Social Selling Tools by Job, With Prices and Free Tiers

Social selling tools do four jobs on LinkedIn and other networks: find the right buyers, keep your profile active with useful content, hold one-to-one conversations, and record each one. Almost every product in this category does one of those four jobs.

For a small B2B team the monthly bill runs from under $200 to about $535. These totals use each vendor's own list price at the time of writing and cover list access (one Sales Navigator Core seat on annual billing), publishing and LinkedIn conversations:

• A solo founder pays $168.99 a month.
• A 3-person team pays $356.99 a month.
• A setup with 5 LinkedIn accounts run by the same 3 people pays $534.99 a month.

A CRM and the email side of outreach come on top of those totals. And the software is the cheap part. Your profile and your list cost more, in time.

What are social selling tools, and which jobs do they actually do?

1. Finding people. Search and data tools that turn a buyer description into a list of named people with the right titles.
2. Publishing content. Schedulers and writing tools that keep your profile active. A stranger who checks you should find a working business.
3. Running conversations. Tools that send connection requests and messages from one or more LinkedIn accounts and collect the replies in one place.
4. Tracking relationships. A CRM, social or ordinary, that holds every reply, next step and booked call.

I left two groups out on purpose. In-app shop features on consumer networks are built for B2C sellers. Account-based marketing (ABM) ad platforms serve display ads to target accounts. That is advertising, and it is a separate budget decision from selling one to one.

Prices come from each vendor's pricing page. I resell none of these tools, and my clients buy their own software directly. The result numbers here come from my team's LinkedIn and email campaigns.

Your tooling is of no interest to your prospects. They never see which one sent your message or which CRM stored their reply. They see your name, your profile and the first two lines you wrote.

Why does the tool matter less than your profile and your list?

Because many buyers research alone before they talk to anyone. Gartner surveyed 646 B2B buyers between August and September 2025. Two in three of them (67%) named a rep-free experience as their preference, and 45% reported using AI in a recent purchase (Gartner).

Forrester's 2026 release on business buying puts a typical decision at 13 internal people and 9 external influencers. It also says buyers look for validation from trusted sources (Forrester).

Put the two together: your message reaches one of about 13 people inside the buyer's company, and 9 outside voices may weigh in too. Before anyone answers, some of them will look you up. They read your profile, scan your recent posts and maybe ask an AI assistant about your company.

That is why I treat the sale as something that mostly happens online, before anyone joins a call. Nobody buys from a LinkedIn message. Their buying starts after they have examined you. A tool can put your message in front of the right person. It cannot make that person's research come back positive. Your profile, your proof and your posts do that work, and they cost time.

When you compare tools, ask this: will it get the right buyers to check me, and will they like what they find?

What do tools really do in campaigns that book calls?

Start with one SEO agency in Singapore. In the first 30 days of its campaign, it booked 78 sales calls. Over 12 months, the same campaign booked 1,344 calls.

Numbers like that come from volume. That campaign needed at least 800 replies to book those 78 calls in 30 days. Software sends the messages and collects those replies. Reading each one, answering it and getting a time into the calendar is human work.

When a setup already books calls and a client needs more, we add LinkedIn or email accounts to what works instead of buying new software. That rule shapes the cost table further down, where the bigger team mostly pays for more senders.

A second campaign ran for a US business consulting firm. The channels were LinkedIn outbound plus LinkedIn content marketing. The founder's profile was optimized, and the team prospected with Sales Navigator. The connection rate was 39% (38 of 98 requests). Calls went 27, 35 and 64 across the first three months, and the 4-month total was 204.

Sales Navigator is the one piece of software that case names. The other two items on its list, the founder profile work and the LinkedIn content, are work a person does.

The third campaign was for a UK social media marketing agency. Lists came from Sales Navigator, Apollo and UpLead. Outreach ran on LinkedIn, warm emails and cold email. There were no paid ads.

I build lists from Sales Navigator, Apollo and UpLead instead of scraping, because a built list holds up when you send to it.

So treat tools as the pipes and the list as the work. When replies dry up, I open the list first and the copy second. Switching on a fresh campaign in whichever automation platform is popular this month usually brings zero clients. Fix the funnel first. Then scale.

Which social selling tools are there, what does each cost and is there a free tier?

Every price below is the vendor's list price at the time of writing, in the currency the vendor shows. Read the billing basis column before you compare rows, because "per sender", "per seat" and "per channel" add up very differently.

What the table does not show, job by job:

Finding people.

• Sales Navigator: LinkedIn lists Core at $1,079.88 a year on annual billing, which works out to $89.99 a month. Month-to-month billing costs about a third more (LinkedIn compare plans). If you are weighing a seat, see what Sales Navigator does and read the Sales Navigator alternatives worth comparing.
• Apollo: the pricing page names four tiers (Free, Basic, Professional and Custom) but shows no dollar amount. The free plan connects Gmail only, and unused credits lapse at the end of the period (Apollo).

Conversations.

