CIENCE pricing, October 2026: the rate card, the maths, and the alternatives

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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.

By Moe Alhosni · Published 13 October 2026 · Updated 27 October 2026 · 11 min read

Short answer: As of 26 October 2026, CIENCE pricing on cience.com/pricing is a $2,000 a month campaign team, a $499 a month graph8 platform, SDRs from $1,750 a month offshore or $3,500 in the US and Europe, a one-time setup with no price shown, and a bonus once an SDR reaches 60% of a held-meeting target. There is no per-meeting fee any more. One offshore SDR costs at least $4,249 a month before setup or bonus, held meetings or not.

How this page was made. Written by Moe Alhosni, who runs ROI Maximizer, a pay-per-meeting agency that competes with CIENCE. CIENCE prices come from its own pricing page, read on 14 and 26 October 2026, and archived copies of it; reviews come from Trustpilot, read on 13 October. Third-party prices are labelled with source and date. Alternatives are grouped, not ranked. We say below when CIENCE is the right buy.

Updated 26 October 2026: CIENCE changed its rate card again. US and Europe SDRs are now one price, from $3,500 a month, and the setup line no longer mentions a quote. The figures below are from the page as read on 26 October.

The first version of this article read the same pricing page on 13 October. That version, archived 28 July, and still showing when I read it on 13 October, listed a $5,000 setup, three SDR levels, $1,000 onboarding per SDR and a per-meeting fee. By 14 October all four had changed or gone. If their page changes again, this article is stale too. Most of the pages ranking for "CIENCE pricing" already are.

What the CIENCE pricing page says today

The page has no "last updated" line. The only date on it is the footer, "Copyright graph8 2026". Every line item, in their words:

Three things to notice before the maths.

Every SDR price says "Starting at". The page does not say what moves a rep above it. On 13 October three regions came in three levels, up to $6,500 for a US rep (28 July snapshot). Ask which rep your quote assumes.

The setup has no number. On 13 October it was $5,000, delivered in a "5-day sprint" (28 July snapshot). Today the page says only "Setup. One time.", with no figure. Third-party pages still say $5,000. Get the figure in writing before you compare anyone's month one.

The bonus is the only line that moves with output, and two of its inputs are not published. The page does not define "base". It does not say what an SDR's held-meeting target is either, only that each SDR "is measured against their own target". Note the step at the top as well: between 60% and 99% of target the multiplier is 0.35, and at 100% it is 0.7. The bonus roughly doubles on the meeting that reaches target.

To be fair to CIENCE, the new page is clearer than the old one. The SDR prices now say "per month", and the worked example says what it leaves out.

Why the third-party pages contradict each other

The pages ranking for this query disagree on the basics. Each claim, next to CIENCE's own page today:

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 three times in 2026. The 23 June snapshot shows exactly ZoomInfo's table: two columns, Offshore and "US / Western Europe". The 28 July snapshot shows three regions in three levels. On 14 October it showed three regions at "Starting at" prices. On 26 October it shows two again: Offshore, and "US and Europe" from $3,500. That is four shapes of SDR table since June. The term depends on which page you landed on. Get the order form. The order form is the price.

The maths: what a held meeting costs at their numbers

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.

Four configurations, all from the page above, at the starting SDR rates:

Two things sit on top. The setup fee lands in month one, and the page no longer prices it. On 13 October it said $5,000 (28 July snapshot); if your quote matches that, month one on the cheapest row is $9,249. And the page includes 75,000 credits a month without saying what the next credit costs.

Then the bonus. Three assumptions, because the page leaves them open:

• Base is the SDR's monthly fee, $1,750 for an offshore rep. The page says the bonus is "paid on top of the monthly fee", so that is my reading. If base means something else, every bonus figure below changes. The July 2026 page defined the formula as "base salary x percent of target hit". Under today's fee-per-seat card, CIENCE's "base" may be the rep's salary rather than the $1,750 fee, which would make every bonus figure below lower.
• Target is ten held meetings a month. CIENCE publishes no target. This number is mine.
• Percent of target is held meetings divided by target, with no cap. The page states none.

On the cheapest row, one offshore SDR at $4,249 fixed:

So the cheapest configuration, at ten held meetings a month with the bonus included, comes to about $547 per held meeting. At five held meetings against that same ten-meeting target, the SDR is at 50% and the bonus is zero, so it is $850. At zero, it is $4,249 with nothing to divide it by.

