What is a slow reply
costing you?
Set four numbers and see an estimate of what a faster first reply could be worth to you each year — built from published response-time research, with every step of the arithmetic shown. No email, no gate, nothing to download.
Your numbers
Rough figures are fine. The maths runs in your browser — there is no form to fill in and nothing gets emailed to you.
Emails and form submissions from people who contacted you. Not outbound prospects.
What one new client is worth to you across the whole engagement, before costs.
Out of every 100 inbound leads, how many become paying clients today.
Your typical first human reply — the median, not your best day, including the inquiry that lands at 9pm on a Friday.
You get 40 inbound leads a month, so 480 a year. On the published curve, replying the next day lines up with about 2.3% of leads converting, while replying inside five minutes lines up with 21% — a gap of 18.7 leads in every 100. Across your volume that is about 90 more conversations a year. We throw half of that away (leaving 45) because the benchmark compares fast companies with slow ones rather than running an experiment, then apply your own 12% close rate. That lands at about 5.4 more clients a year, or $18,900 at $3,500 a client.
An estimate built on published industry benchmarks — not a promise, not a forecast, and not LeadsApp’s own results. Your business is not the median of 1,247 companies.
For comparison: at 40 leads a month you would be on Starter, $149 a month or $1,788 a year. That cost is not subtracted from the figure above; do that yourself.
No card required. See every source behind this.
The curve behind the number
The two ends of this table are measured — five minutes, and anything past 24 hours. Every row in between is ours: a straight interpolation between those ends on a log scale, because the study publishes the ends and not the middle. We would rather label that than quietly present six measured-looking rows.
| First reply | Leads converted | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Within 5 minutes | 21% | Measured |
| Within an hour | 8% | Our interpolation |
| A few hours | 5.2% | Our interpolation |
| Same day | 3.5% | Our interpolation |
| Next day | 2.3% | Measured |
| Longer than a day | 2.3% | Measured |
The measured rows come from the Artemis GTM speed-to-lead benchmark (2026, 253,817 inbound leads across 1,247 companies): companies replying inside five minutes converted 21% of leads, against 2.3% for companies replying after 24 hours — roughly nine times better. Anything slower than a day is held at that same 2.3%, because the study has no data below it and extrapolating downwards would only flatter the result.
Two more numbers set the context but do not enter the maths: the median business takes 42 hours to make a first response, and in a Harvard Business Review audit of 2,241 US companies, 63% did not reply within an hour. (That 63% is frequently miscited as “never reply” — the never-reply share in that audit is about 23%. We set that record straight here.)
The arithmetic itself is deliberately blunt: we take the gap in percentage points of your whole lead pool, not a nine times multiplier on your close rate — multiplying a close rate by nine produces numbers nobody should believe. Then we throw half of the remaining gap away, and apply your own close rate to what is left.
What this doesn’t account for
Six things the estimate ignores. Some of them make it too high, some make it too low, and you know your own business well enough to say which.
Your follow-up
The model counts the first reply only. It gives no credit at all for chasing on day 1, 3 and 7, which is where a large share of quiet leads actually come back.
Lead quality
A hundred tyre-kickers and a hundred serious buyers are the same input here. If your inbound is mostly unqualified, the estimate is too high for you.
Your capacity
More conversations mean more of your time. If you are already full, replying faster wins you better clients rather than more of them — a real gain, but not this one.
Cause versus correlation
The benchmark compares companies that reply fast with companies that reply slowly. It is not a controlled experiment, so some of the gap belongs to whatever else fast companies do well. This is why we throw half of it away before showing you anything.
What it costs you
The estimate is gross, not net. LeadsApp is free on 25 leads a month and paid above that, and that price is not deducted from the number.
Seasonality, deal mix, your market
One average client value and one close rate cannot describe a business that has a good quarter and a bad one, or a $900 job and a $40,000 one.
Where the inputs come from
- 21% versus 2.3% conversion, and the 42-hour median first response — Artemis GTM speed-to-lead benchmark, 2026; 253,817 inbound leads across 1,247 companies.
- 63% of companies not replying within an hour, and the ~23% that never reply — Harvard Business Review audit of 2,241 US companies.
- Everything between five minutes and 24 hours — our own interpolation, labelled as such in the table above.
None of these are LeadsApp’s results. They describe the market this product exists for, and the output of this calculator is an estimate about your business, not a commitment about ours.
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