An agency buys a different product from the one an in-house team buys, even when it is the same login. The in-house team needs the campaign to work. The agency needs the campaign to work, the client to see it working, the next client to be onboarded in days rather than weeks, and none of it to look like it came from somewhere else. Almost every difference between agency plans comes down to those last three.
The four levels of white-label
Vendors use one word for four different things, and the gap between the cheapest and the most useful is where agency buyers get caught.
| Level | What the client sees | What it does not do |
|---|---|---|
| Dashboard branding | Your logo and colours inside the vendor's app. | The URL, the emails and the support replies still carry the vendor. |
| Client portal on your domain | A reporting view at reports.youragency.com. | One workspace underneath, so separation depends on permissions rather than boundaries. |
| Per-client workspace | Their own space, their own campaigns, their own data. | Still your software with your branding; the client does not live in their own mailbox. |
| Client door on the client's domain | Their staff sign in at mail.theirbrand.com and work in their own mail. | It is a bigger product to run, which is why few vendors offer it. |
Pick the level by what the client will actually do. If they will read a monthly report, a portal is enough and the cheapest option wins. If their sales people will answer replies themselves, they need somewhere to answer them, and a reporting portal will not survive that conversation. That second case is what the client-branded webmail exists for.
What each vendor charges an agency
Read on 19 September 2026 from each vendor's own pricing pages. The software line is rarely the expensive one; count the per-client fee and the mailboxes underneath it.
| Vendor | Starting price | White-label | Provisions mailboxes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Smartlead | $32.50 a month annual ($39 monthly) for 2,000 contacts and 6,000 emails | Pro and above, enabled by support: app on your own domain, client access to reports and campaigns; $29 a client workspace | Yes via partners: Google $13 a domain a year plus $4.50 a mailbox a month; Outlook via Zapmail or InfraInbox; pre-warmed $18 plus $9 |
| Instantly | $37.60 a month annual ($47 monthly) for 5,000 emails and 1,000 contacts | Hypergrowth ($77.60) and Light Speed plans: custom domain and logo for a client portal; clients with campaign access see every campaign in the workspace | Yes, Google only: pre-warmed accounts with DNS pre-configured; Instantly retains domain ownership and administrator access |
| Saleshandy | $34 a month annual ($41 monthly) for 2,000 prospects and 6,000 emails | Scale plan and above ($149 a month annual): custom domain and logos | Yes: Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 and Azure mailboxes, pre-set with SPF, DKIM, DMARC and a tracking domain |
| Woodpecker | $35 a month for 500 contacted prospects; annual billing charges eight months for twelve | Client reporting app on your domain, $5 a month per active client, plus the $27 agency panel | Yes: Google or Microsoft addresses $6 a month each, Maildoso, Mailforge, Infraforge or Azure $4; new domains about $1 a month billed annually; an Infraforge dedicated server $59 a month |
| Salesforge | $40 a month Pro (1,000 active contacts, 5,000 emails); $80 Growth (10,000 contacts, 50,000 emails, unlimited users, API); two months free on annual | Reseller programme: 20 percent revenue share under your own domain, Stripe only, Warmforge excluded | Through sibling products: Primeforge $4.50, Mailforge $3, Infraforge $4 per mailbox a month billed yearly; domains $14 a year |
| emailcampaign.ai | Free 14-day trial; Basic $39 a month; Pro $94 a month | Yes: a complete webmail and admin console on the client's own domain, plus dashboard branding | Yes: domains (about $12 a year), Google Workspace seats ($8.40 a month), Microsoft 365 seats at Microsoft's rate, or self-hosted servers from $39 a month; you own the domains and accounts |
The arithmetic that actually decides it
Take five clients, each sending two hundred cold emails a day. That is twenty mailboxes on ten domains per client, so a hundred mailboxes on fifty domains across the book. Now price it three ways.
At Smartlead: $32.50 for the plan, five client workspaces at $29 each, and a hundred partner mailboxes at $4.50 plus fifty domains at $13 a year. Roughly $630 a month once domains are spread over twelve. At Woodpecker: $27 for the agency panel, $5 per active client, and mailboxes at $6 for a Google or Microsoft address, which is about $652 a month, with the caveat that domains bought there cannot leave. At emailcampaign.ai: $94 for the Pro plan with client doors included, a hundred Google Workspace seats at $8.40, a one-off five dollars a mailbox to provision, and domains at about twelve dollars a year, which is about $984 a month with the tenant and the domains in the clients' own names.
The spread across those three is a few hundred dollars a month on a book of five clients. That is smaller than one retained client and smaller than the hours you will spend on DNS if the provisioning is yours to do. Price the operational column before you price the software column.