• HeyReach bills each LinkedIn sender, so a manager who only reads replies adds nothing to the bill. Its early stage program is open to new customers with fewer than 5 people and annual recurring revenue under $250,000 (HeyReach).
• Expandi's Agency plan for 10+ seats is custom quoted (Expandi).
• Dripify's 7-day trial includes Advanced features, and annual billing lowers both plans (Dripify).
• Waalaxy takes 20% off for quarterly and 50% off for yearly billing, and only Business adds cold email sequences (Waalaxy).
• Taplio puts automated lead outreach on Pro, its $199 plan (Taplio).

Content.

• Buffer charges per channel. Essentials allows one user, while Team adds unlimited users and approval workflows (Buffer).
• Hootsuite's prices are based on annual billing, and trial accounts have daily posting limits (Hootsuite).
• Sprout Social charges per seat, and Essentials connects up to 5 social profiles. Its Employee Advocacy add-on starts on the Standard plan ($199 per seat a month) with no public price; you get a quote on a demo (Sprout Social).
• EveryoneSocial, the other advocacy name you will see on lists, is quote-only with one plan priced by users (EveryoneSocial).

Relationship tracking.

• Breakcold X1 at $99 a month covers 1 seat and 2 connected accounts (Breakcold).
• HubSpot's Sales Hub is free for up to 2 users. Starter shows $7 and $20 a seat a month and Professional $90 and $100, depending on the billing term you pick. Professional also adds a one-time $1,500 onboarding fee (HubSpot).
• Crono is a prospecting platform with mailboxes and an email finder built in. Pro needs at least 2 users, so a solo founder cannot buy it alone (Crono).

How much does a social selling stack cost per month for a small team?

Here are three example setups for a small team, priced only from the vendor pages above. HeyReach and Buffer use monthly billing. One person builds the list, so each setup carries one Sales Navigator Core seat at its annual price per month.

Each LinkedIn profile you post from counts as one Buffer channel. The 5-account row adds two senders and two channels to the 3-person row and nothing else, because HeyReach bills per account and Buffer per channel. Headcount does not move either bill.

I leave the CRM out of these totals on purpose. Which one you use matters far less than having one that catches every reply.

Yearly billing lowers the conversation column too. At the time of writing, HeyReach drops to $63 per sender, which saves $80 a month on the 5-account setup.

Three swaps to consider (prices at the time of writing):

• Writing help and outreach in one product. A solo founder can replace HeyReach and Buffer with Taplio Pro at $199 a month. That is $120 more than those two tools cost in the solo row.
• A heavier content team. Three Sprout Social Essentials seats on monthly billing cost $297 instead of $30 for Buffer Team. That takes the 3-person row to $623.99.
• Prospecting in one platform. Three Crono Pro users cost EUR 237 a month on annual billing, with mailboxes and an email finder included.

A paid Apollo tier, if you add one, goes on top. So does the email side of a multichannel setup: domains, mailboxes and a sending tool. I price that part separately in the cold email tool stack, job by job.

If an agency runs outbound for you, ask who pays for the tools. At my LinkedIn outreach agency, software is not inside our monthly fee. The client buys the tools, sending domains, mailboxes and data, and the stack is sized to their market, volume and sales team.

Which tool should you buy first, and when should you buy none?

Buy in this order, and stop at the first step you cannot pass yet.

1. Fix the profile before any tool. If your LinkedIn profile reads like a CV, fix it before you pay for anything. I treat the profile as a page written for clients, with who you help, how and the proof. An ordinary message from a profile that convinces will outperform a perfect message from a bare page. This step costs an afternoon.
2. Get list access next. If you cannot export a clean list of named decision-makers, buy list access before anything that sends. That means a Sales Navigator seat or a paid data tier such as Apollo.
3. Add a CRM third. If replies live in four inboxes and two notebooks, give them one home before volume rises. The tracking home has to exist before the first reply arrives, or good leads slip.
4. Buy conversation and content tools last. Only now do HeyReach, Taplio or Buffer earn their fee, because by then you have a good profile and a good list. When you pick one, check that it lets you set real time between follow-up steps. In our campaigns, it is usually the third follow-up that gets the reply, provided real time has passed since the second.

Content sits in step 4 because it supports outbound and does not replace it. Content gets attention. DMs get deals. A busy feed with no conversations behind it does not pay a single invoice. For the wider method behind this order, see social selling beyond the tools.

For most founders I work with, one solid post a week is enough, written for the buyer who will look you up before answering. If you are unsure about posting at all, read whether a founder should post on LinkedIn.

Intent data only pays when your market is big. Say your market is 2,000 companies and intent signals show on about 10 of them. Those signals cover 0.5% of your market. In a market that size, my team skips intent data and writes one offer that works for all 2,000.

Buy nothing yet in three situations:

• You cannot name the job title that signs your contracts.
• Your profile would not convince a stranger who checks it.
• Nobody on the team can answer replies the same day.

Before you open a single pricing page, look at your LinkedIn profile in a private browser window, the way a stranger would see it. If it would not earn a reply, fix that first. The $168.99 can wait a week.

Paying for social selling tools that nobody on the team opens? Book a call and send me the list with the monthly cost. I will say which ones I would keep.