The step at target is worth a look. The tenth meeting adds $674 to the bill on its own, because it moves the multiplier from 0.35 to 0.7. It is the one meeting on this table that makes the average dearer: $533 at nine, $547 at ten. Above target, each extra meeting adds $122.50. None of that is a reason to avoid CIENCE. It is a reason to ask how the target is set, and who sets it.

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, and they were built on the June card, with SDR levels the page no longer shows. 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 or Europe SDR from $3,500 a month plus bonus, against a hire. That one is in in-house SDR vs pay-per-result agency.

A bonus on a retainer is not pay-per-meeting

CIENCE's campaign team is a flat $2,000 a month and the platform a flat $499. Each SDR is a flat monthly fee. The bonus is the only line that moves with held meetings, and 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?

• Retainer: the full fee. Belkins, most of the agencies on page one, and our own flat $5,000 a month option, which bills in a zero-meeting month too.
• Retainer plus bonus: the full fee, and the bonus line reads zero. This is CIENCE's model today. You pay for the capacity, then pay again once the output clears 60% of a target.
• Pay-per-meeting: nothing. The agency carried the lists, the domains, the copy, the sending and the no-shows, and did not get paid.

To CIENCE's credit, the new page no longer borrows the vocabulary of the third model. The 13 October version talked about a per-meeting fee and an "ROI goal" (28 July snapshot). Today it says what it is: monthly fees, plus a bonus. The longer version is at pay-per-meeting vs retainer.

Our model, for completeness. The published terms start with a one-off setup fee of $1,000–$3,000. After that it is $200–$500 per qualified meeting, billed in arrears. We bill only for meetings that took place and that you approved against the written definition. Nothing is charged for a no-show. There is no minimum spend. Where in each range depends on deal size, and the exact figure is confirmed on the call. The floor is an average contract value of roughly $5,000. Below it, we are the wrong buy. If you would rather carry the volume risk yourself, the alternative is a flat $5,000 a month with no per-meeting fee. The full terms are at pay-per-meeting lead generation pricing. The range exists because a meeting with a $5,000 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.

What the reviews say about lead quality

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.

When CIENCE is the right buy

I would send a buyer to CIENCE in three situations.

You want an SDR team as a service. The bonus formula on the pricing page is the tell. CIENCE is managing reps and renting them to you, with a campaign team, a platform and SDRs offshore or in the US and Europe, and you can "Add or remove SDRs month to month". 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 CIENCE's campaign 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 60-day revenue system build with a forward deployed engineer, a platform licence with 75,000 credits, a website-visitor campaign in the setup. Neither page puts a price on the build today. CIENCE's own five-SDR example is $11,249 a month. 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.

CIENCE alternatives, sorted by what you owe in a bad month

Every "CIENCE alternatives" listicle ranks the author first. Here is the version sorted by pricing model, which is the thing that changes your downside.

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 45 days, written up at PR Noir, first 45 days. Of the 1,543 people who replied positively to our own and client campaigns between August 2025 and July 2026, 19.4% came from B2B PR agency campaigns, the largest single vertical, and 13.5% from UK hospitality PR. Those shares reflect where we sent volume, not how well it converted. We do not phone, we do not do five-language ABM, and we will say so on the first call. The checklist in how to tell if a lead generation agency is any good 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.

Before you sign with anyone

Get these three in writing:

1. The definition of a qualified meeting: titles, company size, budget authority, and held versus booked.
2. No-show terms: replaced, credited or charged.
3. What you pay in a month with zero held meetings.

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).

About the author: Moe Alhosni, founder of ROI Maximizer. He runs the campaigns behind the first-hand data on this site. LinkedIn

Keep reading

• SalesHive vs CIENCE: price, terms and the zero-meeting month (Oct 2026) — SalesHive vs CIENCE from their own pages, October 2026: channels, price, term, guarantee, ramp, and what a month with zero meetings costs at each.
• CIENCE vs Martal Group: month-to-month SDR seats or a 3-month pilot — CIENCE vs Martal Group, October 2026: one prints its SDR rates, one quotes on a call and starts with a 3-month pilot. What a dry month costs at each.
• Callbox pricing, October 2026: $16k–$32k a quarter per pod, and the cost per meeting — Callbox pricing as of October 2026: $16,000–$32,000 a quarter per pod, no per-lead fee, nothing tied to results. What a held meeting costs at its numbers.

Or run the free GTM teardown on your own site for the ICP, cold email and numbers specific to your company.

ROI Maximizer is a trading name of M Ventures LTD, registered in England and Wales, company no. 15554493. Registered office: 4 Beau Street, Bath BA1 1QY, United Kingdom. moe@roimaxi.com

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