CIENCE's rate card as of October 2026, what a held meeting costs at their own numbers, why third-party pages disagree, and when CIENCE is the right buy.
Short answer: As of 13 October 2026, cience.com/pricing lists a $5,000 one-time setup, a $2,000 a month team, a $499 a month platform licence, SDRs at $1,500 to $6,500 each, $1,000 onboarding per SDR, a per-meeting fee with no published number, and a commission on top. The first month is $7,499 before you add a single SDR. That is a retainer with a per-meeting fee bolted on, not pay-per-meeting: in a month with zero held meetings you still owe the retainer. The maths, the contradictions between the third-party pages, the reviews and the alternatives are below.
I run a pay-per-meeting agency. That makes me biased, and it means I have sat on the other side of a lot of CIENCE comparisons. Every CIENCE number here comes from a page I read on 13 October 2026, with the date and the link next to it. If their page changes next month, this article is stale too. Most of the pages ranking for "CIENCE pricing" already are.
The page has no "last updated" line. The only date on it is the footer, "Copyright graph8 2026". Every line item, in their words:
| Line item | Price on the page | Their wording |
|---|---|---|
| GTM System Setup | $5,000 one-time | "Complete GTM setup delivered in a 5-day sprint" |
| Dedicated GTM team ("Performance-Driven Growth") | $2,000 a month | "Full-scale campaign management and continuous optimization" |
| graph8 platform licence | $499 a month | "75,000 monthly credits included" |
| First month, all in | $7,499 | "Setup plus team plus platform. SDR capacity quoted separately." |
| SDR, Level 1 "Scripted Outreach" | $1,500 offshore / $2,500 Europe / $4,500 US | billing period not stated |
| SDR, Level 2 "Independent Producer" | $2,500 / $3,500 / $5,500 | billing period not stated |
| SDR, Level 3 "Data-Driven Optimizer" | $3,500 / $4,500 / $6,500 | billing period not stated |
| SDR onboarding | $1,000 one-time per SDR | |
| Per-meeting fee | no number | "calculated from the agreed ROI goal, typically 4x ROI, using the campaign calculator" |
| GTM team meetings | no number | "Same active held-meeting fee" |
| SDR commission | formula only | below 60% of target: nothing; 60 to 99%: base x percent of target x 0.35; 100% and above: base x percent of target x 0.7 |
| Term | "month to month"; SDR capacity added "without a long-term contract" |
Three things to notice before the maths.
The SDR table does not say "per month". Every third-party page reads it as monthly, and the first-month framing only makes sense if it is, so I have treated it as monthly. Ask them to confirm.
"All in" is not all in. The $7,499 excludes SDR capacity. Stop reading at the summary box and you are out by $1,500 to $6,500 a month per rep, plus onboarding.
The per-meeting fee has no number. "Typically 4x ROI" is the entire disclosure. Read naturally, it means the fee is set so a meeting should return about four times what you paid for it. Their calculator page describes the same idea, working "backward from deal value and CAC tolerance to a sustainable held-meeting cost", but ships with every field blank and every output at $0. The per-meeting number is whatever gets agreed on the call.
The pages ranking for this query disagree on the basics. Each claim, next to CIENCE's own page today:
| Claim | Who says it, and when | CIENCE's page, 13 October 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Platform starts at $2,400 a month | Arvani Media, 20 February 2026; Miniloop, updated May 2026 | $499 a month |
| 6 to 12 month minimum, "no month-to-month option" | Miniloop, May 2026 | "month to month" |
| Initial term "twelve months from the service start date unless the order form says otherwise" | SaaSHero, updated July 2026 | "month to month" |
| "All services run month-to-month with no long-term contracts" | ZoomInfo, dated 06/01/2026, which I read as 1 June | matches |
| One "US / Western Europe" SDR column at $3,500 / $4,500 / $5,500 | ZoomInfo, 1 June 2026 | Europe $2,500 / $3,500 / $4,500; US $4,500 / $5,500 / $6,500 |
| About $250 per held meeting | Arvani, February 2026; Miniloop, May 2026 | no number published |
| $7,499 first month including $5,000 setup | A-Sales, 6 October 2026 | matches |
| "$2,499+ per month"; plans "typically span 3–12 months" | Belkins, updated 11 February 2026 | $2,499 matches; the term is the author's inference |
CIENCE contradicts itself as well. Its own comparison page against CloudTask, marked "Updated March 2026", says graph8 is "included at no extra cost in CIENCE engagements rather than billed as a separate platform fee". The pricing page bills it at $499 a month. One of those pages is out of date, and I cannot tell you which.
