How the pay-per-attended-meeting model works

Arctos AI Outbound invoices when a qualified prospect attends a meeting, not when one is booked. Nothing is owed before that: no setup fee, no retainer, no minimum. Pricing is set per ICP rather than from a public list, in the $250 to $900 per attended meeting range, and the agreement runs open-ended with 14 days’ notice on either side. A prospect who books and does not turn up costs Arctos the work and costs the client nothing.

The billing trigger is attendance, not a calendar entry

Attendance and booking are two different products sold under one word. A vendor paid for a booked meeting is paid when an invite lands on a calendar, and whether anyone joins the call is the buyer’s problem. A vendor paid for an attended meeting carries that risk itself. TaskBlink sets the distinction out plainly in its buyer’s guide: under a scheduled-appointment trigger, “the invoice fires when a meeting lands on your calendar. Attendance is irrelevant.”

Arctos AI Outbound uses the attended trigger. The consequence for the client is arithmetic rather than goodwill. Cancellations, reschedules that never land and prospects who accept an invite and forget about it all sit on the Arctos side of the ledger, because none of them produce an invoice.

Arctos carries a second consequence, an incentive that points at fit instead of volume. Booking a prospect who was never going to attend costs Arctos the sequence, the inbox capacity and the calendar slot, and returns nothing. Cleverly, which sells a different model, names the failure mode that attendance billing removes, writing that providers paid per meeting have “a structural incentive to book as many appointments as possible” and can produce meetings that meet the criteria on paper and carry no buying intent.

What Arctos AI Outbound charges and when the invoice fires

	Arctos AI Outbound	Retainer agency	Hourly SDR
Billing trigger	Qualified prospect attends	Calendar month	Hours worked
Owed before any meeting	Nothing	Full monthly fee	Full hourly cost
Typical published rate	$250 to $900 per attended meeting, quoted per ICP	$3,000 to $15,000 per month	$16 to $100 per hour
No-show cost	Carried by Arctos	Carried by the client	Carried by the client
Qualification defined in writing	Yes, before launch	Rarely	No
Notice	14 days	Commonly monthly, annual at some vendors	Per contract

Retainer ranges above are Outbound Pros’ published figures for the market; hourly ranges are Only-B2B’s and Leadriver’s. Arctos AI Outbound does not operate a public rate card, so the $250 to $900 band is the range engagements are quoted in, set by the ICP and the deal value behind it, and written into the agreement before anything sends.

Three things are absent from an Arctos agreement by design. No setup fee, so a campaign that fails to produce costs nothing to have started. No retainer, so unpaid ramp is an Arctos cost and there is no commercial reason to stretch it. No minimum, so the client is not buying a quantity of meetings in advance that the market may not contain.

A qualified meeting is defined in writing before the first email sends

Qualification is the entire commercial question in this model, and it is settled in the agreement rather than in an argument afterwards. Arctos writes the standard before launch as a named list of titles, plus a substantially equivalent role reasonably relevant to the client’s offering, so that a near-miss on a job title is not automatically a dispute. The client approves the messaging, the sender names and the target markets before anything sends.

Written definitions are rarer in this market than the marketing suggests. Across 36 agencies that describe their own billing as performance-based, checked against their own live pages on 9 September 2026, only 12 publish any no-show policy at all, and only 3 both bill strictly on attendance and publish a per-meeting price. The 36 were assembled by searching for agencies advertising pay-per-meeting, pay-per-appointment, pay-per-lead or commission-based billing, and counting only what each company states on its own site. Where a company publishes nothing, it is counted as publishing nothing rather than estimated.

Three agencies in that set of 36 do both, and they show what a published standard looks like. RevenueFlow charges $500 to $1,750 per attended meeting tiered by prospect headcount and writes that “no-shows are chased and rebooked on our time, not your bill.” ClayVengers charges $2,500 per qualified meeting plus a $500 one-time setup, and states “they no-show, we re-book it free.” DemandNexus charges $400 to $500 per qualified meeting and replaces any no-show “within five business days at no cost.”

