Cost comparison
Hire an SDR, outsource, or build the engine?
Four ways to add outbound pipeline, and what each one actually costs in the first year. Same question every founder at £1M–£20M ARR asks before posting the job. Here is the arithmetic, with the sources.
Hire an SDR
£70k–£90k
first year, fully loaded
Base sits near £39,500 with median OTE around £59,600. Add employer NI, pension, tooling at £8k–£15k per seat, and management time.
Five months to ramp. A 34% chance they leave inside twelve months.
Outsource to an agency
$3k–$14k
per month, plus per-meeting fees
Nearshore to US-based, billed roughly $300 to $600 per held meeting on top of the retainer.
You rent the team and the lists. Nothing stays when the contract ends.
Build the engine
$3k once
or $2.5k/mo, or $4k/mo + $150–$250 per held meeting
A 14-day Sprint ships one engine into your own repo and accounts. Partnership adds a new agent each month. Full Stack runs all eight and bills the rest per held meeting.
You own the code. It keeps running whether or not we do.
SDR figures are UK benchmarks in GBP from our own £45k SDR teardown; agency and engine figures are in USD. We have not converted between them, because the exchange rate moves and the comparison does not depend on it.
The option most people miss
There is a fourth path, and it is the one changing fastest: hire a GTM engineer instead of another rep. One person who builds the machine — inbox infrastructure, list building, enrichment, account scoring, AI copywriting — so the reps you already have only touch accounts the system has found and warmed. Headcount goes down, coverage goes up.
It is a better answer than hiring a third SDR, and we would tell you so on the call. The question it leaves open is whether you need that person on payroll at a full salary, or whether you need the machine they would spend their first six months building. We are the second thing. The engine arrives in fourteen days and you keep it.
Side by side
| Hire an SDR | Outsource | AI Ropeway | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to first meeting | ~5 months (ramp) | 2–4 weeks | 14 days |
| What you own after | Nothing, if they leave | Nothing | The code, forever |
| Cost per held meeting | Front-loaded, fixed | $300–$600 on top | Falls as volume rises |
| Scales by | Hiring another rep | Buying more retainer | Running the same engine wider |
| Reply handling | The rep, in working hours | The agency's inbox | Reply Triager, continuously |
| CRM hygiene | Manual, usually skipped | Not included | CRM Auto-Pilot |
| Reporting | Whatever the rep logs | Agency's dashboard | Revenue Pulse |
| If you stop | Redundancy and re-hire | Sending stops | Engine keeps running |
Where hiring still wins
An engine does not close deals, sit in a room, or read a buyer going quiet. If your motion is high-touch enterprise with long committees and heavy relationship work, a good human rep is worth more than any amount of automation and we will say so rather than sell you a Sprint.
Hiring also wins when the problem is not volume. If you already get enough at-bats and lose them at the demo, more pipeline makes the leak worse. Fix the conversion first — that is a VP Sales problem, not an outbound one.
The engine wins when the constraint is coverage: you know who your buyer is, you cannot reach enough of them, and hiring your way there costs £70k a seat and five months you do not have.
Go deeper on any of these
The full first-year math on a UK hire is in what a £45k SDR actually costs. If you are weighing an agency, we ran the cost-per-meeting comparison in outsource SDR vs AI SDR. And if you are hiring in the UK specifically, read this first. For what the engine is made of, see what an AI GTM engine is and the pricing.
FAQ
What does an SDR actually cost in the UK?
Base salary sits around £39,500 with median on-target earnings near £59,600. Once you add employer National Insurance, pension, a software stack at £8,000 to £15,000 per seat per year, and management time, a £45,000 hire lands north of £70,000 fully loaded in year one — before they book a qualified meeting independently. The full breakdown is in our teardown of what a £45k SDR actually costs.
Is outsourcing cheaper than hiring?
On paper, sometimes. An outsourced SDR agency runs roughly $3,000 to $14,000 a month depending on whether the team is nearshore or US-based, plus about $300 to $600 per held meeting. It is faster to start and easier to stop. What it does not do is leave you with anything — the lists, the sequences and the infrastructure belong to the agency.
What is a GTM engineer, and should I hire one instead?
A GTM engineer is the emerging role that builds the outbound machine rather than working it: email infrastructure, list building, enrichment, account scoring and AI copywriting, so that reps only touch accounts the system has already found and warmed. It is a genuinely better answer than hiring more SDRs. The question is whether you need that person on payroll, or whether you need the machine they would build.
Why not just buy an AI SDR tool?
You can, and for some teams it is the right call — we compare the main ones honestly. The trade is ownership: a subscription runs on someone else's platform and stops when you stop paying. An engine is built around your ICP, ships into your repo and accounts, and keeps running regardless.
How fast does the engine actually go live?
Fourteen days for a Sprint, from audit to a working engine in your stack. Every engagement starts with a free 60-minute audit that ends in a live demo running on your own ICP data, so you see the thing working before you commit.
Run the numbers on your own funnel
The free 60-minute audit ends with a live demo of an engine running on your actual ICP — so you can compare it against the job spec before you post it.
Book your free AI GTM audit
