Cold email ROI calculator.
Plug in your volume, reply rate, and customer LTV. See meetings, customers, revenue, and the actual ROI of a cold email campaign instantly — including the time cost most tools quietly omit.
Your numbers
Drag any slider. The result on the right updates live.
Industry typical: 3–8% for well-targeted cold campaigns.
What fraction of replies turn into a booked call.
Median B2B SaaS: 10–25%. Higher with strong qualification.
Lifetime value of a paying customer.
ProspectFlow plan
We auto-suggest the cheapest plan that fits your volume. Override to compare.
Includes review, edits, replying to interested leads.
Use your hourly rate, or the SDR's burdened cost.
Your ROI
$3,375 in estimated revenue against $779 total cost — that's +$2,596 net per month.
Cost breakdown
- ProspectFlow Starter plan$29/mo
- Your time (15 hours)$750/mo
- Total cost$779/mo
On the same volume, Lemlist starts at $69/mo. Switching to ProspectFlow Starter saves you $480/year.
50 emails on the Free plan. No card.
How we calculated this
The math is deliberately straightforward — there's no hidden multiplier, no "industry secret" assumption. Anyone with the same inputs should reach the same numbers in a spreadsheet.
Revenue funnel
- Replies = emails sent × reply rate.
- Meetings = replies × reply-to-meeting rate.
- Customers = meetings × meeting-to-customer rate.
- Revenue = customers × customer LTV.
Total cost
- Platform cost — the ProspectFlow plan you selected, or the cheapest one that fits your volume by default.
- Time cost — (emails ÷ 100) × (minutes per 100 ÷ 60) × hourly rate. The default of 3 minutes per 100 emails covers review, edits, and replying to interested leads. If you're hand-writing every email, that number is higher.
ROI multiple
Revenue ÷ total cost. A 1× ratio means you broke even. Anything under 1× means you lost money this month (sometimes worth it early, while you're learning the funnel). The realistic long-run target for a working cold-email channel is 3× or better — below that, paid acquisition is usually a more productive lever.
What we don't include
- Brand impact. Cold outreach builds awareness in a segment even when it doesn't convert. We don't model that — it's real but it's noisy.
- Compounding referrals. A customer acquired via cold email often refers others. The calculator credits the first sale only.
- Tool stack outside the sender. CRM seats, inbox warmup tools, lead-enrichment subscriptions. Add them to your hourly cost if they matter for your setup.
Frequently asked
How do you calculate cold email ROI?
ROI is total revenue divided by total cost. Revenue = emails × reply rate × reply-to-meeting rate × meeting-to-customer rate × customer LTV. Cost = the platform subscription plus the human time (hours = emails ÷ 100 × minutes per 100 × hourly rate). A ratio above 1 means you're net positive; the calculator surfaces both the multiple and the net dollar figure.
What's a realistic reply rate for cold email in 2026?
Well-targeted B2B cold outreach with a warm domain and personalised copy lands between 3% and 8%. Below 2% usually means the list quality is poor or the offer doesn't match the audience. Above 10% on cold (not warm) outreach typically means either an exceptionally hot offer or a very small, surgically targeted list.
What reply-to-meeting and meeting-to-customer rates should I use?
Reply-to-meeting is typically 25–45% — not every reply is positive. Meeting-to-customer for B2B SaaS clusters around 10–25%, with the variance driven by deal size, qualification rigour, and product-market fit. If your numbers are very different from these ranges, the bottleneck is probably in the funnel stage you're underperforming on.
What customer LTV should I use?
Use the average revenue you collect from a customer over their entire lifetime, after refunds and churn. For a SaaS at $99/mo with 24-month average lifetime, that's ~$2,400 ÷ retention curve. If you don't know yet, use average annual contract value as a starting estimate — it understates LTV but won't mislead you in the wrong direction.
Why include time cost?
Cold email isn't free even on a free platform — every campaign takes review time, reply handling, and refinement. A 500-email campaign at 3 minutes per 100 emails is 15 hours of work. At a $50/hour cost that's $750 of time before you've sent a single message. Tools that don't include time in their ROI math are deceiving you about the real economics.
How does ProspectFlow compare to Lemlist or Instantly on cost?
ProspectFlow Starter is $29/mo for 500 emails. Lemlist's cheapest paid plan starts at $69/mo. Instantly starts at $37/mo. ProspectFlow Pro at $99/mo (2,500 emails, DeepSeek personalisation, 3 SMTPs) sits roughly where competitors charge for their mid tiers. See the comparison pages for feature-by-feature breakdowns.
Why send through my own SMTP instead of a shared sending pool?
On a shared pool your inbox placement is shaped by every other sender on the same IPs. One bad actor and your reputation drops with theirs. Sending through your own SMTP (Workspace, M365, Postmark, SES) isolates your reputation — harder to start (you handle warmup), but the gains stay yours and don't share a fate with strangers.
What happens if I exceed the plan's email volume?
ProspectFlow caps you at the plan's monthly send quota; the queue worker holds excess sends until the next month or until you upgrade. We don't surprise-bill on overage. The calculator suggests the cheapest plan that fits your monthly volume.
Stop modelling — start sending.
ProspectFlow ships the AI prospect finder, smart personalisation, and RFC 8058 unsubscribe headers by default. Free for 50 emails / month. No card.
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