Keeping one client's mistakes off another client's domains
This is the operational risk that only agencies carry, and the one most tooling ignores. A client hands you a list they bought. It bounces at eight percent. If that client's mailboxes sit in a tenant shared with three other clients, or send through a tracking domain shared across the book, or share a self-hosted IP with everyone else, the damage does not stop at their account. Their bad month becomes everyone's bad quarter.
Separate at four levels and the blast radius stays where it belongs. Domains per client, never shared. Tenants or workspaces per client where the provider allows it, which Microsoft does cleanly at about twenty-five users each. Tracking subdomains per client, because link reputation travels with the link. And, if you self-host, either separate IPs or the acceptance that you are pooling reputation deliberately.
Then verify lists before sending rather than after. An eight percent bounce rate reads to a provider as a bought list, and it is the fastest way to lose a domain that has just finished three weeks of warm-up. Verification costs cents per address and buys back the only thing you cannot re-buy, which is the domain's history.
The questions to ask before signing
- Who owns the domains? Some vendors keep ownership of what they provision, and some bought domains cannot be used outside the vendor at all. Ask in writing.
- Can one client see another? Ask specifically about a client with campaign access, not about the default view. Test it with two dummy clients.
- What happens at offboarding? Domains, mailboxes, mail history and the client list. If the answer is a support ticket, that is your answer.
- How is white-label enabled? If it requires a chat with support on an upper plan, factor the delay into your onboarding promise.
- What does support response actually look like? Open a ticket during the trial. Two of the vendors above carry review themes about multi-day replies, and a client outage on a Friday is your problem, not theirs.
Onboarding, honestly timed
Three weeks from signature to full speed, and the constraint is warm-up rather than setup. Domains, DNS and mailboxes are a day of work each if the tooling is good. The ramp is two to three weeks because a mailbox with no sending history has nothing for a filter to read. Anyone promising week-one volume is either sending from mailboxes that carry a stranger's history or sending too much too early, and both land on the client's domain rather than the vendor's.
Build the promise around that. Week one: domains, mailboxes, DNS, list and copy. Weeks two and three: warm-up running, copy reviewed, list verified. Week four: campaigns at full volume. Clients accept the timeline when it is explained at the start and never when it is explained in week two.
Questions, answered straight
- What does cold email software cost an agency per client?
- The software line is usually small and the infrastructure line is not. Smartlead charges $29 a month per client workspace on top of $32.50; Woodpecker charges $5 per active client plus a $27 agency panel; Saleshandy includes white-label from its $149 plan with no per-client fee stated; Instantly brands a portal from $77.60; emailcampaign.ai includes the client door in the plan. Add mailboxes at roughly $3 to $10 each a month, and domains at about $12 a year, and the infrastructure is what you actually bill against.
- What is the difference between white-label and a client portal?
- Four levels, and vendors use the word for all of them. A logo on a dashboard. A client portal on your own domain, where the client sees reports. A per-client workspace, where campaigns and data are separated. And a full client door, where the client's own staff sign in to their own mailboxes on their own domain and their administrator controls privacy and forwarding. Only the last one survives a client who wants to read their mail.
- Should an agency own the clients' domains and mailboxes?
- Decide it in writing before the first send. Some vendors keep ownership of the domains they provision, which means neither you nor the client can leave with them. Either the client owns them, which is cleanest and what we default to, or the agency owns them and the contract says what happens at the end. The failure mode is discovering the answer during an offboarding.
- How many mailboxes does one client need?
- Divide their daily target by sixteen to twenty, which is what one domain carries at two mailboxes and eight to ten sends each. A client who wants two hundred a day needs about twenty mailboxes on ten domains. Multiply by your client count to size the fleet, and remember that every domain needs its own DNS written, verified and maintained.
- Can clients see each other's data?
- Ask specifically, because the answer varies. Instantly's own documentation notes that a client given campaign access sees every campaign in the workspace. Per-client workspaces solve it by separation; a client door solves it by giving each client a different sign-in on a different domain. Test it with two dummy clients before you trust it.
- How long does onboarding a new client take?
- Three weeks from signature to full-speed campaigns, and almost all of it is warm-up. Domains and DNS are a day; mailboxes are a day; the ramp is two to three weeks and cannot be shortened honestly. Agencies that promise results in week one are either sending from pre-warmed mailboxes with someone else's history or sending too much too early.
- What should be in the monthly report?
- Sends, replies, positive replies and meetings, split by client and by mailbox, plus the deliverability line: bounce rate, complaint rate and any provider-level refusals. The last one matters because it is the leading indicator. A client whose 5.7.x count is climbing has a problem you should raise before they notice fewer replies.
Published 19 September 2026. Updated 19 September 2026. Written by the team that runs the infrastructure; numbers come from the platform's own provisioning and sending, and from the providers' published documentation at the time of writing.