Before writing a line of product code I ran eight research tracks. Every claim carries the URL and the date it was read, and anything inferred is marked as inference rather than fact. Three of those tracks are below in full, because they are useful to anyone running outbound and they cost me nothing to give away.
What is not here: our own unit economics, architecture and legal position. Those are ours, and pretending otherwise would be a strange kind of generosity.
Seventeen players examined. The pattern is uniform and it is the reason this company exists: each one connects the accounts you already hold. None of them supplies the account.
| Player | Model | Price | Whose account |
|---|---|---|---|
| Composio | per-tool-call gateway, 1,000+ toolkits | free 20K calls → $29 (200K) → $229 (2M) | yours |
| Arcade | actions runtime, auth + governance | demo-led | yours |
| Zapier MCP | app access for AI clients | metered against task quota, 2 tasks per call | yours |
| Pipedream Connect | managed OAuth for 3,000+ APIs | developer plans | your end-user's |
| Nango | managed OAuth, 900+ APIs | cloud plans | yours |
| ColdIQ | 40+ GTM data providers behind one API | credits: $99 / $199 / $499 | they hold them (data only) |
| MoltSets | B2B enrichment via MCP | flat: $27 / $97 / $997 | they hold them (data only) |
The two that do hold the subscriptions are read-only data businesses. Nobody holds the action channels: a LinkedIn seat, a WhatsApp number, an email sender.
This is the brief people assume rather than read, and the assumption is wrong about half the time. Verdicts below are from the providers' own published terms.
| Provider | Verdict | The actual clause |
|---|---|---|
| Unipile | PERMITS | §6 grants an integrator a licence to "build and operate their own features and services" and "offer these integrated features to their own end-users, in compliance with Unipile's subscription and pricing terms". Note it is revocable. |
| Apollo | BLOCKED | Their terms forbid the passthrough this model requires. |
| People Data Labs | CONDITIONAL | Resale is contemplated but fenced: you may not "resell, authorize or permit anyone to use… data obtained from People Data Labs for any purposes prohibited in the Acceptable Data Use Policy". Prohibited uses include employment, credit, insurance or housing eligibility decisions and profiling on sensitive characteristics. |
| Nango (self-hosted) | BLOCKED | Elastic License 2.0: "You may not provide the software to third parties as a hosted or managed service, where the service provides users with access to any substantial set of the features or functionality of the software." If you are building a hosted product on self-hosted Nango, read that sentence twice. |
| Amazon SES | PERMITS | Standard resale terms; ~$0.10 per 1,000 emails. |
One more, and it costs people real money: LinkedIn's User Agreement §8.2.13 prohibits "bots or other unauthorized automated methods to access the Services, add or download contacts, send or redirect messages". §3.4 reserves the right to restrict or terminate the account. Every vendor in this category operates against that, and most of them are quiet about it. If you run LinkedIn automation, that risk is real and it lands on whoever owns the seat.
A working operator running outbound from a terminal pays roughly this, per operator, per month:
"A Claude Max subscription ($200/month), data enrichment APIs ($200 to $500/month depending on volume), and a sending tool ($100 to $300/month)" — roughly $500 to $1,000 per operator per month. Databar, Claude Code for GTM Teams
And the complaint underneath it, in an operator's own words: five or six API keys, "each with different authentication methods, rate limits, response formats, and billing models".
There is a second cost nobody invoices for. Stacking MCP servers eats the context window before you type anything:
"Just 5-6 MCP integrations will fill up your context window and you can't even do anything… suddenly 30-50% of your context is gone before you type a single prompt." JuniaGitHub's MCP server alone is 93 tools, about 55,000 tokens of schemas.
For your outbound work, the LinkedIn seats, the enrichment, the sending: are those accounts and bills yours, or your clients'? And roughly what does that stack cost you a month?
Reply to roki@dewx.com and it reaches me. If the answers say the accounts sit with the client and nobody wants to rent one, I will write that on the log and change the plan.