We measured what a scored forum lead actually costs
· 6 min read
Nobody publishes this, so here are our own numbers. One scan across all five sources — ten keywords, twenty-five threads hydrated and scored — cost $0.4193. That's $0.0168 per scored thread.
Where the money goes
| Line | Share of scan cost |
|---|---|
| LLM shortlisting (which threads are worth reading) | 46.5% |
| LLM scoring (reading and rating each thread) | 26.8% |
| Keyword metrics | 10.0% |
| LLM keyword selection | 8.4% |
| Search API | 7.2% |
| Page reading | 1.1% |
The striking part: the language model is roughly three quarters of the cost. Search — the thing people assume is expensive — is 7%.
Most of the cost is fixed, which changes everything
Only about $0.0047 per thread is genuinely variable. Roughly $0.30 of a scan is fixed regardless of how deep you go: picking keywords, pulling metrics, running the searches.
So cost per thread falls steeply with depth. Twenty-five threads costs $0.0168 each. A hundred threads brings that to around $0.008 — less than half — for the same fixed overhead spread wider.
A deeper scan is not proportionally more expensive. It is proportionally cheaper per result.
What we changed after measuring
Two things, both aimed at the 73% that was going to the model. We moved shortlisting to a smaller model — it's picking indices out of a compact list, not writing prose — which removed most of the largest line. And scans over fifty threads now go through a batch endpoint at half price, since a scan that size takes minutes anyway and nobody is watching the clock.
The honest caveat
This is one scan. A single measurement, in keyword mode. Domain and URL scans do extra work up front that this one didn't, and we haven't re-measured since the two changes above. We'd rather publish the number with that caveat attached than round it into a marketing claim.
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SweepSonarscans five forums for threads describing the problem your product solves, scores each one, and tells you the community's self-promotion policy before you reply.
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