At an $8,000 average fee your whole model is a cost-per-contract problem, so treat the software line as a rounding error and go look at the funnel above it.
Work backwards. If 2,000 postcards get you 0.5% response, that's ten conversations. If one in ten conversations that reach an actual motivated seller turns into a signed contract, you need volume that most one-person operations don't have, and you'll be buying leads twice because your skip data is stale. So the levers are list quality and how many times you touch the same list, not which platform you pay for.
The $8,000 figure is worth interrogating. Fees near that level, in the under-$250,000 price tier, are exactly where institutional buyers and iBuyers have moved downstream and compressed spreads. If most of your contracts sit in that tier, you're competing on price with capital that doesn't need a spread. The deals those buyers won't touch are heavy rehabs, occupied houses, and situations with unresolved family or title problems. Repricing your list toward those is a bigger swing than saving $150 a month.
One thing that'll break without warning: carrier filtering. Cold-call and text volume from a single number gets flagged and your answer rate falls off a cliff, and most people read that as a market slowdown rather than a delivery problem. Track connect rate per number weekly, not monthly.
And if you're leaning on one channel, one legislative session can shut it. Kentucky and Nebraska folded public marketing of a contract into brokerage. If your only dispo channel is public posting, that's a single point of failure.
