Investor Outreach Cost: the Full Price List

What does it cost to reach an investor: really? Not the price of an email (nearly zero), but the price of that email being found, verified, compliant, and actually seen. Our free tier gives every founder five investor reachouts, and behind them sits an infrastructure most founders never have to think about : that is the point. This post lays out what it takes, what it costs to do yourself, and exactly what we charge for it.

What we set out to change

When we scoped investor outreach, the simple reading was: write a good email, send it to five well-matched investors, done. The execution challenge post covers why lists and generic sales tools fall short for a raise (it and the rest of the series live on the blog). When we started building, we found a layer of quiet practicalities underneath, the kind every founder deserves to have handled for them.

Delivery is invisible until it works. An email can be "sent" perfectly and still never be seen: new sending domains need time to earn trust with email providers, and that warm-up period that does not compress. We wanted your first impression with an investor to actually arrive.

Every country plays by its own rules. Reaching out to investors is perfectly legal everywhere we researched, but the how differs. The US asks for a working unsubscribe link and a real postal address. Germany and several neighbours expect prior consent. Canada wants a documented reason before the first email. The UK adds an extra layer of care around anything investment-related. One "send" button has to quietly know all of this.

Investor conversations have their own etiquette, and their own rulebook. A friendly first note is welcome everywhere. An email that reads like an offer sheet is a different kind of document with different rules. Knowing where that line sits, and keeping every first touch on the welcome side of it, turned out to be its own discipline.

Lists age like milk, not wine. Even professionally verified investor lists bounce far more often than their vendors suggest, and business contacts naturally decay a few percent every month. Sending to a stale list doesn't just waste a stamp. It teaches email providers to distrust the sender.

The idea / how Raisy fixes it

So we built the five emails as a peace-of-mind product, not a template feature. Three decisions carry the weight.

One careful gate, keyed by intent and country. Every send, including the preview you approve: passes a compliance check that understands two things: where your recipient is, and what kind of email this is. A first hello to an investor is treated differently from a sales pitch, and a recipient in Munich is treated differently from one in Miami. If anything is absent, the gate says so in plain language before anything leaves, never after.

You send; we prepare. Investors reply to founders, not platforms, so every email goes from your own mailbox, under your own name, at your pace. Raisy does the research, the ranking, the drafting, the checking, and the record-keeping. You approve every word. It is the same rule as everywhere else in Raisy, humans decide, bots prepare , applied to the most visible channel your company has.

Timing is part of the service. New sending infrastructure needs roughly a month of steady, honest use before email providers fully trust it. Rather than letting you discover that after the fact, we treat timing as something the platform manages and schedules around, so when your email matters, it lands.

How it works (the technical layer)

• A ranked investor funnel. An external investor list becomes structured profiles, scored against your stage, sector, and geography. You see the ranking and the reasoning, never a black box.
• A compliance gate on every send and every preview. The gate resolves the recipient's country and the email's intent, then applies the matching rules: consent-first countries ask for a documented basis, the UK investor path asks for a recorded exemption, and first touches stay in friendly, teaser-style framing by default.
• Verification right before sending. Addresses are checked at send time, not at import time, and role addresses and known risk patterns are filtered out, because a list that was fine in March is not necessarily fine in June.
• Sensible sending limits, built in. Per-mailbox daily caps, gentle ramp-up schedules, and the email providers' own published thresholds are enforced by the platform, so a good week never accidentally becomes a bad reputation.
• A record of everything. Approved, sent, answered: the full trail lives in your company record, so any future question has a clear, documented answer.

What it costs, and what you're actually investing in

Here is the honest arithmetic of assembling this yourself, before your first email lands:

Every number in this table and in both figures reads from one data file, download it as XLSX or CSV.

The subscription number is survivable, $80–320 a month is not what makes this hard. What the stack price leaves out is the calendar month of warm-up, the list care that never ends, and the quiet discipline of staying on the right side of rules that carry real weight, the kind of weight measured in thousands per email in the US and far more in Europe and Canada. None of that is meant to worry you; it is meant to explain why we took it seriously so early.

