You already pay for Claude, the skills are on GitHub, and the whole thing looks close to free. That is the arithmetic worth doing before you spend a weekend on it.
There is exactly one place in this field that answers the question with numbers, and the answer is not close to free. Better than that: the numbers are old enough to check, and two of them have moved.
What the setup actually consists of
The reference implementation is coldoutboundskills, a public repository at 672 stars and 242 forks as of 1 September 2026. Its README describes 30 skills organised in five tracks, plus 19 signal playbooks in a sixth.
Ten third-party services carry API keys in it: Smartlead, Prospeo, Dynadot, Zapmail, MillionVerifier, Blitz, RapidAPI, Instantly, OpenWebNinja and OpenRouter. The README is helpful about which of those you actually need, and states that the minimum viable setup for a first campaign is Dynadot, Zapmail, Prospeo and Smartlead.
Four services, then, before Claude does anything. Domains to send from, inboxes on those domains, a source of verified email addresses, and a sending platform.
The one published estimate, and credit where it is due
The same README publishes a cost breakdown, which is more than any vendor in this market does. Its scenario is a first campaign of 2,000 leads, 20 domains and 40 inboxes, and its figures are these: about $240 one-time for domains at roughly $12 each, about $60 a month for Zapmail across 40 inboxes, about $20 for a 2,000-lead Prospeo export, about $39 a month for Smartlead's starter plan, and about $5 for 2,000 MillionVerifier validations.
It totals that as about $360 in month one and about $130 a month recurring.
That is a genuinely useful thing to have published. It is also a snapshot, and price pages move underneath a README.
What those four charge today
Checked against each vendor's own pricing page on 1 September 2026.
| Service | Published price today | What the estimate assumed |
|---|---|---|
| Dynadot, .com domain | $10.88 to register, renew or transfer, with a standing coupon code applied | about $12 each |
| Zapmail | Starter $39/mo for 10 Google mailboxes, extra mailboxes $3.50 each. Growth $99/mo for 30, extras $3.25. Pro $299/mo for 100, extras $3.00. No free tier. | about $60/mo for 40 inboxes |
| Prospeo | Free $0 for 100 credits/mo with no time limit. Starter $49/mo, or $37/mo billed yearly, for 2,000 credits/mo. Growth $99/mo for 5,000. Pro $249/mo for 15,000. One credit is one verified business email; a direct mobile number costs 10. | about $20 for a 2,000-lead export |
| Smartlead | Base $39/mo: 2,000 contacts, 6,000 sends, 2,000 verified prospect emails. Free trial, no card. | about $39/mo |
Sources: Dynadot, Zapmail, Prospeo, Smartlead.
Two of the four match. Dynadot at $10.88 against an assumed $12 is close enough to be the same number, and Smartlead's Base plan is exactly $39. The other two have moved, and they moved in the same direction.
Where the estimate and the price lists diverge
Zapmail, and this is one line of the bill rather than the total. The estimate budgets about $60 a month for 40 inboxes. No current Zapmail plan reaches 40 mailboxes at that price. The cheapest published path today is the Growth plan at $99 for 30 mailboxes plus 10 extras at $3.25, which comes to $131.50 a month. Going up from Starter instead is worse: $39 for 10 mailboxes plus 30 extras at $3.50 is $144.
Prospeo. The estimate treats 2,000 leads as a roughly $20 one-time export. There is no pay-per-export option on Prospeo's pricing page. Credits come with a subscription, and 2,000 credits a month is the Starter plan at $49 a month, or $37 if you commit to a year. The free tier is real and non-expiring, but it is 100 credits a month, which is 5% of the campaign the estimate describes.
Add the four verified lines at today's published prices and a first month comes out around $437 rather than $360: twenty domains at $10.88 is $217.60, plus Zapmail at $131.50, plus Prospeo at $49, plus Smartlead at $39. MillionVerifier is left out of that sum because its price was never checked against its own page, which is also why the comparison stops at four services rather than five.
The recurring picture matters more, because the domains are bought once. Zapmail at $131.50 and Smartlead at $39 are unavoidable monthly costs, and if you want 2,000 fresh verified addresses every month rather than once, Prospeo's $49 joins them. That is $219.50 a month against the estimate's $130.
None of this is a criticism of the repository. Its author published real numbers under their own name, which is the reason this article can exist at all. Prices moved, as prices do.
The Claude side of the bill
Everything above happens before Claude is involved, and Claude is the cheap part.
