What Intent Data Costs: Bombora, 6sense, ZoomInfo

Problem: A renewal quote is sitting on your desk with a five-figure number on it, the vendor will not put a price list in writing, and nobody in the building can tell you what last year's contract actually produced.

Quick Win: Intent data is a guess, sold as a subscription, about which companies are researching what you sell. A vendor watches anonymous reading activity across a network of business websites, traces the activity back to a company, and hands you that company's name with a score attached. Recorded contract data from Vendr, a buying service that logs what its clients actually paid, puts the medians at $25,000 a year for Bombora, $33,500 for ZoomInfo, and $62,440 for 6sense. Before you sign, get clear on the one thing the vendor page never says out loud: none of it names a human being.

Intent data, in one plain sentence

Somebody at a company you have never spoken to read three articles about your category last week. Intent data is the product that tells you a company did that, without telling you who.

The mechanics are not mysterious. Bombora, the vendor that supplies the underlying data to much of the rest of the industry, runs a shared network of publishers: 5,000 or so business websites feeding it activity from roughly 4.7 million unique website domains across 15.8 billion interactions a month, sorted into 21,600 business topics and matched back to 2.8 million businesses using the company's internet address (Bombora). Bombora is explicit that this happens at the business level. Company Surge, its main product, "monitors content consumption on a business level" (Bombora).

Business level is the whole story. Read it as: a company, not a person.

What buyers actually paid

None of these vendors publishes a price list. Every deal is a custom quote, which is exactly why the public numbers are all over the place depending on who is doing the reporting. Here is what is recorded rather than marketed.

All figures are anonymized buyer records published by Vendr. Treat them as reported, not quoted.

Three things fall out of that table.

The spread is the real finding. ZoomInfo contracts in the record run from $7,200 to $155,370. That is a 21x range for the same logo on the invoice. Nobody pays list price, and nobody pays the same. If your quote is well north of the median, you are being sold a large-company setup somebody decided you needed.

You are not comparing three versions of the same thing. Bombora sells the raw topic activity. ZoomInfo sells a contact database and layers intent on top. 6sense sells intent, plus a model that predicts a purchase, plus a place to run advertising against it. The 6sense median is roughly 2.5x the Bombora median because you are buying three products stapled together, and most buyers use one or two of them.

Discounts are normal, not a favor. Roughly 12% off on Bombora, 22% on ZoomInfo, 17% on 6sense, averaged across those recorded purchases. Asking properly is worth thousands. Ask.

The money buys a company name, not a person

Here is the part worth stopping on if you are holding a renewal.

You pay somewhere between $25,000 and $62,000 a year. What lands in your salespeople's hands is a list of companies with a number next to each one. At a 4,000-person company, "someone here read about your category" narrows your search from 4,000 people to 4,000 people.

This is not a hostile reading of the product. It is what the industry's own research says is the sticking point. Forrester's global survey of companies using intent data found that working out which specific people to contact inside those companies was the number one problem reported (Forrester). The same survey found more than 85% of users report business benefits, and that over 70% now buy from multiple providers, with almost half taking data from three or more. Read those two findings together and the picture gets clearer. The data is useful enough to keep buying, and not decisive enough to stop buying more of it.

Also from that survey: fewer than half of companies use their intent investment to move deals already in progress, and fewer than a third use it for anything to do with existing customers. Most of what you are paying for sits in one narrow use, right at the start, before anyone has spoken to you, where it is hardest to prove anything.

The line item that never appears on the quote

The subscription is not the expensive part. The expensive part is the person who has to turn a score into a sentence somebody sends.

A weekly list of companies with numbers attached is not work anyone can act on. Someone has to open it, decide which companies are even a fit, find the actual humans inside each one, work out what those humans might care about, and write something worth reading. Then do it again next Tuesday, forever.

Price that. ZipRecruiter puts the average US demand generation manager, the marketing role that usually inherits this list, at $101,463 a year before benefits and overhead (ZipRecruiter). Half a day a week on this list is about a tenth of that role, so call it $10,000 a year on top of the license. If it grows into a quarter of somebody's job, which it does the moment leadership starts asking why the list is not producing deals, you are at $25,000 a year in labor.

So the honest annual number is not $25,000. It is the license plus somewhere between a tenth and a quarter of a person: roughly $35,000 to $90,000 a year depending on which vendor and how seriously you staff it. Take that range to your finance team, not the license fee.

And notice what happens if nobody is assigned. The list still arrives every week. The invoice still renews. This is the same trap as the competitive intelligence subscription. The software buys you somewhere to put the work, never the work itself.