That is what the paid tier is an investment in. Sending email itself costs almost nothing. What you are investing in is the gate that knows the difference between Munich and Miami, a list you can trust, infrastructure that is already warmed up, a documented trail behind every send, and the confidence that the natural outcome of your outreach is a good conversation. A full-service fundraising agency charges $5,000–25,000 a month, much of it for exactly this execution layer. We think that layer should cost like software.

What Raisy charges, and why

Everything above exists so this part can be boring. Try the slider, then the full price list:

We charge per reachout, not per meeting. A plan buys credits, and credits are the platform's currency: 1 USD = 1,000 credits, and what one reachout costs falls as you move up: 196 credits on Starter, 172 on Growth, 164 on Scale — so a bigger plan's credits buy more reachouts. Send, or spend them on anything else in the platform: a mailbox-month, a domain, whatever comes next. One currency, one balance, every action priced in it.

Our pricing principle: the premium tightens the more you buy. Starter $0.196, Growth $0.172, Scale $0.164 per reachout, every step up buys a better unit price. Monthly bills as you go; every plan is month-to-month, cancel anytime.

A reachout is one investor reached out to, through any channel, with the address found and verified, the compliance check passed for their country, and the send logged. We count reachouts, not emails, because you are buying conversations started, not messages fired.

No commissions, no equity, no hidden fees — ever. One number is published: a 1% success fee, charged only when your round closes. Agencies take 1–6% of your round plus a $5,000–25,000 monthly retainer; we charge a flat monthly price, and the 1% only once it worked.

Every plan includes the components that make the price easy to defend: The Compliance Shield (a per-country gate on every send and every preview), Verified-or-Replaced(every address verified at send time; any hard bounce replaced free), Warm-Up Done-For-You (domains, mailboxes, and the 30–45 day clock, carried by us), and The Evidence Trail (every send logged and auditable). And on Growth and Scale there is The First-Conversation Guarantee: at least one investor response in your first 200 reachouts, or we keep sending for free until you get one. We can promise this because the addresses are verified, the gate keeps every email on the right side of the rules, and the list is ranked for fit. (The math, honestly: the est. figures above use the midpoint of the tailored band — 6.5%. This sentence uses the floor of the published cold-outreach band — 2%, the worst case — and even there, zero replies in 200 verified reachouts is a ~2% event. So the guarantee costs us almost nothing and should cost you no sleep.)

One honest note on availability: we onboard a limited number of raises per month. Warm infrastructure is real, not rented, and per-mailbox capacity is capped by the same compliance rules that protect your domain.

Why these numbers: a reachout costs us cents to deliver, and the premium pays for the gate, the verified data, the warmed infrastructure, and the effort above. Compare honestly: 200 generic sales contacts a month at AiSDR costs $250, our Growth tier does 200 investor reachouts for $129, with the fundraising logic and the compliance gate included. A fundraising agency does this work for $5,000–25,000 a month plus a success fee. We think that layer should cost like software: three monthly plans, one free tier, and nothing else to compare.

What a month of reachouts gets you, practically. At Growth pace a month is 750 investor reachouts, which we estimate at 48.8 investor replies and 19.5 investor meetings— about $6.62 per investor meeting. Carry it for the length of a raise (2 to 4 months) and that is 400–800 reachouts, roughly 10–20 investor meetings, and a realistic shot at term-sheet conversations. Every one of those figures is anestimate, not a promise. What the plan actually commits to is the pipeline: the right investors, reached the right way, every month.

What a plan is expected to produce — est.

est. is short for estimated. What you buy is credits (and they spend anywhere in the platform); what one investor reachout deducts depends on your plan — 196 credits on Starter, 172 on Growth, 164 on Scale, which is where the volume discount sits. The replies, meetings and cost per meeting below are what we estimate you get for those reachouts — shown so you can judge the value, never charged.

How we estimate: replies = 6.5% of investor reachouts (the midpoint of the 3–10% band published for cold investor outreach with a fit-ranked list and an email written for each investor) and meetings = 40% of replies (the midpoint of the 30–50% reply-to-meeting band). Cost per meeting is the plan price divided by the estimated meetings. These are estimates from published research, not promises, and we do not yet have our own measured reply rate — when we do, it replaces these.