So the rate card has moved at least once in 2026, the SDR table changed shape between June and October or ZoomInfo misread it, and the term depends on which page you landed on. Get the order form. The order form is the price.
CIENCE publishes no meeting count, so there is no official cost per meeting. What I can do is take their fixed costs and divide by a range of outcomes. Pick the row that matches what they promise you on the call.
Three configurations, all from the page above, SDR rates treated as monthly:
| Configuration | Fixed monthly | Month-one cash | Per held meeting at 5 / 10 / 20 a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Team + licence + 1 offshore Level 1 SDR | $3,999 | $9,999 | $800 / $400 / $200 |
| Team + licence + 2 offshore Level 1 SDRs | $5,499 | $12,499 | $1,100 / $550 / $275 |
| Team + licence + 1 US Level 3 SDR | $8,999 | $14,999 | $1,800 / $900 / $450 |
Month-one cash is the fixed monthly plus the $5,000 setup plus $1,000 onboarding per SDR. Two things sit on top.
The per-meeting fee. Arvani in February 2026 and Miniloop in May 2026 both put it around $250 per held meeting. If that is right, add $250 to every cell. If "4x ROI" is applied per meeting it could be far higher: on a $20,000 deal where one held meeting in five closes, expected revenue per meeting is $4,000, and a 4x target implies a fee near $1,000. That is my reading of one sentence, not their quote. Get the number in writing.
The commission. At 100% of target, a Level 1 offshore SDR on a $1,500 base earns base x 1.0 x 0.7, which is $1,050 a month, billed to you. Hit target with ten held meetings and that is another $105 per meeting.
So the cheapest configuration, at ten held meetings a month with the third-party fee and the commission included, comes to about $755 per held meeting. At five held meetings against that same ten-meeting target, the SDR is at 50% and the commission is zero, so it is about $1,050. At zero, it is $3,999 with nothing to divide it by.
ZoomInfo's bigger example from 1 June 2026, two offshore Level 1 SDRs plus around 490,000 credits, starts at $7,574 a month, "rising to approximately $19,674/month with performance bonuses and credit overages". At twenty held meetings that is $379 to $984 each. At ten, $757 to $1,967. Those are their figures and their assumptions, not mine. The shape is the same, though: the fixed cost does not move, so the price per meeting is set by the meeting count and nothing else.
For a UK buyer the comparison that matters is a US Level 3 SDR at $6,500 a month plus commission, against a hire. That one is in in-house SDR vs pay-per-result agency.
CIENCE's monthly plan is called "Performance-Driven Growth". It is a flat $2,000. The per-meeting fee is real, but it is added to the retainer, not put in place of it.
The difference in one question: what do I owe in a month with zero held meetings?
The second model is sold with the vocabulary of the third. "Performance", "per meeting", "ROI goal". The words are doing work the contract does not do. The longer version is at pay-per-meeting vs retainer.
Our model, for completeness: pay per qualified meeting, no retainer, no minimum spend, nothing charged for a no-show. The published terms are $200–$400 per qualified meeting plus a one-off setup fee of $650–$1,000 for US clients, or £200 per qualified meeting plus £500 a month that starts only after the first meeting for UK clients — billed in arrears, only for meetings that happened and you approved, nothing for a no-show. Where in the range depends on deal size; the full terms are on the pricing page. That range exists because a meeting with a £3,000 buyer and a meeting with a £90,000 buyer are not worth the same to you and should not cost the same.
