Free tool
Form spam cost calculator
Junk submissions cost you three times over: the click you paid for, the rep hour spent finding out, and the response fee your form tool charged to receive it. This adds up all three, and works out what your cost per lead looks like once the junk is out of the denominator.
Runs in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, stored, or logged — there is no request to send it in. Built by the team behind the dishonest dashboard.
How this is calculated
Every figure above comes from the arithmetic below. No weighting, no model, no numbers of ours mixed into yours.
Submissions
submissions = monthly spend ÷ reported cost per lead
The ad platform's cost per lead already implies a submission count. We use that rather than asking you for it twice.
Junk and real
junk = submissions × junk share real = submissions − junk
The three costs
wasted ad spend = junk × reported cost per lead wasted rep hours = junk × minutes per lead ÷ 60 wasted payroll = wasted rep hours × hourly cost per-response tax = junk × fee per response
The three are additive because they are three different budgets: media, payroll, and software.
The headline
real cost per usable lead = monthly spend ÷ real multiple = real cost per usable lead ÷ reported cost per lead
Note what this does and does not claim. It does not say your ads got worse. It says the same spend bought fewer leads a person can sell to than the dashboard implies, and the gap is the junk rate.
Where the defaults come from
The example numbers are a plausible small paid-search account, not a benchmark. Replace all six.
The junk-rate default is a guess and we want to be clear about that. Nobody publishes reliable junk-rate data by industry, ourselves included — we have no customers yet, so we have no aggregate to draw on. 28% is a placeholder chosen to be uncomfortable rather than measured. Ask the person who calls your leads; they will know within about five percentage points, and their number is worth more than any benchmark.
What we can source is the surrounding weather. Bad bots were 40% of internet traffic in 2025, up from 37%, and automated requests are roughly 57.5% of HTML traffic against 42.5% human. About 30% of leads bought from third-party vendors are outright fake. Those are internet-wide figures, not measurements of your form — they explain why the junk rate is not zero, not what yours is.
What this cannot tell you
It cannot tell you your junk rate. That is the input the whole result swings on and the one number here that has to come from a human who called the leads. If you have never checked, the honest use of this tool is to run it at 10%, 30% and 50% and notice how much the answer moves.
It also does not model the second-order cost, which is often the larger one: a rep who has worked forty junk leads this month treats the forty-first differently, and a lead scoring model trained on polluted data stays polluted. Neither has a defensible number attached, so neither is in the arithmetic.
And it assumes junk costs the same as good traffic on a per-click basis, which is roughly true for search and less true for display and social. If your junk is concentrated in one placement, the wasted spend figure is conservative.
The argument this tool comes from, including the strongest counter-arguments to it, is at the dishonest dashboard. If you want the version of this question aimed at your billing rather than your media, that is cost per usable response.
Why we built this
Every number on this page is one your form builder could have told you and didn’t.
Endpoint Forms is an open-source form builder for marketers: forms built to convert, data that goes wherever you need it, and every submission carrying what it turned out to be worth. It is not shipped yet. The waitlist is where we tell you when it is.