Cost planning

Plan the cost of your revenue motion.

Compare a founder-led scenario with the hiring plan you are weighing, using your own numbers. Include your time and every tool you expect to keep. Nothing here is a revenue forecast.

Hiring scenario total per month ($) Include pay, tools, recruiting and management for the hire you are weighing.

Founder hours per month Time you expect to spend on this revenue motion.

Value of a founder hour ($) Your own planning assumption. We do not prefill one.

Software per month ($) Prefilled with one seat at $99 a month. Change it to match your seats and billing.

Other tools and usage per month ($) AI provider usage on your own key, enrichment credits, CRM, email and anything else you keep.

Planning period in months Use the same period for both scenarios.

Enter your assumptions to see the comparison. No salary or savings figure is prefilled.

This is cost planning, not a revenue forecast. Two scenarios can cover different work and different capacity, and only you can judge that trade.

The seat is $99 per person a month, or $1,089 a year. It licenses all 9 roles for that person. Pricing has the detail.
Usage is separate. AI calls run on a provider key you hold and that provider bills you. Contact enrichment spends credits from your own Apollo account, only when you turn it on, within daily ceilings. Your CRM and mailbox are your own subscriptions.
Your time stays on the ledger. Research and drafts arrive for review; you confirm the business brief, approve the market, review each draft, and send. The hours field above is where that goes.

We send the comparison you built, with your numbers, once. Your address is kept so we can reply to you about it. Nothing else follows unless you ask.

Or price the other option: hire somebody

The planner above uses your totals. This itemises the hiring side: one seller, in seat, per month. Change any number that is wrong for you and the total follows.

Monthly cost of one in-house seller, by line item
Line	Share	Per month
Base salary sourced Half of a $180k on-target package, which is the middle of the published first-AE range.		Base salary, dollars per month
Commission at target sourced The other half. Paid on quota, and around 60% of reps do not reach theirs.		Commission at target, dollars per month
Payroll taxes, benefits, insurance your number Assumed at 20% of the package. Yours depends on your state and your plan.		Payroll taxes, benefits, insurance, dollars per month
A manager's time your number A fifth of a sales manager. Before your first hire this is your time, which is why it reads as free and is not.		A manager's time, dollars per month
Recruiting, interviewing, hiring sourced A published cost-to-hire spread over an expected eighteen months, not treated as one-off.		Recruiting, interviewing, hiring, dollars per month
Contact data and enrichment your number A per-seat data subscription. The seat is useless without a list.		Contact data and enrichment, dollars per month
CRM, sequencer, dialer, meeting recorder your number Four seats a seller cannot work without, at typical per-seat pricing.		CRM, sequencer, dialer, meeting recorder, dollars per month
Onboarding, training, enablement content your number Somebody writes the playbook, the scripts and the objection handling, and keeps them current.		Onboarding, training, enablement content, dollars per month
Laptop, phone, desk, software licences your number The unglamorous line that still leaves the bank every month.		Laptop, phone, desk, software licences, dollars per month
One seller, all in		$24,600/month
Sales as Code, one seat, all 9 roles		$91/month, paid yearly

One month of the hire is 23 years of one seat. Same money, not the same capacity.

Two things this table does not do. It adds no ramp line: three to six months of paying every line above before anything closes is those months counted once, not an eleventh row. And the total sits above the published $200,000 to $280,000 first-AE range on purpose, because that range prices the person. The last four lines are what the person needs in order to work. Want the comparable number? Read the first three lines.

Sourced lines, read August 2026: First-AE cost, 2026 · RepVue Cloud Sales Index, Q2 2025 · Cost to hire, 2026. Lines marked your number have no public source we would stand behind, so they are our assumption and yours to change. Our own figure comes from the price list.

See what one seat costs →