Same budget, three lead products, three completely different outcomes. All the math is shown — including the assumptions you should argue with.
Five hundred dollars is roughly what a working agent spends on leads in a slow month. Where it goes determines whether that month produces one conversation or twenty. Here is what the same $500 buys across the three products agents actually choose between in 2026.
At a typical $75 per transfer, $500 buys you about 6 or 7 warm conversations. At a 15–30% close rate, that is realistically one to two policies. Every one of those conversations is with someone who was pre-qualified and handed to you on the phone — no dialing, no texting, no list hygiene. When the sixth call ends, your $500 is spent and you own nothing.
At $15 each, $500 buys roughly 33 leads. Closing 5–15% gives you two to five policies on paper. In practice, published cost-per-acquisition figures for shared property and casualty leads land between $400 and $800 per bound policy — meaningfully worse than the naive math suggests, because contact rates collapse when the same form is sold to several agents and you are the third one to call.
Aged records are $0.015 each, but the honest comparison has to include the cost of contacting them. Two SMS messages per lead at roughly $0.012 per segment adds about $0.024 per record, so your true all-in cost is near $0.039 per lead touched. That means $500 covers roughly 12,800 leads, messaged twice.
Running our funnel assumptions over that volume:
And when the campaign is finished you still own 12,800 records you can re-work next month, layer into an email sequence, or hand to a dialer.
| Live transfers | Shared web leads | Aged data list | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leads acquired | 6–7 transfers | ~33 leads | ~12,800 records |
| Real conversations | 6–7 | 10–20 (if you win the race) | ~23 |
| Policies (typical) | 1–2 | 2–5 | 7–8 |
| Work required from you | Answer the phone | Call within minutes | Scrub, text, work replies |
| Time to first conversation | Same day | Same day | 2–5 days after setup |
| Left over afterward | Nothing | Nothing | 12,800 reusable records |
Live-transfer and web-lead figures use published 2026 industry ranges; aged-list figures use the funnel assumptions above. Change any of them in the ROI calculator and watch the answer move.
The aged column is the one carrying assumptions, so here they are in the open. A 0.18% positive reply rate is the middle of the 0.1–0.3% range we plan around. The 45% appointment rate and 75% close rate are appointment-stage numbers, not lead-stage: they describe what happens after someone has already replied that they are interested, which is why they look high next to the close rates quoted for web leads. Push the reply rate down to 0.1% and convert only one in ten of those replies, and that same $500 still produces about one policy — roughly $390 in cost per deal, which is about what a single live transfer buyer pays. Plan for the range rather than the midpoint, but note where the floor actually sits: level with the alternatives, not below them.
Two costs the table does not include, because they vary too much to fake: a DNC scrub, which runs a few dollars per thousand records and is not optional, and your own time working the replies — which is the single biggest variable in the entire model.
If you have no texting stack yet, spend it on transfers this month and build the stack in the background — an aged list you never message is worth nothing. If you already text, put the $500 into volume: buy the records, scrub them, message twice, and work every reply the same day it lands. If you are somewhere in between, split it — $250 of transfers to keep this week's calendar full, $250 of data to build a pipeline that outlasts the spend.
You can see live inventory by state and age, with pricing that updates as you build the order, on the aged insurance leads page — or grab a free masked sample first and look at the data before you spend anything.
Aged data records are not consented insurance-form leads, no TCPA express consent is claimed, and they are not DNC-scrubbed at delivery. Scrub against the National and applicable state Do-Not-Call registries, register your 10DLC campaign with your SMS provider, and honor every opt-out permanently. Our step-by-step is here: how to DNC scrub an aged lead list. Not legal advice — check with your own compliance counsel.
Roughly 6 or 7 live transfers at $75 each, about 33 shared web leads at $15 each, or around 12,800 aged data records messaged twice by SMS at an all-in cost near $0.039 per record ($0.015 for the data plus about $0.024 in texting).
Yes, comfortably. Our minimum order is 7,500 leads, which is $112.50 in data. A $500 budget covers roughly 12,800 records including two SMS messages each, which is enough volume for the response math to mean something rather than being noise.
Nobody on an aged list filled out a form asking to be contacted, so positive reply rates run about 0.1% to 0.3% rather than the double-digit contact rates a fresh form fill produces. You are buying reach at a price where volume is affordable, not intent.
Three: SMS or dialer costs, which typically exceed the cost of the data itself; a DNC scrub at a few dollars per thousand records; and your own time working replies. Any comparison that leaves these out is not an honest one.
No. You can buy a single list from 7,500 leads with no contract and no recurring charge. Monthly plans exist if you want a fresh list delivered automatically, but they are optional and can be canceled from your dashboard at any time.
Join free — then filter and buy leads in your dashboard.
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