The free comparison: events that name a human

Now price the alternative, because that is the comparison the vendor page will never draw for you.

A funding announcement tells you money landed and roughly what it was raised for. A named executive hire tells you who to write to, what they were brought in to fix, and when their clock started. US federal contract opportunities are published through a free public API at SAM.gov, the government's public contracting site (GSA). Company filings are free to search on EDGAR, the SEC's public database. Job postings, expansion news, and leadership changes are announced on purpose, because the company wants them seen.

None of that is a probability. All of it has a date and, usually, a name.

The catch is worth stating: public means public. Everyone watching funding announcements sends the same congratulations email within hours. The advantage is not being first to a feed. It is what you bring when you arrive, which is the argument we make in buying signals vs. intent data.

When intent data is genuinely the right buy

It is not a con. It is the right purchase when all three of these are true at once. Not two.

1. You sell to a very large number of companies. Ten thousand possible buyers and no way to rank them is the exact problem topic-level activity solves. Two hundred possible buyers is a research problem, not a data problem, and you should just research them.
2. Your marketing runs on advertising. Intent data's most defensible use is deciding which companies see an ad, which does not require naming anybody. If you spend real money advertising to companies, the targeting alone can carry the license.
3. A named person owns the list. Written into their goals, with time protected for it. Not a volunteer, not "the sales team."

Condition three is where most companies quietly fail, and it is the only one you cannot buy.

When it is not, and what to renew into instead

If your possible buyers number in the hundreds, or you do not advertise, or nobody owns the weekly list, you are paying five figures for a spreadsheet that opens once a quarter.

The alternative is not "do nothing." It is changing what you pay for. Stop buying a probability that a company might be interested, and start watching the events that are already public, combining them per company, and pairing each one with something worth reading. That is a system built on facts with dates on them, and it is the model behind lead generation from custom signals.

Before you renew anything, check what you already own. The strongest signs a company is about to buy are usually sitting in the software you already use to track customers and deals: a customer who opened a renewal conversation, a stalled deal where the contact just changed jobs, a company that asked about a second product and never got a follow-up. Those are free, verified, and yours. Start there: the buying signals already inside your own systems.

Where this reasoning breaks

Advertising is a real exception. If you buy ads aimed at companies rather than people, intent data does not need to name anyone to earn its keep. That one survives every criticism in this post.

Big lists genuinely need ranking. At ten thousand possible buyers, even a mediocre score beats alphabetical order. Scale changes the math.

The prices here are reported, not quoted. Vendr's figures are anonymized buyer records, and the sample sizes vary a lot: 1,568 recorded ZoomInfo purchases against 35 for Bombora. Thirty-five purchases is a thin sample. Use these to set expectations before the call, not as a number you quote back across the table.

The labor figures are our arithmetic, not a survey. The $101,463 salary is published. The tenth-to-a-quarter of a role is our estimate. Run it against what your own people actually cost.

Public signals have their own failure mode. Everyone sees them, they go cold fast, and a signal you show up to empty-handed is just a faster cold email.

Related reading

• Buying signals vs. intent data, the difference between the two and how fast each one goes cold
• The buying signals already inside your own systems, the free list you already own
• Lead generation from custom signals, what replaces a subscription

Frequently Asked Questions

Is $25,000 a year for intent data worth it?

It depends on one number: how many companies could plausibly buy from you. At ten thousand, ranking them is a real problem and a subscription is a defensible answer. At two hundred, you are paying $25,000 to sort a list a person could read in an afternoon. Add the labor to run it and the honest annual figure is closer to $35,000.

Why will the vendors not publish a price?

Because the range is enormous and every deal is negotiated. The recorded ZoomInfo purchases run from $7,200 to $155,370 a year (Vendr). A published price would anchor every conversation at the low end of that range. Assume the first quote is not the price.

Does intent data tell me who to call?

No. It reports at the company level. Reaching an actual person means adding a contact database on top, which is a second bill, and Forrester's survey found that working out which people to contact inside companies showing intent was the number one problem users reported (Forrester).

What should I ask on the renewal call?

Three questions. Which deals closed last year that we can trace back to this list. Which parts of the tool did nobody log into. And what does this cost without them. Bring a competing quote and the median figures above, and time the call near the end of the vendor's sales quarter.

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If you are holding a quote and quietly wondering what last year's contract actually produced, that hesitation is the right one. We install the other version: a ranked queue of companies built from public events you can verify, combined per company, sorted by which opportunity goes cold first, and handed to your salespeople with something worth reading already attached. No score with nobody's name on it, no weekly list waiting for a volunteer. See what we build for companies →