What does the software stack behind a buyer list actually cost?

From what I've seen poking at the pricing pages, the CRM end is cheap. REsimpli and similar are somewhere in the low hundreds a month for a small team. Propstream was around $100 for a seat last time I looked. The expensive one is the blast platform. InvestorLift has tiers and the serious one is not a couple hundred dollars, it's more like a car payment plus a cut per deal. So $1,500 could be real, depending on which tier he's on.

Does the platform take a cut on top of his 25%? That would change the math a lot.

The line item nobody puts in these proposals is deliverability. If he's blasting a few thousand buyers by email, he needs a sending setup that doesn't get the domain burned, and the moment you get flagged you're paying someone to warm up new domains. Texting is worse because carrier registration for A2P messaging is its own fee and its own approval process. Cheap on paper, annoying in practice.

Running a small service shop, my monthly tool spend sits well under what that retainer implies. CRM, a data subscription, a phone system with a couple of numbers, and an email sender comes in around $400 to $600 depending on seats. The heavy platform is a choice, not a requirement, and plenty of dispo people run off a well-maintained spreadsheet plus a mail merge and do fine. What actually costs money is labor. Somebody has to call the top 40 buyers by name every time a deal drops, and that person is the $1,500.

I'm on maybe nine of these buyer lists as a small buyer and I open roughly none of the blasts. The two people who get my attention both text me directly with the address and the number they need, and they know I only do two specific zip codes. So when you're pricing his stack, canton, ask whether he can tell you the ten buyers he'd call first on your deal and why. Which platform he pays for matters a lot less to me than that.

beacon's tier point is right but the per-deal cut is the part canton should look at hardest. Some of these platforms charge a percentage or a flat fee on deals that close through them, and if that's coming off the spread before the 25% split, you're paying twice out of the same pot. Make the agreement say whether platform success fees are an expense of the deal or of his retainer. I'd also want the tool accounts in the operating entity's name rather than his personal card, otherwise the buyer database walks out the door with him.

Something else in that wording bugs me. "25% of the spread" needs a definition of spread in the document, because on a double close the spread is the difference between two settlement statements after two sets of closing costs, and on an assignment it's just the fee. I've seen people argue about that for weeks after a closing. Also worth asking who pays if the deal has to be double closed and the title company wants funds, since that's real capital and it isn't in his retainer.