The Outbound Tech Stack We Run for Every Client

The question we get asked more than any other: “what tools do you actually use?” Here is the complete answer. This is the exact stack we run for almost every ReplyWorks engagement, what each tool costs, why we picked it over alternatives, and how everything connects together. No affiliate links, no hidden agenda — just the tools we have settled on after years of trying everything.

The stack at a glance

The full stack covers six functional layers: domain and infrastructure, sourcing and enrichment, sending, deliverability monitoring, reply handling, and reporting. Almost every team underinvests in two of these layers — usually deliverability monitoring and reporting — and that is where most preventable problems originate.

Layer 1: Domains & infrastructure

Cloudflare Registrar — for buying and managing all sending domains. Around $10 per domain per year. Clean WHOIS, fast DNS, no nonsense. We strongly prefer it to GoDaddy and Namecheap.

Google Workspace — for mailbox hosting. $6 per mailbox per month, billed monthly with no annual commitment. We use Google for roughly seventy percent of client mailboxes; the deliverability is consistent and the API is mature. Microsoft 365 (also $6/mo) is the alternative we use for the other thirty percent depending on client preference.

Total monthly cost for infrastructure: roughly $80–$200 depending on volume tier (3–10 domains, 6–30 mailboxes).

Layer 2: Sourcing & enrichment

LinkedIn Sales Navigator — $99/mo per seat. The highest-quality source of fresh firmographic and people data. We use it for top-of-funnel research and saved searches that get exported elsewhere for sending.

Apollo.io — $59/mo per seat. The all-in-one workhorse for bulk firmographic and contact data, used as a fallback when Sales Navigator data is sparse.

Clay — $149–$349/mo depending on volume. The orchestration and enrichment layer that ties everything together. This is where we run the actual list-building workflows — pulling data from multiple sources, waterfalling email validation, generating personalization tokens, and pushing clean rows into the sending tool.

BuiltWith (occasional) — $295/mo. Used only when technographic targeting is critical to the engagement. Skipped for clients where tech stack is not a primary filter.

NeverBounce — pay-per-use, around $0.005 per email verified. Used as the final gate before any email enters a campaign.

Total monthly cost for sourcing & enrichment: roughly $300–$800 depending on engagement scale.

Layer 3: Sending

Smartlead — $94/mo for the agency tier. Our default sending tool for almost all clients. Unlimited mailboxes, deep analytics, robust master inbox, and a strong API. See our Smartlead vs. Instantly playbook for the full reasoning.

(For solo-founder clients we sometimes use Instantly instead at $37–$97/mo, but Smartlead is the default.)

Total monthly cost for sending: around $94 per client.

Layer 4: Deliverability monitoring

Google Postmaster Tools — free. Should be set up for every sending domain on day one. It shows actual reputation data from Gmail itself, which is the canonical source of truth for Gmail deliverability.

mail-tester.com — free for occasional use, $20/mo for unlimited. We run this before every campaign launch and weekly afterwards.

Glock Apps — $79/mo. Sends test emails to seed accounts across Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and other major providers, then reports back which folder each one landed in. The richest deliverability dataset available short of running your own seed list.

Total monthly cost for deliverability monitoring: around $100. This is the layer most teams skip and most regret skipping.

Layer 5: Reply handling

This layer is mostly process, not tools. Replies come into the master inbox in Smartlead. A human (us, or the client’s SDR) categorizes each reply within four business hours: positive, negative, out-of-office, referral, wrong-person, or unsubscribe. Positive replies get forwarded to the client’s sales team or booked directly into Calendly depending on the engagement.

Calendly — $12/mo per user. For meeting scheduling once a positive reply is qualified.

Total monthly cost for reply handling tools: around $12. The labor cost is the real cost here, and it scales with volume.

Layer 6: Reporting

Smartlead built-in dashboards — included. Sufficient for day-to-day campaign monitoring.

Custom Google Sheet (weekly) — pulled from Smartlead’s API. Aggregates sent, opened, replied, positive-replied, and meetings booked across all campaigns and all mailboxes. Shared with the client every Monday.

Loom video (weekly) — five-minute walkthrough of what happened the previous week, what we changed, and what we are testing this week. This is the highest-leverage piece of client communication we do.

Total monthly cost for reporting tools: $0 — it is all process, not software.

Total stack cost

For a typical mid-tier engagement (six sending domains, fifteen mailboxes, sending around three thousand emails per week), the total monthly tooling cost is roughly $700–$1,000 depending on which optional tools are needed for the client’s specific market.

That is the entire stack. There is nothing magic in it. The tools are not the secret — the secret is knowing which tools to use for which purpose, how to wire them together, and what processes to wrap around them. Same tools, different operators, dramatically different results.

What we have stopped using

For balance, here is what we have removed from our stack over the past two years:

SalesLoft and Outreach.io — too enterprise, too expensive, and the deliverability is consistently worse than Smartlead for cold use cases. They are great for warm sales engagement; not for cold prospecting.

Lemlist — solid tool but the master inbox and analytics are weaker than Smartlead, and the per-mailbox pricing gets painful at scale.

Hunter.io — fine for finding the occasional email, but Apollo and Clay handle this better and at higher volume.

ZoomInfo — only worth the price tag if your buyers are exclusively at Fortune 500 companies. For mid-market and SMB it is overkill.

Mailshake and Reply.io — both fine, neither best-in-class for the way we work in 2025.

Tools change every year. The principles do not. Pick the right tool for each layer, wire them together carefully, and put more energy into process than into the next shiny thing.