Updated September 01, 2025
The agency owner's dilemma: scaling outreach without crushing margins.
As an agency owner, you constantly balance growth with operational efficiency. You need to drive more MQLs for your clients and your own business. However the cost and complexity of your tech stack can quickly eat into your profits. The problem boils down to four key factors:
- High tech stack expenses. Most sales engagement platforms use a per-seat pricing model. Adding a new SDR or client account means adding another license, causing your software costs to scale linearly with your growth. For a tool like Apollo, a five-user team can cost between $3,500 and $6,000 per year just for the seats.
- Poor deliverability. Even with a perfect message, campaigns fail if they land in spam. Industry studies show that around 10.5% of emails go to spam folders, with another 6.4% failing to be delivered at all. This wastes budget and damages your sender reputation.
- Manual effort and complexity. Juggling multiple tools for lead sourcing, email verification, sending, and analytics is inefficient. Your team spends valuable time on technical setup, such as configuring SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records, instead of booking meetings.
- Scaling limitations. Per-seat tools not only increase costs but also create friction. Adding new accounts, warming them up, and managing them across different client campaigns becomes a logistical bottleneck that slows down growth.
Traditional solutions force a trade-off. You can either pay more to scale or limit your outreach to control costs. Neither option leads to sustainable, profitable growth.
How Instantly reimagines agency cold email
Instantly was built to solve the agency scaling dilemma. Its combination of unlimited sending accounts, an automated warm-up network, and a flat-fee pricing model is designed for high-volume, high-deliverability outreach without the punitive costs.
These results are possible because Instantly directly addresses the core pains of agency owners with a different approach:
- Unlimited Email Sending Accounts. Every Instantly plan includes unlimited sending accounts. This separates your software costs from your headcount or client count. You can add 10, 50, ... unlimited new inboxes for new campaigns or clients without paying for more seats. This is the key to scaling cold email with unlimited accounts.
- Massive Deliverability Network. Our Deliverability Network, a pool of over 4.2 million accounts, automatically warms up your sending inboxes. This builds a positive sender reputation with email providers, ensuring your messages land in the primary inbox, not the spam folder.
- Integrated B2B Lead Database. SuperSearch gives you access to a database of over 450M verified B2B contacts You can find, enrich, and contact your ideal prospects without paying for a separate lead-sourcing tool like ZoomInfo or LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
- AI-Powered Personalization. B2B decision-makers place a high premium on personalization, making generic templates ineffective. Instantly's AI CoPilot helps you write entire sequences and personalized first lines at scale, improving reply rates without adding hours of manual work.
The Instantly ROI Calculator: quantify your impact
Stop guessing your cold email ROI. Here's an example scenario of an agency with a team of 25, you can map to your own agency. The exact uplift on MQLs depends on a lot of factors specific to your agency. These figures are rough estimates based on historical data we've seen.
Getting a baseline
| Item | Value | How it’s calculated |
|---|---|---|
| Current monthly software cost | $395 | Input (typical seat bundle). Per‑user tools price per seat, using Apollo |
| Instantly monthly cost | $97 | Hypergrowth plan. Includes unlimited email accounts |
| Sending accounts | 25 | Input |
| Current monthly MQLs | 20 | Input |
| Uplift from better inboxing & personalization | +20% | Leveraging Instantly's AI Copilot & Unibox |
| Projected monthly MQLs | 24 | 20 × 1.20 |
| Change in MQLs / month | +4 | 24 - 20 |
| MQL→Client conversion | 10% | Input |
| New clients / month | 0.4 | 4 × 10% |
| Avg revenue per client (annual) | $24,000 | Estimate of annual client revenue |
Getting to ROI
| Metric | Result | Formula |
|---|---|---|
| Annual software savings | $3,576 | (395 − 97) × 12 |
| Additional revenue | $9,600 | 0.4 × $24,000 |
| ROI % | 1,132% | (3,576 + 9,600) ÷ 1,164 × 100 |
Breaking down the numbers
- You save money immediately. Switching a 25‑account setup from ~$395/mo to $97/mo saves $3,576/year, even with zero deliverability improvement.
- You get more MQLs at the same spend. Because ~16.9% of emails don’t reach the inbox, moving to automated warm‑up + unlimited inbox distribution + AI‑assisted personalization raises inboxing and replies. A conservative +20% MQL uplift adds +4 MQLs/mo in this scenario.
- Your cost per MQL collapses. Software $/MQL drops from $19.75 to $4.04 (‑80%) while projected MQLs rise 20% a direct win on both volume and unit cost.
- Flat‑fee scales with your pipeline, not headcount. You can add inboxes for new clients/campaigns without buying more seats, keeping cost growth flat while MQLs grow
Cost per MQL side by side
To boil it down, your cost per MQL drops significantly by leveraging Instantly to dial up three key levers:
- Unlimited inboxes, at a flat fee with Instantly
- Getting more emails into the prospective client's inboxes with DFY email setup and a 4.2M+ private email network to warmup your accounts.
- Ramping up personalisation of your campaigns with Instantly's AI Copilot and enriched 450M+ contact database.
| View | Before (seat tool) | After (Instantly @ +20% MQLs) | What changes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software $ / MQL | $19.75 | $4.04 | $395 ÷ 20 vs. $97 ÷ 24 |
| $ / sending account / mo | $15.80 | $3.88 | $395 ÷ 25 vs. $97 ÷ 25 |
This isn't just theory. Agencies are using Instantly to get these results:
Get ROI for your agency's outreach investment
Stop letting per-seat pricing and deliverability headaches sabotage your ROI. For agency owners, Instantly's flat-fee model, unlimited accounts, and better deliverability directly translate into more and lower cost MQLs - start your free trial.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Instantly.ai cost for an agency? Instantly plans start at $37/month for the Growth tier and $97/month for the Hypergrowth tier. Both plans include unlimited sending accounts and unlimited email warm-up, so your cost does not increase as you add more clients or SDRs.
How does Instantly improve email deliverability? We use a multi-faceted approach, including our Deliverability Network of over 4.2M accounts for automated warm-up, automated SPF/DKIM/DMARC checks, and an AI spam checker. This builds a strong sender reputation to ensure your emails reach the primary inbox.
Can I use my existing CRM with Instantly? Yes. Instantly integrates with popular CRMs like HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive, allowing you to sync leads and campaign data automatically.
How long does it take to get set up? With our "Done-for-You" setup option, your agency can be fully onboarded, with domains configured and warming up, in 2-4 weeks.
