Worksheet · Resources

The buy-versus-build worksheet

The ten lines of what one seller in seat costs a month, as a spreadsheet you can put your own numbers into and take to whoever signs off.

What is in it

For: A founder deciding between a first sales hire and something else.

Every line item from the calculator on /roi, with our default and a column for yours
Which lines have a published source behind them and which are assumptions
The sources themselves, so somebody can check them rather than trust us
A total row, and the same total against a year of one seat

Preview the file

"Line","Our figure (USD/month)","Your figure","Basis","Note","Source"
"Base salary","7500","","Published source","Half of a $180k on-target package, which is the middle of the published first-AE range.","First-AE cost, 2026: https://www.getboomerang.ai/glossaries/when-to-hire-first-ae-founder-2026"
"Commission at target","7500","","Published source","The other half. Paid on quota, and around 60% of reps do not reach theirs.","First-AE cost, 2026: https://www.getboomerang.ai/glossaries/when-to-hire-first-ae-founder-2026 | RepVue Cloud Sales Index, Q2 2025: https://www.quotapath.com/blog/saas-sales-reps-missed-quota/"
"Payroll taxes, benefits, insurance","3000","","Our assumption, change it","Assumed at 20% of the package. Yours depends on your state and your plan.",""
"A manager's time","2800","","Our assumption, change it","A fifth of a sales manager. Before your first hire this is your time, which is why it reads as free and is not.",""
"Recruiting, interviewing, hiring","1800","","Published source","A published cost-to-hire spread over an expected eighteen months, not treated as one-off.","Cost to hire, 2026: https://interviewcost.com/sales"
"Contact data and enrichment","800","","Our assumption, change it","A per-seat data subscription. The seat is useless without a list.",""
"CRM, sequencer, dialer, meeting recorder","500","","Our assumption, change it","Four seats a seller cannot work without, at typical per-seat pricing.",""
"Onboarding, training, enablement content","400","","Our assumption, change it","Somebody writes the playbook, the scripts and the objection handling, and keeps them current.",""
"Laptop, phone, desk, software licences","300","","Our assumption, change it","The unglamorous line that still leaves the bank every month.",""
"One seller, all in (per month)","24600","","","Sum of the lines above",""
"One seller, all in (per year)","295200","","","Twelve times the monthly total",""
"Sales as Code, one seat, every role (per year)","1089","","Price list","Every role, one person. https://salesascode.com/pricing",""
"One month of the hire, in years of one seat","23","","","Monthly hire cost divided by the yearly seat price",""

"Two things this worksheet does not do","","","","It adds no ramp line: the three to six months of paying every line above before anything closes are those months counted once, not an extra row. And the total sits above the published $200,000 to $280,000 first-AE range because that range prices the person, while the last four lines are what the person needs in order to work.",""

See activation See what a seat includes

After activation, the start guide lists each setup step from the business brief to the first draft review: what it saves, what it can cost, and what to do when it stops.

Preview checklist

Get the worksheet

The file opens in your browser right away, and a copy arrives by email. Product email needs the separate box below.

The trade, stated. We write to you about the product only if you tick the box, and you can stop that from any of those emails. Nothing you need in order to trust us is behind this or any other gate: the docs, the price, the security answers and the status page stay open.