I spent $300 to text 10,000 numbers in a market I had never worked. Not for the deals, at least not primarily. I am looking at expanding into South Carolina, and before committing real money to an area I want to know whether it replies. The question this run answers: can cheap skip tracing tell you whether a market is worth entering, and does it pay for itself while answering?
The short version
Cheap tracing, wide
You do not know yet whether the market works, so buying premium data to find out is backwards. $300 across five counties told me which areas reply and which do not, and it produced signed contracts while it was answering the question.
Premium on tight lists
Once you know an area produces, a 500-record list of owners you actually need to reach justifies 15 cents. Different job, different tool. These two are not really competing.
Run the math first
Pay-per-lead runs around $200 a lead and operators tell me it takes three to ten to close. That is $600 to $2,000 per deal in lead cost alone, against $3.49 a lead here.
The setup
- $300 on Kind bought 10,000 records, which after vetting gave me about 10,400 mobile numbers to text
- Spread across several areas on purpose, not one county: Gaffney, Spartanburg, Anderson, Orangeburg, and Florence, so I could compare busy competitive counties against quiet ones
- Marketing to vacant land, which replies well but converts differently than single family
- Texted through my own AI texting platform, with roughly 90% of the messages handled by AI
Spreading across counties is the part I would repeat. One county tells you about one county. Five tells you where to go back.
Reply rates
Reply rates ran 16% to 23% depending on the campaign. For context, 16% is around industry standard and anything past 23% is a good campaign. Back when I ran platforms like Launch Control I was seeing 7 to 15%, so this is a real improvement, though your list and your tracing drive that as much as the platform does.
Wrong numbers are the tax you pay on cheap data. Spartanburg: about 4,500 texted, 226 flagged wrong. My system detects and flags those automatically. And that is only the people who bothered to reply and say so, so the true number is higher. Every skip tracing service has this, Kind, SkipMatrix, PropStream, all of them. The question is how much it costs you relative to what it finds.
What actually converted
Replies are not leads and leads are not deals. From roughly 10,500 numbers texted:
- 86 leads into my CRM, a little under 1% of numbers texted
- 4 contracts sent on vacant lots
- 3 signed by the seller, now working on buyers
Worth noting on that 1%: one owner can carry several numbers. Kind returns up to five numbers per person plus relatives. I did not text relatives here, though on probate or divorce lists that is worth doing.
Cost per lead, which is the number that matters
$300 for 86 leads is $3.49 per lead on skip tracing. Texting cost me somewhere around $140 to $150 for the whole run, because I built the platform, which is one of the five systems I write about.
Compare that with pay-per-lead. Services selling ready-to-sell leads run around $200 each, and the operators I build systems for tell me it takes anywhere from three to ten to close one. Call it $600 to $2,000 in lead cost per deal. Here, $300 plus texting produced 86 leads and three signed contracts. Close even one and the ROI is not a close comparison.
The honest caveat: this is a good run, not a guaranteed one. You can spend $300 on a new area and get nothing. That is also part of the business, and it is exactly why I test with cheap data first.
What I learned that was not in the numbers
One of the signed lots had a buyer ready at a good price. Then it came apart on title: the seller had bought it at a tax deed sale, and in South Carolina there is no clean way to clear that without a quiet title action, which takes months and costs money nobody wanted to spend. In Florida, where I have done this for years, a tax deed property can be cleared five years after the sale. Different state, different rule.
That is the actual cost of entering a new market, and no skip tracing test surfaces it. You find it by doing deals there.
Pricing
| Tool | Pricing | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Kind Skip Tracing * | $300 for 10,000 records on this run, roughly 3 cents each; up to 5 numbers per person plus relatives; volume tiers from 1.5 to 4 cents | Testing a new market before you commit real money to it |
| SkipMatrix * | 15 cents per match, 13.5 with code RAUPH; volume discounts on bigger lists | The small precise lists you run once the market proves out |
Pricing verified August 12, 2026. Pricing changes. Check the vendor's site before buying.
* Affiliate link.
This isn't for you if
- You need this month's deal. This is a market test that happens to produce deals, not a fast closing strategy.
- You have no follow-up system. 86 leads landing in a CRM nobody works is $300 spent on nothing.
- You expect a clean answer from one run. Reply rates varied county to county, and one signed lot turned out to have a tax deed title problem. That is what market testing looks like.
Bottom line
Am I switching to Kind exclusively? No. I have used them for a long time and will keep using them as one of my tracers, not my only one. The split I run:
- New market, testing the waters, or big lists that do not need to be precise: Kind
- A 500-record list of owners I genuinely need to reach: SkipMatrix, at 15 cents, on areas I have already proven
They are not really competitors. If you are starting out, expanding, or trying to save money, Kind is the best of the cheap tracers I have tested, and I have tested all of them on the channel. The full head-to-head against premium data is here.
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