Pricing the first package is where I watch most people go sideways. Either they undercharge and quietly start resenting the client, or they invent a clever per-lead scheme that blows up around month two. The shape that holds up is boring: a setup fee plus a monthly fee. What's worth understanding is what each part actually buys, and why the clever alternatives fail. What the setup fee pays for The setup fee covers the build: connecting the channel, loading the client's business context, defining what counts as a qualified lead, configuring the handoff to a human, setting business-hours behavior, and testing the whole path before real traffic hits it. Real hours, spent once. In the US frame I'm working from, setup runs $500 to $1,500 depending on how much of that list the client needs. What the monthly fee pays for The monthly fee is what makes this a service instead of a gig. It pays for operating the thing: reading conversations, tightening the qualification rules when the wrong people get through, adjusting follow-ups, and showing the client evidence of what happened. The US frame is $300 to $1,000 a month. One honest rule: if you don't intend to do that operating work, charge more for setup and skip the retainer, because a monthly fee for work nobody does is where the bad reputation of retainers comes from. Why never per lead Per-lead pricing sounds fair on the surface. You get paid for results, the client pays for value. It fails on contact with reality, for reasons that have nothing to do with fairness. You don't control the volume. Lead count is a function of the client's ad budget, and the client can halve that budget without telling you. Your revenue now lives inside someone else's ad account. The incentives point the wrong way. Paid per lead, you earn more when more people get through, while the client is paying for fewer, better conversations. Sooner or later the client does this math too. And you will fight about definitions. Is a lead someone who wrote once? Someone who got qualified? Someone who booked and didn't show up? Per-lead pricing turns every invoice into an argument about what a lead is.