The cost per contact per year, the metric that changes everything

“How much does contact cost? » This is the question every B2B data buyer asks, and it's the wrong question. It assumes that a contact is an asset that is acquired once, like a license or equipment. However, a contact is a perishable asset: it begins to degrade on the day of purchase. So the honest question is: how much does accurate contact, maintained accurate, cost for a year? This simple unit change turns most price comparisons on their heads.

The purchase price illusion

Take two seemingly incomparable offers:

• a list of 10,000 contacts purchased for €3,000, i.e. €0.30 per contact ;
• a subscription to a maintained database, say €6,000 per year for the same scope, i.e. €0.60 per contact per year.

At the purchase price, the list wins by two to one. But the list is a snapshot: with a degradation of around 25 to 30% per year – the order of magnitude commonly accepted for B2B data – it only contains around 8,600 exact contacts after six months, and 7,200 after a year. The price of exact contact continues to rise as time passes. And to find the starting level, you have to repurchase: the disposable list is in reality a subscription which does not say its name, with the added bonus of deduplication and reimport work at each iteration.

The complete calculation, over twelve months

To compare honestly, you must integrate three costs that the contact price ignores:

• The cost of redemption. Maintaining 10,000 exact contacts with disposable lists requires two to three purchases per year. Our €3,000 becomes €6,000 to €9,000.
• The operational cost of error. Each outdated contact consumes reality: an email that bounces degrades the deliverability of the entire domain, a call to a party who has left costs ten minutes of sales, a letter to the wrong head office goes in the trash. At a modest cost of €2 to €5 per error exploited, 2,500 expired contacts used during the year represent €5,000 to €12,500 of invisible friction.
• Opportunity cost. The prospect who was not called because the file was false does not appear in any dashboard. However, it is the heaviest position.

In full annual cost, the list at €0.30 the contact typically amounts to €1.10 to €2.10 per exact contact per year. The base maintained at €0.60 remains at €0.60, minus rebounds and redemptions. The ratio of one to two has reversed itself to a ratio of two to three — in the other direction.

Why the credit model worsens the bias

Credit billing — credit consumed per revealed or enriched contact — pushes in exactly the wrong direction: it prices theacquisition and makes it refreshment expensive. Rechecking an existing record consumes a credit, like acquiring a new one; so the economic incentive is to never recheck. The credit model structurally creates bases that rot.

The annual cost reasoning calls for the opposite model: a plan that covers the perimeter and its maintenance. The provider then has an incentive to maintain accuracy—that's their product—and the customer can resynchronize as often as needed without a ticking counter.

Ask your suppliers the question differently

The next time you evaluate a data source, replace “how much contact?” » with three questions:

• What is the last check date, file by file — not the date of constitution of the database?
• What is the guaranteed refresh cycle on my perimeter?
• What does contact cost? per year, maintenance included, repurchases and corrections included?

These three questions eliminate most face-to-face low-cost offers, and reveal the real comparison ground: the servicing process, not inventory.

It is on this ground that sourcing.sh was built: an index — around 200,000 companies, 123,000 profiles, 1.4 million job offers — whose agents ensure continuous refreshing, with a re-crawl guaranteed at least quarterly, delivered to your CRM, your ATS, via API or in Claude via MCP. Flat rate, precisely because the metric that counts is not the price of a contact, but the cost of a contact which remains true.