Shared insurance leads: $5-20 each. Three to eight carriers hitting the same prospect within minutes.
Here's the full economics, laid out:
Shared leads (EverQuote, QuoteWizard, SmartFinancial): $5-20 per lead. Contact ratio at 5 minutes is 35-45%. Wait past 30 minutes and you're competing with agents who already ran through the pitch.
Exclusive leads: $25-100 or more. One agent, higher contact ratio, higher cost-per-bound-policy unless your quoting speed and follow-up cadence are tight.
Aged leads: $0.15-$0.30 each. Leads that were exclusive last week or last month. Most agencies won't touch them. With a 6-touch cadence over 12 days - calls, SMS, email - aged leads close at 1-4% under a disciplined process.
The arbitrage math:
At $0.25 per lead with a 2% close rate, your cost-per-application lands at $12.50. At a 65% bind rate from application to bound policy, that's roughly $20 per bound policy. Compare that to an exclusive lead at $75 with a 10% close rate: $750 cost-per-application, around $1,150 per bound policy.
Most agencies I've watched buy aged leads, make two calls, then write them off. Make six touches over 12 days before you declare the play dead. Two calls tells you nothing about whether the strategy works.
The aged-lead play only holds up if you have the infrastructure: an AMS that tracks every contact attempt (EZLynx, Applied Epic, or AgencyBloc), a power dialer running the cadence (Convoso or Five9), and a rep who can work a conversation that's six touches deep.
The shared-lead market is a speed contest. The aged-lead market is an execution contest. Both are real plays. Most agencies run neither properly because they're measuring CPL instead of cost-per-bound-policy and never see where the math actually breaks.
Ruslan co-founded Tegra in 2017. Runs the Google Ads practice - feed, PMax, search, attribution. Writes weekly about the parts of paid search operators are afraid to touch.