Pay per meeting: why Dylan charges only for meetings that happen
Retainers, seats and per-lead pricing leave you holding the risk. Why Dylan charges per held meeting instead, and where outcome pricing can go wrong.
- pricing
- meetings
- appointment-setting
Dylan charges per held meeting, and nothing for the research, the writing and the thousands of emails it takes to get one. We chose pay per meeting because a held meeting is the first thing in outbound you would happily buy on its own. Everything before it is the cost of making one, and the people doing the making should carry that cost.
The price depends on who you want to meet. During the beta it is $250 for founder-led buyers at small companies, $500 for directors and VPs in the mid-market, and from $900, quoted, for VP and C-level buyers at companies with 1,000 or more employees.
Every pricing model answers one question: who pays for the misses?
Outbound is mostly misses. In Belkins’ study of 7.5 million cold emails sent in 2025, the average reply rate was 0.45%, and all those emails together booked over 1,200 appointments. That is roughly one booked meeting for every 6,000 emails.
So the useful question about any proposal is not the price. It is who pays for the emails that never became a meeting.
| Model | What you pay for | Who carries the misses |
|---|---|---|
| Hiring an SDR | Salary, tools and ramp time | You |
| Agency retainer, $3,000 to $15,000+ a month | The team’s time | You |
| AI SDR software, $50,000 to $100,000+ a year per platform | Seats, contacts or credits | You |
| Per lead, $1 a lead | Names to contact | You, one name at a time |
| Per meeting, billed when booked | A calendar invite | You, for every no-show |
| Per held meeting (Dylan) | A call that happened | Us |
Pricing per held meeting makes us the underwriter. Like an insurer, we survive only by pricing risk well, which means being honest about which markets we can serve. That is why Dylan’s plan sometimes says no before you pay.
Some costs never reach an invoice: a tool that sends from your domains can damage the domain your invoices come from, and someone has to run it (SaaStr reports 15 to 20 hours a week overseeing its five AI SDRs). Dylan sends from his own mailboxes, and your domain never sends a cold email.
A dollar a lead is an input price
In April 2026, HubSpot moved two of its Breeze agents to paying for results. Its customer agent went from $1.00 per conversation to $0.50 per resolved conversation, and its prospecting agent from a monthly charge per enrolled contact to $1 per lead recommended for outreach.
It is a good move, but look at what counts as the result. A lead recommended for outreach is a name, and between a name and a meeting sits everything hard: finding the right person, writing something worth answering, landing in the inbox, handling the reply and finding a time.
Paying per lead is like paying a recruiter per CV. CVs are cheap. You wanted a hire.
Why the price follows the buyer, not the effort
The effort behind a meeting rises steeply with company size and seniority, and you should not have to estimate it. The Belkins study shows the slope: reply rates fall from 0.72% at companies with up to 10 employees to 0.22% at 10,000 or more, and founders and owners reply at 0.57% against 0.32% for VPs. A meeting with a VP at a 5,000-person company takes more research, patience and email than one with the founder of a 30-person firm.
Price per email and you pay for that slope. Price per held meeting and we absorb it, with every reason to get better at climbing it.
Why we bill held meetings, not booked ones
In one agency’s 2026 survey of appointment-setting prices, per-meeting fees run from $250 to $1,500+, but vendors split on what they count: some charge on booking, others only when the meeting is held. The difference is the empty chair, and the survey puts no-show rates anywhere from 10% to 35%, depending on segment, seniority and booking flow.
Pay per meeting also has a known flaw. In the survey’s words, if the vendor only gets paid on meeting count, “quality pressure can slip unless qualification rules are brutally clear.” A vendor paid per meeting is tempted to book anyone who will take a call.
We close that gap in four places:
- You write the meeting definition before anything is sent: which companies, which people, and who takes the call on your side.
- Anything outside the definition is not billed, and neither are no-shows, duplicates or anyone on your do-not-contact list.
- You have 72 hours to dispute a meeting, and disputes come back as credit.
- You approve the plan and the first emails, so nothing goes out that you have not seen.
The full rulebook is in what counts as a held meeting.
Why we stop at the meeting, and why there is a deposit
Why not charge on pipeline or revenue? Because a held meeting is the last step we control: after it, the result depends on your demo, your price and your timing, which we should neither bill for nor be blamed for. A held meeting is the cleanest line between our work and yours, and both sides can see it.
To start, you prepay three meetings as credit: $750 on Lite, $1,500 on Standard, and three meetings at the quoted price on Enterprise. The plan, the research, the first emails and the sending all come before any meeting can, so the deposit commits both sides first.
It is not a fee. If no meeting is held within 60 days, the deposit comes back. If you pause, unused credit stays on your account.
When pay per meeting is the wrong choice
This model is not for everyone. The same survey notes that per-meeting pricing “works worst when your ICP is tiny, your offer needs education, or your sales cycle is highly consultative.” If your whole market is, say, 80 accounts, you need a relationship plan, not a meeting machine; an enterprise market is a pond walks through the math.
And if inbound leads wait a day for an answer, fix that first. It is cheaper than any outbound, ours included.
What to do next
Work out what a held meeting costs you today. Add up a month of outbound spend (salaries or retainers, tools, data, domains and your team’s hours) and divide it by the held meetings that matched your definition. Not booked: held.
The survey’s own example shows why. At $450 per booked meeting, 20 bookings became 14 held meetings and 8 qualified ones, a real cost of $1,125 each. Once you know your number, compare it with ours.