A per-booked-meeting rate costs more than it prints

Cost per attended meeting equals the booked-meeting rate divided by the share of prospects who attend. The table below runs that division across the range of attendance rates vendors cite, so the comparison does not depend on any one claimed figure.

Rate per booked meeting	At 60% attendance	At 70% attendance	At 80% attendance
$250	$417	$357	$313
$400	$667	$571	$500
$600	$1,000	$857	$750

The same division reversed gives the number a buyer actually needs. A booked-meeting rate matches an attended-meeting rate only when it sits below the attended rate multiplied by the attendance share. At 70% attendance, a $400 attended price is matched by a $280 booked price and beaten by anything above it.

Attendance data itself is weaker than either side of this market admits. No publisher was found that states a sample size, a measurement period and a denominator together for B2B meeting attendance. GrowthSpree reports a 62% to 72% median show rate with no sample and no period stated. Outbound Pros cites no-show rates of 10% to 35% and DemandNexus cites 20% to 35%, neither with a source. Every one of those figures is a vendor claim, which is the reason the table above spans the range instead of picking a point inside it.

What the same outcome costs on a retainer

Published retainer pricing is thin but not absent. SalesRoads publishes $9,950 per four weeks for one SDR, rising to $43,150 for six, with no long-term commitment. EBQ publishes $5,000 per month for a half-time employee and $10,000 for full-time, both conditioned on an annual commitment. CIENCE publishes a $5,000 one-time GTM setup plus $2,000 per month for a strategic team, $499 per month for its platform and $1,000 per SDR onboarded, with SDR capacity from $1,500 to $6,500 per month depending on region. Sopro starts at around $3,800 per month with no minimum contract. SalesHive publishes no price at all.

Converting the SalesRoads rate into a per-meeting figure takes one published input and one benchmark. The Bridge Group’s 2025 SDR report, a survey of 351 B2B companies, puts the median monthly quota for fully qualified meetings at 9.0 per SDR, with 60% of reps hitting quota. Applying that quota to the SalesRoads rate gives $9,950 divided by 9, or $1,106 per booked qualified meeting at full attainment, and $9,950 divided by 5.4, or $1,843, at the median attainment rate. Both figures are for booked meetings. At 70% attendance they become $1,580 and $2,632 per attended meeting.

The calculation above borrows an in-house quota median and applies it to an outsourced SDR, because no retainer agency publishes meetings per SDR per month. Anyone who disagrees with the quota can substitute their own and redo the division. The structural point survives any input: a retainer converts into a per-meeting cost only after the fact, and the conversion is the client’s risk.

Who this model is not for

Attendance billing is the wrong structure for some buyers, and saying so is cheaper than discovering it in month two.

Companies with an annual contract value below roughly $10,000 usually cannot carry a per-meeting price at any point in the $250 to $900 band, because the meeting-to-deal conversion needed to justify it does not exist. A retainer or an in-house hire is the better arithmetic there.

Companies with fewer than about 10,000 reachable buyers will exhaust the market before the model pays for either side. Arctos runs full-market coverage at volume, and a small market reaches its end quickly.

Companies without a working sales process should fix that first. A model that only charges for attended meetings still delivers attended meetings, and meetings that nobody follows up are an expensive way to learn that the gap was downstream.

Companies that want to own the sending infrastructure themselves are also a poor fit. Outreach runs on Arctos domains and inboxes, which protects the client’s sending reputation but means the sending assets are not the client’s.

Sources: TaskBlink, Cleverly, Outbound Pros, Leadriver, Only-B2B, RevenueFlow, ClayVengers, DemandNexus, SalesRoads, EBQ, CIENCE, Sopro, SalesHive, The Bridge Group 2025 SDR Models, Motions and Metrics. All vendor pages checked 9 to 11 September 2026.