How much do MCA leads cost?

The short answer

Exclusive, verified MCA leads run $65–$120 on the open market. Real-time shared leads run $10–$30, fresh applications $15–$45, live transfers $50–$300, and aged data under $5. But cost per lead is the wrong number to compare on — at two to four funded deals per fifty exclusive leads (4–8%), a $60 lead works out around $750–$1,500 per funded deal.

Here is the price of everything on the market, so you have the whole picture before the argument about which number matters.

Why is the cheap end not actually cheap?

Because your rep costs the same either way. That is the entire argument and it is worth sitting with for a second.

Say a $15 shared lead takes four times the dials to reach a merchant who has already spoken to three brokers. Your lead line went down. Your labour line went up by more than it went down. You did not save money — you moved it to a column you were not watching, and you spent your reps’ morning on it.

What should I compare vendors on instead?

Cost per funded deal. It is the only figure that survives contact with reality, and any vendor should be able to walk you through it at their typical outcome rather than their best one.

What actually moves the price?

• Revenue floor. Leads filtered to merchants doing $50K+ a month cost more to source than leads at $30K+, because more traffic gets thrown away to produce it.
• Verification. A one-time-code step discards a large share of submissions, and that cost lands in the per-lead price. It is most of the gap between a $60 lead and a $20 one.
• Volume. Orders in the hundreds move the per-lead price down. A 25-lead order will not carry volume pricing anywhere, and you should be suspicious if someone offers it.
• Exclusivity window. Exclusivity that holds longer costs more than exclusivity that quietly expires.
• Where it is generated. On Meta, a qualified lead with a passcode on the form costs $15 to $30 to produce; a vendor’s price sits above that because the media buyer, the creatives and the learning weeks are theirs.

Why do two vendors quote such different prices?

Because "lead" describes a dozen different products. Two quotes thirty dollars apart are usually not the same thing priced differently — they are different things. Before comparing numbers, get these five answers from both:

A vendor at the cheap end of every row is not overcharging you. They are selling a genuinely cheaper product, and if your operation suits it, buy it. The error is comparing a right-hand-column lead to a left-hand-column price and concluding one vendor is greedy.

How do I know if a real-time lead vendor is reselling?

Shared leads are resold by design — that is what the lower price buys, and it is fine when it is disclosed. The problem is a lead sold as exclusive that also went to somebody else. Four checks catch most of it:

• The overlap test. Buy from two vendors at once, tag every lead by source, normalise phone numbers to digits and emails to lowercase, and look for the same record under both. Any overlap between two vendors who both claimed exclusivity means at least one of them is reselling.
• The terms. Look for an exclusivity window or an aged-data line. "Exclusive for 30 days" means the record can be sold again on day 31, and an aged-data line means it can be sold again later as aged. Neither is a lie if it is written down, but it tells you what exclusive actually covers.
• The submit timestamps. Real applications arrive spread across the day as merchants fill in forms. Records stamped in tight clusters — a dozen inside the same few minutes, day after day — suggest a batch being loaded rather than live traffic.
• The certificate. Ask for a TrustedForm certificate on a delivered record. It carries the merchant’s own submission timestamp, so you can see when the application was really made and how long it sat before it reached you. A vendor who generates their own traffic can send one in minutes; a reseller has to ask somebody.

The full version of the overlap test, and what to do when you find duplicates, is in how to tell if your leads are being resold.

How should I budget a first order?

Size it so the result means something. Under about 25 leads, one good week or one bad week swings your entire read — you will not learn whether the leads work, you will learn what happened that fortnight.

• Budget for enough leads that one week cannot swing the result — the benchmark is quoted per 50 exclusive leads.
• Do not spend your whole test budget with one vendor on the first order. Two vendors at 25 each tells you more than one at 50, provided you tag the sources.
• Set the money aside for the follow-up too. A lead you call once is a lead you wasted, and most funded deals take several touches.
• Decide the success threshold before the leads land. Writing down "this works if we fund two" stops the result being argued about afterwards.

Do volume discounts actually save money?

They save money per lead. Whether they save money depends entirely on whether your floor can work the extra volume at the same speed. A 500-lead order at a discounted price is only cheaper than buying at full price if all 500 get called as fast as a smaller order would have been. We do not offer volume tiers — exclusive leads are $60 flat — so this is about the vendors who do.

This is where most large orders go wrong. The discount is real, the leads are the same quality, and the outcome is worse because the same three reps are now working ten times the volume with the same number of hours. If you are scaling an order, scale the floor first or throttle the delivery.

A worked example, start to finish

Fifty exclusive leads at $60 is $3,000 — fifty because that is the unit the benchmark is quoted in. Say your floor calls within five minutes and works each record properly. At the benchmark our clients report for exclusive leads, that produces two to four funded deals (4–8%).

Now run the same exercise on a vendor quoting $25. If their leads fund one deal per fifty rather than the two to four our clients report on exclusive, your cost per funded deal is $1,250 — more than exclusive at the typical three per fifty ($1,000), less than at two ($1,500) — and your reps worked two to four times as many records to get there.

Are $10 MCA leads ever worth it?

Sometimes, and the break-even takes one division. Our clients report two to four funded deals per fifty exclusive leads (4–8%), so a $60 exclusive lead costs $750 to $1,500 in leads per funded deal ($60 ÷ 8% = $750; $60 ÷ 4% = $1,500). A $10 lead only matches that if one in 75 to one in 150 of them funds ($750 ÷ $10 = 75; $1,500 ÷ $10 = 150).

That is the invoice alone, before rep time. At those rates a $10 lead needs 75 to 150 records worked for every funded deal, against 12.5 to 25 on exclusive (50 ÷ 4 and 50 ÷ 2) — six times as many records to work at every point in the range, before counting any extra dials each one takes. It only comes out cheaper if it funds better than the rate in the table by enough to pay for that extra work.

What a record worked costs is your number, not ours. On a floor with idle reps whose hours are paid either way, the extra dials cost little, and a $10 source that beats those rates can be worth buying. On a floor paying for every dial, price the extra records before you count the saving. Put your own rep cost and funded rate into the cost per funded deal calculator.