable. Questions to ask in the eval call:

• What is your definition of a qualified meeting? The honest answer cites ICP fit, decision-maker presence, and a real expressed problem. Vague answers ("they took the meeting") signal a low-quality book.
• Who owns the sending domains? The answer should be: you (the client). Sending domains tied to the provider's tenancy become a vendor-lock-in problem.
• What is your reply-handling process? Look for: humans on positive replies within 4 business hours, automated suppression of negatives, escalation queue for ambiguous replies. Anything looser produces a leaky pipeline.
• What is your monthly meeting target and what happens if it is missed? Reasonable answer: a clear monthly target, an explicit course-correction process, and a credit or scope adjustment if missed for 2 consecutive months. Avoid contracts with no accountability.
• How do you handle deliverability? Look for: secondary domains per pod, full SPF/DKIM/DMARC setup, weekly monitoring against Google Postmaster Tools and Microsoft SNDS.
• What is the minimum commitment? Avoid anything longer than 3 months. The right contract is month-to-month or quarterly with a 30-day notice.
• Who writes the copy and how much input do I have? Good answer: provider writes, client reviews on a weekly cadence, all sequence variants tested with explicit data.
• Can I see two case studies in my segment? If they can't, you are the test case, and you should price accordingly.

The ReachIQ Done-for-You program publishes its answers to each of these on the page. Compare any provider against that bar.

Part 9: Hidden costs people miss on both sides

In-house costs people miss

• Recruiter fees. 15 to 25 percent of first-year comp for an SDR, or $12,000 to $25,000 per seat if you use an external recruiter. Some teams use internal recruiters, but the cost shows up as recruiter headcount.
• Sales enablement content. Battle cards, objection libraries, call recordings, training materials. 80 to 120 hours of work to build once, then 2 to 4 hours per month to maintain.
• CRM hygiene. Bad CRM data eats 5 to 10 hours per SDR per week. Many teams underestimate the data-ops burden of running an in-house SDR program.
• Founder coaching time. Even with a manager, founders typically spend 2 to 4 hours per month on coaching the senior SDRs. Real cost.

DFY costs people miss

• Onboarding period. The first 30 days of a DFY contract are usually setup, domain warmup, and ICP refinement. Volume is below steady state. Some providers prorate; many do not.
• Client-side review time. Even a well-run DFY engagement needs 1 to 2 hours per week of client-side review (copy approvals, segment refinement, escalated replies). Budget the time.
• CRM integration. If you use Salesforce or HubSpot, the integration setup is real. Cost is 4 to 8 hours of internal IT or RevOps time.
• Meeting-handoff workflow. The DFY provider books on your AEs' calendars. If your AEs no-show or fail to follow up, the book degrades fast. This is your responsibility, not the provider's.

The single most useful number

If you only track one metric across both options, track cost per qualified meeting, measured monthly, fully loaded. For in-house, divide the total cost of the SDR program (people + tools + manager) by the number of qualified meetings booked that month. For DFY, divide the retainer by the number of qualified meetings delivered.

Healthy bands in 2026:

• Strong: Under $300 per qualified meeting.
• Healthy: $300 to $500 per qualified meeting.
• Watch: $500 to $750 per qualified meeting. Investigate ramp, targeting, or sequence quality.
• Broken: Above $750 per qualified meeting. Something structural is wrong.

The number cuts through the philosophical debate. If your in-house team is at $300 per meeting and DFY is at $400, in-house wins on cost. If your in-house team is at $900 per meeting and DFY is at $300, the math is settled. Track it monthly and let the data make the case.

One more thing about year 2

The most underweight factor in this comparison is what happens in year 2 of an in-house seat. If the SDR stays and ramps to full output, the cost-per-meeting drops dramatically. Year 2 in-house can hit $200 per meeting on a $150,000 loaded seat producing 750 meetings. That is competitive with anything.

The catch: only about half of SDRs make it to month 18. Half of the cost-per-meeting projections in board decks assume retention that does not happen. Pricing in a 50 percent probability of replacing the seat halfway through year 2 brings the expected cost back toward the year-1 number.

This is why the hybrid path works. DFY covers the variance. In-house captures the upside if it materializes. Both reduce risk in the way the other cannot.

For pricing on the ReachIQ DFY program, see our pricing page. The model is transparent: a monthly retainer scoped to a clear meeting target, no long contracts, no hidden setup fees. The full delivery model is documented at Done-for-You and Meet Your SDR.

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