The catch with pure pay-per-meeting is the obvious one. The agency is paid per meeting, so the agency wants every meeting to count. That is why "qualified" has to be defined in writing before outreach starts, and why ours is published at what counts as a qualified meeting. Hold us to it.
Trustpilot on 13 October 2026: 1.6 out of 5 from 21 reviews. Andrew Morgan, 8 September 2026: "We paid $20k and they didn't generate a single lead." Jeremy Neal, 29 May 2025, on the leads delivered: "many were completely irrelevant to our industry or services". Roger Poulin, August 2022: "poorly fit leads well outside our described ICPs". Jon, October 2022: "I wasn't paying for an open rate, I was paying for booked appts."
I will not characterise these beyond what they say. Twenty-one Trustpilot reviews is a small sample. G2 would not load for me without a verification wall, so nothing from it is in this article. Read it yourself before you decide.
I would send a buyer to CIENCE in three situations.
You want an SDR team as a service. The commission formula on the pricing page is the tell. CIENCE is managing reps and renting them to you, with a manager, a platform and three skill tiers across three geographies. If you want to go from zero to three SDRs in a month without recruiting, that is the product, and no pay-per-meeting agency offers it.
You need multi-channel. Their pricing page lists cold calling and "Add calls, ads, and social to email", their CloudTask comparison page sells graph8 as "multichannel orchestration", and the inputs on their ROI calculator include SDRs, LinkedIn accounts and website visitors. If your buyers need to be phoned, in several countries, an email-led agency like mine is the wrong tool.
You are enterprise. A $9,500 or $25,000 "Revenue System" build, a platform licence with 75,000 credits, visitor deanonymisation. If your budget is north of $10,000 a month and the sales cycle is nine months, the retainer is the smaller risk and the platform is part of what you are buying.
Do not buy CIENCE, or us, if you have never closed a deal from outbound, if your addressable market is a few hundred companies, or if you cannot afford a month that produces nothing. The first two are message problems. The third is the whole reason the pricing model matters.
Every "CIENCE alternatives" listicle ranks the author first. Here is the version sorted by pricing model, which is the thing that changes your downside.
| Model | Example | A zero-meeting month costs you | Good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Retainer, quote only | Belkins (belkins.io/pricing shows Growth, Growth Plus and Enterprise tiers with no price, as of 13 October 2026; Belkins does not publish pricing) | the full retainer | multi-channel, larger budgets |
| Retainer plus per-meeting fee | CIENCE SDR model | retainer and commission; the per-meeting line is zero | SDR team as a service |
| In-house SDR | your own hire | salary and tools | control, long cycles |
| AI SDR software | a tool subscription | the subscription | you have a team to run it; see AI SDR software vs pay-per-meeting |
| Pay per qualified meeting | ROI Maximizer | nothing | email-led outbound, a defined ICP, first meetings inside 30 days |
On us, since I am in the table: our public case is PR Noir, a US PR agency, 27 leads, 10 meetings, 37% lead-to-meeting and a $90K close in the first 30 days, written up at PR Noir, first 30 days. Across 1,543 positive replies from our own and client campaigns between August 2025 and July 2026, 19.4% came from B2B PR agency campaigns, 13.5% from UK hospitality PR and 9.2% from B2B SaaS. That is where we are strong. We do not phone, we do not do five-language ABM, and we will say so on the first call. The checklist for judging any agency applies to us as hard as to CIENCE.
If you want to see where you stand before talking to anyone, the free GTM teardown is there.
Get these four in writing:
A qualified meeting is defined, in writing, at what counts as a qualified meeting. And before you accept any per-meeting number, from CIENCE, from us or from anyone, run your deal size through the ROI calculator to work out the most you should pay per meeting.
If you'd like a second pair of eyes on a CIENCE quote, or on ours, I'm happy to talk it through. Grab 20 minutes or email moe@roimaxi.com.
Moe Alhosni, founder, ROI Maximizer (M Ventures LTD, 4 Beau Street, Bath BA1 1QY).
Or run the free GTM teardown on your own site for the ICP, cold email and numbers specific to your company.