What makes the reachout count deliverable, and not a claim. A mailbox can send about 25 cold emails a day before it starts damaging its own reputation, and that is the cap our send gate enforces. So each plan comes with the sending infrastructure to carry it: 1 mailbox on Starter, 2 on Growth, 3 on Scale — domains, mailboxes and the warm-up carried by us, not by you. Our published price includes that; the tools in the comparison above send from your mailbox, which is why their number is a floor and not a total. One honest detail: a brand-new mailbox starts at 5 sends a day and ramps over 30–45 days, so the monthly figure is what a plan delivers once warm— and that is also why we onboard a limited number of raises per month.

The alternatives, one number per cell — all outcomes are est.

Read across a row to compare one thing; read down a column to see what one plan actually is. Every cell holds a single value — nothing is bundled. est. means estimated.

Sources and assumptions, so you can check us. Competitor prices and included contact volumes were read from their own pricing pages on 20 September 2026(angelmatch.io/pricing, openvc.app, metal.so/pricing) and may have changed since. Metal publishes no price and no sending volume — it requires a demo — so only the figure quoted to us is shown and the rest is marked not computable, rather than estimated from nothing.

The reply rate is the same for every column, and that is deliberate. A reply rate belongs to the sending method, not to the vendor: it depends on how well each email is written and who it is sent to. An earlier version of this table gave our own columns6.5% and the database tools 1.5% inside one comparison — which decided the answer with a number we chose, and priced their lists as though you were obliged to send them badly. So one rate now applies to all of us: 6.5%(tailored — a fit-ranked list and an email written for each investor; the midpoint of the 3–10% band published for cold investor outreach), or 1.5% (generic — a template or bulk send; the published floor for generic cold email). Switch it in the chart below and every column moves together. Meetings are estimated at 40% of replies (the midpoint of the 30–50% reply-to-meeting band), and cost per meeting is the plan price divided by those meetings. Where a plan sends from your own domain — Angel Match and OpenVC both do — the mailbox, the domain warm-up and the copy stay with you, so their cost per meeting is a floor that excludes what you must bring yourself; Raisy carries those. All estimates, ours included.

How long until it works

Two honest answers, because there are two different clocks.

Your first email: the engine is built and verified today: the funnel, the ranking, the compliance gate, and the approval-gated preview all pass their live tests. What remains is connective, not inventive: your mailbox connection, a final legal once-over of the first-touch template, and front-end polish. That is days of engineering and roughly one to three weeks of calendar, and the longest pole is the careful review, not the code.

The complete package: follow-up sequences that pause the moment an investor replies, a warmed inventory of sending infrastructure, verification at scale, per-mailbox health monitoring: the engineering runs eight to twelve weeks, with the warm-up clock ticking in parallel whether we code or not. Call it a quarter, done properly. We would rather give you a date you can plan a raise around than a date that sounds better.

Why this matters beyond convenience

Fundraising is already two jobs: building the company and selling the company. The layer described in this post is a third job nobody applies for, and it quietly taxes exactly the founders who move fastest, because moving quickly is easier when someone has already swept the path. Folding it into the platform means your two scarcest resources, your calendar and your good name, stay where they belong.

It also generalizes. The same intent-and-country gate that keeps an investor first touch friendly will keep a sales pitch and a support reply on their own right tracks; the same warm-up discipline will serve every outbound motion we add later. We built it for the raise, and we built it to last.

So the choice in front of you is concrete. Assemble it yourself: $80–320 a month in tools, a 30–45 day warm-up before full volume, and the rules of every recipient's country on your desk. Or open Raisy, where the gate, the verified list, and the timing are already in place, and your five first emails are free.

What this post does not answer: deliverability numbers from our own live sends (the gate is verified; production placement data comes with the first real campaigns), and the legal sign-off itself . We build the gate; counsel owns the judgment. Pricing is no longer an open question, see the table above.

Start your raise with the groundwork already laid, create your company profile at raisy.team/entities and see your ranked investor list before you send a word