Most pages that rank for insurance lead prices are written by companies that sell leads or sell software to lead buyers. They give ranges with no sample, and none of them puts a price on a lead that comes from the agency’s own website. So we did the math on four live independent agency websites: 142 leads from July 31 to October 23, 2026, with 117 of them matched to each agency’s CRM to see who bought. Four agencies is a small sample, so read this as directional, not as a benchmark.
Last updated: October 23, 2026
How much do insurance leads cost?
Of the lead vendors that publish a price on their own site, an exclusive auto or home web lead runs $18 to $45 and a live phone call runs about $25 to $100, as of October 2026. Shared and aged leads cost less. The big lead marketplaces we checked do not publish a price at all.
The ranges on the ranking pages are wider and mostly unsourced. ActiveProspect puts exclusive web leads at $45 to $120 and shared web leads at $10 to $45. Phonexa lists shared auto web leads at $2 to $12. Neither page gives a sample size or says where the ranges come from. That is why we only used prices that vendors print on their own pages, below.
A price per lead also leaves out the number that matters: how many of those leads buy a policy. We come back to that further down.
What do lead vendors publish on their own price pages?
Two of the vendors we checked publish a flat price for exclusive auto and home leads, one publishes a price for calls only, and two of the biggest marketplaces publish none. Everything in this table was read on the vendor’s own page on October 23, 2026.
| Vendor | Auto lead | Home lead | Calls | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Parasol Leads | $18, exclusive | $25, exclusive | not listed | No minimums or contract terms stated on the price page |
| InsureLeads | $35, exclusive web | $45, exclusive web | $90 auto, $100 home, per connected call | Month to month, no setup fee; exclusive orders carry a minimum the page does not state |
| ResultCalls | not listed | not listed | auto calls from $24.85 ($29.85 in the headline) | No contract, no setup fee |
| EverQuote | no price published | no price published | no price published | Price varies by product and lead type; no minimum spend |
| QuoteWizard | no price published | no price published | no price published | Price is the lead plus any filters; ask a sales rep |
| SmartFinancial | no rate card | no rate card | no rate card | Its agent page says auto leads “typically” run $5 to $25 |
To be fair to the vendors, Parasol’s $18 auto lead is cheaper than some of what our own sites produced in a slow month, and the per-call prices buy you a live conversation, which a website form does not.
What does a lead from your own agency website cost?
On four live agency sites, about $15 a lead at $250 a month and about $9 at $150. Those sites produced 142 leads over 8.4 site-months, about 17 per site per month. In each site’s first 30 days, the counts ran from 11 to 37, so a single month cost anywhere from about $7 to $23 a lead.
Here is the math at our two published plan prices. The site cost is our list price times the months each site has been producing leads. We do not publish what any of these four agencies actually pays.
| Site, $150 a month | Site + Content, $250 a month | |
|---|---|---|
| Per lead (142 leads) | $8.87 | $14.78 |
| Per new-prospect lead (117) | $10.76 | $17.94 |
| A month with 11 leads (slowest first 30 days) | $13.64 | $22.73 |
| A month with 37 leads (fastest first 30 days) | $4.05 | $6.76 |
Two caveats before anyone quotes this. First, a website does not produce on day one the way a lead order does. The slowest of these four started at 11 leads in its first 30 days, and the clock here starts at each site’s first lead, not its launch. Second, results depend on the agency’s market and its Google profile. A new site does not create demand. It catches what is already pointed at the agency.
Which costs less per sale: bought leads or your own website?
On these four sites, the website cost about $123 per new household that bought, at $250 a month. To match that, a $35 bought lead would have to close at 28 percent, and an $18 lead at 15 percent. Vendors do not publish close rates, so the honest comparison is that break-even number.
We matched 117 website leads from new prospects to each agency’s CRM. 17 have bought, 61 did not, and 39 are still being worked. That is 22 percent of the leads with a decision. The details are in do insurance agency website leads actually close.
| Bought lead price | Close rate needed to match $123 per sale | Close rate needed to match $74 per sale (the $150 plan) |
|---|---|---|
| $18 | 15% | 24% |
| $25 | 20% | 34% |
| $35 | 28% | 47% |
| $45 | 36% | 61% |
The website number will move. The 39 open leads can only add sales, so the cost per sale should come down as they are decided. It also leaves out the time your team spends working the leads, on both sides of the comparison.
The ranking pages that talk about cost per sale use example close rates, not measured ones. One works a $12 shared lead at a 10 percent close into $120 per policy. That may be right for some agencies. It is an example, not a measurement.
When is buying leads the better choice?
When you need volume this month, when you need to turn it up or down on demand, or when your agency has little Google presence yet. A lead order starts producing the day you fund it. A website takes weeks to ramp and depends on the demand already pointed at your agency.
Some honest cases where buying wins:
- A brand new agency or a new market. If nobody searches for you yet, a website has little to catch. Bought leads fill the gap while you build reviews.
- A slow first month. The slowest site here cost $22.73 a lead in its first 30 days at $250. Parasol’s $18 exclusive auto lead beats that.
- Volume on demand. You cannot double your website traffic next week. You can double a lead order.
- Live calls. A $25 to $100 call is a conversation already happening. A form still has to be called back.
And where the website tends to win: the lead is not sold to anyone else, the person came to your agency’s own site, and the site keeps producing without a new order. Plenty of agencies will do some of both. The point is to know what each one costs per sale, not just per lead.
How do I work out my own cost per lead?
Divide what the channel cost you in a month by the leads it produced that month. Then do the harder one: divide by the policies sold from those leads. Use the same rules for both channels, or the comparison means nothing.
- Count real leads only. Finished quote or contact forms, not half-finished forms, service requests or test submissions.
- Separate paid ads from organic. A lead from a Facebook ad is a bought lead, even if it lands on your website.
- Use whole months, and start the clock when tracking started, not when the site launched.
- Tag every lead with its source in your CRM so you can count sales by source later.
- Count sales by the month the lead came in, and give the newest month time to finish before you judge it.
- Write down the sample any time you quote the number. “$123 a sale” means nothing without “17 of 117”.
How we counted
Every lead number comes from the lead records of four live independent agency websites EffiWise built and hosts. A lead is a completed quote, callback or contact form, not a service request and not from a paid social ad. The 142 leads ran July 31 to October 23, 2026, measured from each site’s first lead (251.9 site-days, or 8.4 months of 30 days). Sales come from matching 117 new-prospect leads to each agency’s own CRM, leaving out people who were already customers, people who were already leads, repeats, and 15 leads not yet matched. Site cost uses our published prices of $150 and $250 a month, which have no build fee and no contract; it is not what any of these agencies pays. Vendor prices were read on each vendor’s own page on October 23, 2026. No agency is named next to any number. All queries were run on October 23, 2026.
If you want to see what your own agency’s site would look like before you pay anything, we build a preview first.