Quick answer: To compare an AI SDR with hiring a human SDR, add up the full cost of each (not just the headline price), then divide by the outcome you care about, such as qualified meetings booked. A human SDR's cost is much more than salary. An AI SDR's cost is more than the subscription. Use your own numbers, because salaries, markets, and sales cycles vary widely.
Why headline price comparisons mislead
"A rep costs a lot, software costs a little" is true in direction but useless as math. A good comparison looks at:
- Full cost of each option, including the parts that do not appear on an invoice.
- Capacity: how much outreach each can realistically run.
- Outcome: meetings or pipeline per period, not activity.
- Time to results: how long before either produces anything.
- Risk and flexibility: what happens if it does not work.
This post gives you the framework. It deliberately does not give salary statistics. Pay varies by region, industry, and experience, and any number we printed would be stale or wrong for you. Plug in your own.
Cost categories for a human SDR
Here are the categories to price. Fill in your own figures.
| Category | What to include |
|---|---|
| Base pay | Salary for the role in your market |
| Variable pay | Commission or bonus tied to meetings or pipeline |
| Payroll costs | Employer taxes, benefits, insurance, equipment |
| Recruiting | Job posts, recruiter fees, interviewer time |
| Ramp time | Months of partial output while they learn your product and market |
| Management | The share of a manager's time spent coaching and reviewing |
| Tools | CRM seat, data/contact tools, LinkedIn plan, email sending infrastructure |
| Training | Onboarding, playbooks, shadowing |
| Turnover | The chance you must repeat recruiting and ramp, and the gap in between |
| Overhead | Space, software licences, admin |
Add these for one year to get a fully loaded annual cost per rep. Then be honest about ramp: a rep who produces little for the first stretch costs the same as one who produces a lot.
Cost categories for an AI SDR
An AI SDR is cheaper in most dimensions but is not free, and it has its own costs:
| Category | What to include |
|---|---|
| Subscription | The platform fee, usually per account, seat, or volume |
| Data | Lead data or search you need alongside it |
| Email setup | Sending domains and mailboxes if you use email outreach |
| Your time | Setup, writing or approving the sequence, reviewing replies |
| Human follow-through | Someone still has to take the booked meetings and sell |
| Ramp | Time to tune targeting, messaging, and pacing |
| Risk | LinkedIn account risk, which no tool can remove |
The last two matter. An AI SDR that books meetings nobody attends or follows up on is not saving money. And any automation of a personal LinkedIn account carries risk that sensible pacing and safeguards reduce but cannot eliminate.
A cost-per-meeting formula
Once you have costs, convert both options into the same unit.
Cost per meeting = total cost over a period divided by qualified meetings booked in that period.
Use the same period for both, and count only meetings that meet a clear definition of qualified (the right role, a real conversation, held). A table to fill out:
| Human SDR | AI SDR | |
|---|---|---|
| Total cost over the period | your number | your number |
| Qualified meetings booked | your number | your number |
| Cost per qualified meeting | cost / meetings | cost / meetings |
| Months until first meetings | your estimate | your estimate |
A hypothetical illustration, with made-up figures: if an option costs 10,000 over a quarter and books 20 qualified meetings in that quarter, the cost per meeting is 500. Do the same math with your own data and compare. Do not borrow anyone else's meeting counts, including ours.
What the numbers will not tell you
- Meeting quality. A cheap meeting that never becomes pipeline is expensive.
- Brand and fit. A human may handle sensitive or strategic accounts better. This is why many teams use both; see AI SDR vs human SDR.
- Flexibility. Software can be paused or scaled quickly. A hire is a longer commitment.
- Opportunity cost. The hours a manager spends coaching are hours not spent selling.
Often the better comparison is not "AI instead of a hire" but "what does our first SDR hire do, if software already handles the repetitive outreach?"
How FollowArc pricing works
FollowArc is priced per connected LinkedIn account: $149/month for the first connected account, stepping down to $79/month per account at 16 or more accounts. Every account gets the full product, with no feature-gated tiers, and there is a 7-day free trial. For current details, check the pricing page.
That structure matters for your math because the cost scales with the number of LinkedIn accounts you connect, not with the number of messages. If you need more reach than one account can safely carry, multiple accounts each run at their own conservative pace. Read how many connection requests you can safely send per day to see why that matters.
A practical way to decide
- List your costs using the two tables above.
- Define "qualified meeting" in one sentence.
- Estimate meetings from the human option using your own history or a conservative assumption.
- Run a small pilot of the AI option (a trial helps) on a narrow, well-defined list.
- Measure acceptance, replies, and meetings; see the metrics that matter.
- Compare cost per qualified meeting after a few weeks of real data.
- Decide whether to replace, supplement, or keep both.
Where FollowArc fits
FollowArc is for teams that want the repetitive outreach, follow-up, and reply sorting handled by Sophia while people keep control of what sends and focus on conversations and closing. It does not replace a closer, and automated LinkedIn outreach carries account risk that safeguards reduce but cannot remove. If you want your own cost-per-meeting number rather than an estimate, start the 7-day free trial or read about the AI SDR use case.