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 now lands at $327 a month. It came in under $300 when we first priced it, and two lines moved during 2026: Attio raised its Plus seat from $29 to $35, and MailStrike replaced flat mailbox bands with graduated per-mailbox rates in September, taking four warmed mailboxes from $45 to $72. The target in the title is still the right target. Hitting it now means making one of the trades at the end of this piece.

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	$70
B2B data	Apollo.io Basic, 1 seat	$49
Cold email sender	Instantly Growth	$47
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, 4 mailboxes	$72
Total		$327

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 $327 for a stack that skews above entry level in two slots, and that now carries per-mailbox deliverability pricing, is about right.

CRM: Attio Plus at $35 a seat

Attio Plus is $35 per user per month on annual billing, $44 monthly, so two seats cost $70 or $88. Attio raised these seat prices in 2026 from $29 and $36. 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 $47

Instantly Growth is $47 a month, or $37.60 on annual billing, and it is the Outreach plan rather than one of the bundles that fold in lead credits and the AI agents. 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 billed annually ($12 month to month), $20 for both of you. 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 billed annually ($20 monthly), which is what you buy when you need round-robin and routing forms, neither of which a two person team does.

Deliverability: MailStrike at $18 a mailbox

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 is $18 per mailbox per month on annual billing for the first five mailboxes, so this stack's four cost $72, and each mailbox includes one deliverability test a month. That is worth knowing if you priced this stack earlier in the year: the same four mailboxes sat inside a flat $45 band until September 2026, when the model moved to graduated per-mailbox rates that fall to $5 a mailbox above a hundred. The new shape rewards fleets and penalises small ones.

Each connected mailbox gets an AI Agent that warms it with threads written at send time from your industry and company description, reaching full volume on a 21-day ramp and then continuing at a maintenance level rather than stopping. A per-mailbox reputation score refreshes daily against a 14-day trend, and the dashboard clears a mailbox to send only when score, warmup time, and domain age all pass. Instantly bundles its own warm-up, but a dedicated layer is the part worth paying for: bundled warm-up is a shared network trading similar messages on similar schedules, which is the pattern providers fingerprint first.

Cheaper: TrulyInbox Starter at $22 a month on annual billing, priced by daily warm-up volume with unlimited connected accounts. Pricier: MailReach at $19.50 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.

No slack at all, and now a $27 overrun before you start. Attio's workspace credits, Apollo's export credits, and Instantly's contact caps are all meters, and meters get hit. If $300 is a hard ceiling, the two honest trades are dropping to Attio's free tier, which covers three seats and 50,000 records, or moving warming to TrulyInbox at $22 a month with unlimited connected accounts. The first keeps your deliverability layer intact, and that is the one we would make.

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 $327 a month at advertised rates, over the target since Attio and MailStrike both raised prices in 2026, and every tool in it can be replaced in an afternoon when you outgrow it.