The $300 a month GTM stack for a two person startup

A two person startup needs six things to run a real go-to-market motion: somewhere to keep the pipeline, somewhere to get contacts, something to send cold email, something to verify the addresses first, a way for prospects to book time, and a layer that keeps your sending domains out of spam. Priced from the advertised rates of the tools we track, that whole stack lands at $262 a month. Call it $300, because the gap is exactly what you will spend on monthly-billing premiums and your first credit top-up.

This is not a list of category winners. Several of these picks lose feature comparisons against tools three times their price. It is the stack we would actually run with two people, a new domain, and a budget someone checks.

The stack at a glance

Prices are the advertised rates as of our last review; where a vendor's headline number assumes annual billing, that is noted in the slot section.

Slot	Pick	Monthly cost
CRM	Attio Plus, 2 seats	$58
B2B data	Apollo.io Basic, 1 seat	$49
Cold email sender	Instantly Growth	$37
Sending infrastructure	4 Google Workspace mailboxes, 2 extra domains	About $30
Email verification	MillionVerifier, 10,000 credits	$39
Scheduling	SavvyCal Basic, 2 seats	$20
Deliverability	MailStrike Starter	$29
Total		$262

Across the SaaSTracker database, the median advertised entry price among tools that publish a flat dollar figure is $34 a month. Six paid slots at the median would be $204, so $262 for a stack that skews above entry level in two slots is about right.

CRM: Attio Plus at $29 a seat

Attio Plus is $29 per user per month on annual billing, $36 monthly, so two seats cost $58 or $72. You could start on the free tier, which covers up to 3 seats with 3 objects, 50,000 records, and 200 emails a month, and plenty of two person teams should. We budget the paid tier because the free plan's caps are the kind you hit mid quarter, and migrating a pipeline is the chore you least want in a good month.

What the money buys is a CRM that does not fight you. Records sync from email and calendar, the data model bends to whatever your sales motion actually is, and nothing about it assumes a sales ops person exists. One warning from the fine print: every plan includes a workspace-credit allotment for AI and enrichment, and heavy use exhausts it. Treat credit packs as a real line item if you lean on enrichment.

Cheaper: Zoho CRM Standard at $14 per user on annual billing, with a genuinely free 3-user edition below it. It takes configuring, but the capability per dollar is the best in the category. Pricier: Close Essentials at $35 per user on annual billing, worth it if your motion is calling-heavy, though its workflows only arrive on the $99 Growth tier.

B2B data: one Apollo seat at $49

Apollo.io Basic is $49 per user per month, with the advertised price assuming annual billing at a discount of roughly 20 to 25 percent. One seat is enough. Only one of you is building lists, and Apollo's email credits are effectively generous at this tier; it is the phone and export credits that meter tightly, so audit usage before assuming you need Professional.

The reason Apollo takes this slot rather than a cheaper finder is that a two person team needs the database and the filters, not just an email lookup. You will spend more time deciding who to contact than contacting them, and that work happens inside the data tool.

Cheaper: GetProspect Starter at $34 a month on annual billing gets you 1,000 valid emails, and credits are only consumed for verified addresses, so the quoted volume is honest. Pricier: UpLead Essentials at $99 a month, where credits are only charged for contacts that pass real-time verification, a structure that suits teams who care more about accuracy than volume.

Cold email: Instantly Growth at $37

Instantly Growth is $37 a month, with annual billing discounting roughly 20 percent. Sending accounts and warm-up are never metered, which matters because the correct way to send cold email in 2026 is across several mailboxes at low per-mailbox volume, not one mailbox at high volume. The plan meters uploaded contacts and monthly email volume instead, and note that contact caps count uploads, not sends; if you cycle lists, you hit the contact cap first.

The line item Instantly does not include is the mailboxes themselves. Google Workspace seats run roughly $6 to $7 per mailbox per month, and you want your cold volume on secondary domains, never your main one. Four mailboxes across two extra domains is about $30 a month all in, and it is the least optional $30 in this table.

Cheaper: Mailmeteor Starter at $5.99 per user per month if your volume is small enough to live inside Gmail with mail merge. Pricier: Smartlead Pro at $94 a month, the agency-grade version of the same architecture, with unlimited mailboxes and warm-up on every tier.

