$4,000per month.

The least expensive option, and the most demanding. You save on salary risk and gain contract flexibility. But a fractional SDR is exactly that — an SDR, not an SDR manager. You still own all the management: reviewing calls, editing scripts, checking conversion rates, fixing targeting, running coaching. And you need all the infrastructure: dialing platform, recording, transcription, reporting, list sourcing, contact enrichment.

The cost looks lower. The time cost is the same as a full-time hire, because the management burden doesn’t scale with the SDR’s hours.

What's missing: management, infrastructure, strategy

Same price range as Spright. Completely different output. There’s real technical sophistication here — signal gathering, intent data, Clay workflows, personalized sequences. Beautiful messages. Compelling subject lines.

Almost no one responds. Months pass. The metrics look active: emails sent, open rates, reply rates. But the pipeline is empty. And critically — you learn nothing about what your buyers actually think, because you never had a conversation with one.

What's missing: conversations, pipeline, intelligence

The realistic marketing bet for small tech companies. SEO is too noisy and too slow for a startup. So you run ads. You spend tens of thousands over months. You get impressions. You get clicks. You get very little information about what’s actually resonating or what your buyers think about your positioning, your competitors, or your category.

Meanwhile, Spright is talking to your market on day one, learning what language lands, what objections come up, and what buyers care about — and getting meetings while doing it.

What's missing: intelligence, conversations, speed-to-signal

The closest to what Spright does — and the reason Spright exists. These agencies can manage execution. Some of them manage it well. But they’re built for commodity markets: real estate, appointments, 3PL, logistics, packaging — products where the buyer already understands the category and the script doesn’t need to be that smart.

When the sale requires nuance — a new category, a technically complex product, high-level buyers who need to understand something they’ve never heard of — the strategy layer breaks. B2B tech startups are almost always selling something disruptive. The managed agencies at double the price are optimized for a different kind of sale.

What's missing: strategic depth for disruptive markets

The highest total cost and the longest ramp. Even a good SDR fails without daily management: checking conversion rates, checking conversation rates, editing scripts, making sure lists are right, making sure messaging is right. That daily execution management is the real cost — and it’s the part nobody budgets for.

A sales leader with eight AEs and three sales engineers doesn’t want to add this to her day. A founder with 20 other priorities can’t give it the attention it needs. The management is where the value of a sales development program lives, and it’s the line item that’s invisible until you’re doing it every morning.

Plus the infrastructure: dialing platform, recording and transcription, reporting dashboards, list sourcing, contact enrichment. A full-time hire needs all of it before they make a single call. First-year total cost: $120,000–$180,000 with 3–6 months before meaningful output.

What's missing: nothing, in theory. In practice — the management capacity, the infrastructure, and the 3–6 months you don’t have