A Pro subscription is $20 a month, or $17 billed annually. Max starts at $100. Team is $20 per seat annually, $25 monthly.
If the setup runs through the API rather than a subscription, Anthropic publishes token prices per million tokens: Sonnet 5 at $2 in and $10 out, Opus 5 at $5 and $25, Haiku 4.5 at $1 and $5. The Batch API halves all of those. For work that classifies and writes rather than reasons at length, Haiku on batch is the line item nobody notices.
So the shape of the bill is the opposite of what the framing suggests. The model is tens of dollars. The infrastructure around it is hundreds. Our piece on how enrichment credits are priced covers why the data line behaves the way it does across this whole category.
What has a free tier, and what does not
A useful correction to something that gets repeated: it is not true that every lead-data provider makes you pay before an AI agent can reach it. Two of them do not.
Apollo publishes a free plan at $0 with 900 credits per seat per year, granted monthly, and its feature list includes API access. Its own MCP documentation states that there is no additional cost to connect to Apollo MCP and that your existing plan, permissions and credits still apply. One restriction to know: accounts registered with a personal rather than a work email address cannot use search and enrichment. Paid tiers run $49, $79 and $119 per seat per month billed annually, and the $119 Organization tier has a three-seat minimum.
Oppora has a plan it calls Free Forever at $0, with 50 data credits, one phone credit and 10 AI credits a month, access to its company database and three AI workflows. Its pricing page banners its Claude MCP as live and invites you to start on the free plan.
ZoomInfo is the counterexample. It publishes no self-serve price at all, has no free plan, and its MCP server is included with existing paid subscriptions and draws on paid bulk data credits. If your plan for this setup involved ZoomInfo data, that is the wall. Alternatives for a company under fifty people covers what else exists at that end of the market.
At 900 credits a year, Apollo's free tier is not going to run the 2,000-lead campaign the estimate describes. It is enough to test whether the pipeline works before you commit $200 a month to it, which is a different and useful thing.
What this is worth building
The honest read: if you enjoy this and you are going to run outbound continuously for a year, the setup pays for itself against most tools in this category, and the repository is a real head start.
If you were drawn to it because it looked like the free version of buying data, the arithmetic does not support that. You are looking at roughly $220 a month in infrastructure before a single reply, on a stack of four vendors you now maintain, to produce a list whose accuracy nobody has measured.
Set that against the thing you were avoiding. Apollo's Professional seat is $79 a month billed annually with 48,000 credits a year, and it includes the sending platform the DIY stack pays Smartlead for. That is not a like-for-like comparison, because the DIY stack buys you your own domains and inboxes and Apollo does not, and deliverability on your own infrastructure is the reason people build this. It is close enough to say the decision is not about saving money. Our piece on what Claude can and cannot do for lead generation goes through that last part using Anthropic's own documentation.
The build is a real option. It is just not a cheap one, and the one person who published the numbers deserves credit for making that checkable.
All prices in this article come from each vendor's own pricing page, checked on 1 September 2026.
Frequently asked
- How much does a Claude cold-outbound setup cost?
- The one published estimate, from the coldoutboundskills repository, is about $360 in month one and about $130 a month recurring, for 2,000 leads across 20 domains and 40 inboxes. Priced against the four required vendors' own pages on 1 September 2026, the first month comes closer to $437 and the recurring cost closer to $220, because Zapmail's price for 40 mailboxes and Prospeo's credit model have both moved.
- What services do you need besides Claude?
- The repository states that the minimum viable setup is Dynadot for domains, Zapmail for inboxes, Prospeo for verified email addresses and Smartlead for sending. Ten services carry API keys in the full project.
- Is Claude the expensive part?
- No. A Pro subscription is $20 a month, or $17 billed annually, and API token prices run from $1 per million input tokens on Haiku 4.5 to $5 on Opus 5, halved again on the Batch API. The infrastructure around the model costs several times more than the model.
- Do all lead-data providers charge before an AI agent can use them?
- No. Apollo publishes a free plan at $0 with 900 credits per seat per year that lists API access, and its MCP documentation states there is no additional cost to connect. Oppora has a $0 Free Forever plan and markets its Claude MCP from it. ZoomInfo publishes no self-serve price, has no free plan, and its MCP draws on paid bulk data credits.
- Can you run this on free tiers?
- Not at the scale the published estimate describes. Prospeo's free tier is 100 credits a month against a 2,000-lead campaign, Apollo's free plan is 900 credits a year, and Zapmail has no free tier at all. Free tiers are enough to test whether the pipeline works before committing to the monthly cost.