Verification: MillionVerifier at $39 per 10,000

Never send to an unverified list. A bounce spike costs more sender reputation than a year of verification fees, and at MillionVerifier's prices there is no excuse: $39 buys 10,000 credits at $0.0039 each, with no subscription, no contract, and no expiry. You are charged only for good and bad results; risky results, including unresolved catch-alls, cost nothing, which is more generous than the unknown-only refunds most rivals offer.

Because credits never expire, this is not really a monthly cost. A 10,000 block covers two or three months of two person outbound. We keep it in the table at full price anyway, because budgeting verification at zero is how teams talk themselves out of doing it.

Cheaper: MyEmailVerifier is near the bottom of the market, with pay-as-you-go running about $15 at 10,000 addresses. Pricier: ZeroBounce at $129 for 10,000 credits, the most certified verifier in the category, priced like it knows.

Scheduling: SavvyCal at $10 a seat

SavvyCal Basic is $10 per user per month, $20 for both of you, with annual billing giving two months free. There is no free scheduling plan; you pay to activate a link, backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee. What you get is a booking experience built for the person receiving the link, which is precisely the person a two person startup cannot afford to annoy.

This is the most defensible place in the stack to spend nothing instead. Cal.com is free forever for one user with unlimited event types and no booking cap, and zcal's free tier holds almost nothing back. We still budget the $20, because the scheduling link is the one piece of your stack every single prospect touches.

Cheaper: Cal.com or zcal, both genuinely free for individuals. Pricier: Calendly Teams at $16 per seat per month, which is what you buy when you need round-robin routing and branding removal, neither of which a two person team does.

Deliverability: MailStrike Starter at $29

Cold email stacks fail silently. Open rates sag, nobody knows why, and by the time you investigate, the domain has been sitting in spam for three weeks. MailStrike Starter is $29 a month ($23 on annual billing) for up to 10 mailboxes, and the tier is flat rather than per mailbox, so it covers this stack's four mailboxes with headroom to grow.

Each connected mailbox gets an AI Persona that warms it with individually written conversations, ramping over two to four weeks and pausing automatically if reputation dips. Reputation scores refresh every 15 minutes, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are validated continuously, and domains are checked daily against more than 100 blacklists. Instantly bundles its own warm-up, but the monitoring layer is the part you cannot skip: it is the difference between finding out about a blacklist listing today and finding out from a quarter of dead campaigns.

Cheaper: TrulyInbox Starter at $22 a month on annual billing, priced by daily warm-up volume with unlimited connected accounts. Pricier: MailReach at $25 per mailbox per month, the established name, which at four mailboxes already costs more than MailStrike's flat tier.

What $300 does not buy

Honesty about the ceiling matters more than the stack itself.

No phone. There is no dialer here, no call recording, and Apollo's phone credits at the Basic tier will not sustain a calling motion. If your buyers answer phones, this stack does not reach them.

No marketing. Nothing on this list sends a newsletter, runs a nurture sequence, or scores a lead. Among the tools we track, marketing automation carries a median advertised entry price of $89.50 a month, which is why it is the first line item that breaks a $300 budget.

No LinkedIn automation, no intent data, no enrichment waterfall. You get one database's view of the market, and when Apollo lacks a contact, you write around it or look them up by hand.

Almost no slack for usage. Attio's workspace credits, Apollo's export credits, and Instantly's contact caps are all meters, and meters get hit. The roughly $38 between this table and $300 is not a rounding cushion; it is the overage budget, and some months it will not be enough.

And nobody to run it. The real cost of a GTM stack at this stage is founder hours, and no invoice line shows it. The tools above are picked as much for how little attention they demand as for what they do.

The short version

Attio holds the pipeline, one Apollo seat builds the lists, MillionVerifier proves the addresses, Instantly sends across four cheap mailboxes on secondary domains, SavvyCal books the meetings, and MailStrike keeps the whole sending operation out of spam. That is $262 a month at advertised rates, $300 in practice, and every tool in it can be replaced in an afternoon when you outgrow it.