You pay for matched records, not for a seat licence and not for rows that came back empty. Tell us the volume and the filters and we will quote against them in writing.
Per-record pricing falls as volume rises. A five-thousand-row file covering one state and a two-hundred-thousand-row national file are genuinely different jobs with different unit costs, and printing a single number for both would mean overcharging the smaller customer in order to subsidise the larger one.
It would also be misleading in a more specific way. The cost of assembling a file depends heavily on how narrow the filters are, and a published per-record rate invariably assumes the broadest, cheapest possible pull. Customers then discover the real number only after they describe what they actually want. We would rather quote once, in writing, against your actual brief.
Three things sit outside every invoice, and they are worth stating explicitly because they are where files quietly become expensive elsewhere.
The delivery summary is designed to reconcile against the invoice line by line. If the billed-rows figure and the invoice disagree, that is our error to fix.
The most common mistake we see is a first order that is far too large. A buyer with a national ambition orders a national file, hands two hundred thousand rows to three callers, and learns nothing useful for six weeks because the team never gets through enough of it to judge anything.
A better sequence is to start with one well-defined segment, work it properly, measure the connect rate and the conversion rate, and only then scale to the territories that resemble it. It costs less, produces an answer faster, and if the segment does not work you have discovered that for a fraction of the outlay.
A single list or a first test
Teams running regular campaigns
Continuous or integrated use
The metric almost every buyer optimises is cost per record, and it is close to useless on its own. What matters is cost per conversation, and the two can point in opposite directions. A file at a very low per-row price where only a small share of numbers connect can easily cost more per conversation than a carefully verified file at several times the unit price.
The reason is that the expensive part of outbound is not the data, it is the people. A caller’s time is the largest line item in the operation by a wide margin, and every dead number consumes it. That is the arithmetic that makes padded files a false economy, and it is why we would rather sell you a smaller file.
These are not trick questions and a straight vendor will answer all six without hesitation. If any of them produces an evasive answer, that is the answer.
Suppose you sell packaging machinery and want to reach manufacturers in Gujarat and Maharashtra. A poor brief is a request for all GST-registered businesses in those two states, which produces an enormous file that is overwhelmingly irrelevant. A good brief narrows by industry to manufacturing and food processing, restricts constitution to private limited and LLP as a rough size proxy, and asks for the two state codes only. The resulting file is a fraction of the size, costs less in total despite a higher unit price, and every row is a business that might plausibly buy a packaging machine.
A sensible first budget is the one that lets your team work a segment properly for about a month. Buying more than a month of calling capacity in the first order is the most reliable way to waste money, because you will change your mind about the segment once real conversations start and the unused remainder ages while you decide.
Data has a shelf life. Registration status changes, numbers change, and a file bought twelve months ago describes a market that has partly moved on. Buying in proportion to the capacity you actually have keeps the file fresh at the moment it is used, which is the only moment that matters.
If the first quote is higher than your budget, the productive conversation is about scope rather than discount. Narrowing the geography, tightening the industry filter or reducing the row count all move the total meaningfully, and usually improve the file at the same time by removing rows you were never going to call. Ask what a version at your budget would look like and we will describe it honestly, including whether we think it is still worth doing.
Finally, ask what a repeat order looks like before you place the first one. If you expect to come back quarterly, that changes what we would recommend buying now, and it is easier to plan a sequence of files together than to reconstruct one after the fact.
Not a published one, because unit cost depends heavily on volume and on how narrow the filters are. Send us the shape of what you need and you will have a written quote.
Ask when you request your quote and we will confirm the options and the invoicing details in writing before anything is committed.
We will tell you up front if a minimum applies to the job you are asking for. The free sample has no minimum at all.
The free sample exists precisely so this does not become a dispute. You see the match rate on your own numbers before you commit, and the quote is made against that.
For teams pulling data continuously, yes, because a scheduled refresh costs less per record than repeatedly buying fresh files. For a one-off need it is not, and we will say so.
Volume pricing is based on the job in front of us. If you return with a larger or recurring requirement, that is quoted on its own merits.
Send the filters and the row count you need. You will get a firm price in writing, not a call from a salesperson.