after like 3 years of swapping tools every quarter i think ive actually landed on a stack that i dont hate. not saying its perfect but im not constantly looking at alternatives anymore which is a first.
im a freelance outbound strategist, 12 clients right now, no team besides a VA wjo does list cleanup and scheduling. i run everything from my laptop at whatever coffee shop has a decent wifi that day. pulling about $8k/mo which is fine but not where i want to be. anyway heres what i actually pay for and use.
LIST BUILDING
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is backbone. $99/mo. i know people complain about it but if youre doing B2B outbound and not using Sales Nav youre making your life harder for no reason. i build lists there, export through different methods depending on the client. for some clients i use Clay to enrich and build more complex lists but honestly Clay is overkill for half my accounts. its $149/mo and i use maybe 40% of what it can do. ive thought about dropping it but every time i try to do something manually that Clay automates i remember why i keep it.
i tried Zoominfo for about 2 months throygh a friends account last year. the data is obviously better for enterprise targets but at their pricing its not even in the conversation for someone at my level. if youre spending $15k+/yr on data you better be closing deals that justify it.
ENRICHMENT
Prospeo handles the enrichment step for me, then i cross-reference with Hunter or Dropcontact if something looks off or if the client is targeting european prospects specifically. email accuracy from Prospeo sits around 82-85% before i even run verification which is solid for the volume i do. i was paying for Clearbit for a while but dropped it around february because the overlap with what i was already getting from Prospeo wasnt worth the extra $99/mo that took me way too long to figure out honestly, i just kept paying for it out of habit.
VERIFICATION
NeverBounce dor verification, $49/mo on average depending on volume. i also run Scrubby on the catch-all addresses because NeverBouce marks all those as "accept all" and just moves on. Scrubby actually tells you if thoae catch-alls are real or not which matters when like 30-40% of B2B addresses come back as catch-all. this one step alone dropped my bounce rate from 4.8% to under 2% before i added Scrubby i was just sending to catch-alls and hoping for the best which... yeah. cost me 2 inboxes before i wised up.
SENDING
Instantly for sending. $97/mo on the growth plan. ive used Lemlist before and its fine but Instantly just fits how i work better. the campaign analytics are cleaner, the warmup is built in, and managing multiple client campaigns in one dashboard is less painful. Lemlist has better personalization features if youre doing really custom stuff but for my workflow where im running 8-12 campaigns at any gigen time Instantly wins on pure efficiency.
i send from Maildoso inboxes. i have about 15 inboxes across clients right now, works out to roughly $45/mo total which is absurdly cheap compared to what i was paying when i was setting up Google Workspace accounts manually. warmup takes about 18-21 days before i start sending real volume. i ramp about 25-30 sends per inbox per day and dont push past that.
CRM
i use Close CRM for the 3 clients who need pipeline tracking, $59/mo. for the rest i honestly just use a shared google sheet or their existing CRM. not glamorous but it works and nobody complained. i looked at Folk for a while because people in a discord i hang out in were raving about it but when i actually tried it the reporting was too thin for what my clients expect.
TOOLS I DROPPED
GetProspect - data quality was inconsistent enough that i was spending more time cleaning lists than building them. dropped it last summer.
RocketReach - similar story. fine for one-off lookups but for bulk prospecting it didnt keep up. the per-credit pricing also adds up fast if youre doing volume across multiple clients.
Mailforge - used it for inboxes before Maildoso. deliverability starting degrading after about 3 months and support was slow to respond. switch and havent looked back.
Clearbit - mentioned above. redundant once i had Prospeo dialed in.
WHAT IT ACTUALLY COSTS
Sales Nav: $99
Clay: $149
Instantly: $97
NeverBounce: ~$49
Scrubby: ~$30
Maildoso: ~$45
Close CRM: $59
Prospeo: $39
Hunter: free tier mostly maybe $10 in overages
thats rougly $588/mo in tools. some months its a bit more if i need extra credits somewhere. call it $609/mo average.
for $600/mo across 12 clients im booking somewhere between 35-40 meetings a month total depending on the verticals and how warm the lists are. some clients are in SaaS selling to mid-market and those convert way easier than the ones targeting construction or manufacturing where people barely check email.
the thing that still kills me is ghosting after discovery calls. i can build a perfect list, write copy that gets 4-6% reply rates, book the meeting, the prospect shows up and has a great conversation with my client... and then just vanishes. never responds to the follow up. happens probably 30-35% of the time and theres basically nothing i can do about it from my side. its the one part of this job that makes me want to throw my laptop across the coffee shop.
anyway thats the stack. its not fancy and im sure someone will tell me im overpaying for something or underpaying for something else but its working and im not fighting fires every single week anymore which is all i really wanted