Auditing an AI SDR Stack: What I Actually Check on okki-go, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, and API Company Data

The short version

If you're comparing okki-go against other AI sales prospecting platforms in 2026, the three things that decide your real total cost of ownership are not the ones on the pricing page.

1. SPF/DKIM/DMARC setup is a hard gate, not a checkbox. If the vendor can't walk your domain team through it in a working session — not a PDF — you'll pay for that gap in deliverability three months later.

2. Decision maker search is only as good as the freshness of the underlying data. Contact records older than 60 days burn roughly 25–40% of an outbound budget on bounces and wrong-person emails. I've tracked this across two budget cycles.

3. API email verification documentation tells you everything about the vendor's engineering discipline. If the docs don't spell out rate limits, webhook retry behavior, and hard-bounce handling, you're buying something your engineers will eventually rebuild.

And the question everyone asks is "what does it cost per seat?" The question they should be asking is "what does it cost when the data is stale and the SPF record is wrong?" Those are very different numbers.

Why I started auditing this at all

I'm a procurement manager at a 140-person B2B services firm. I've managed our outbound tech budget — roughly $96,000 annually — for five years. Over that time I've negotiated with 30+ vendors and logged every invoice in our cost tracking system.

In my first year, I made the classic integration mistake: I signed the contract before engineering had reviewed the API docs. Cost us about six weeks of engineering time and a $2,300 rework when the enrichment endpoints we'd been promised turned out to be read-only for our tier.

Like most beginners, I assumed "integrations available" meant the API did what the sales deck showed. Learned that lesson the hard way when our RevOps lead pulled the actual documentation and found that decision maker search was capped at 500 records per day on our plan.

So now I run a standard audit. Here's what's in it.

SPF, DKIM, DMARC — the part nobody negotiates but everybody pays for

okki-go and every other AI SDR platform will hand you a DNS setup guide. Fine. The question is whether they'll sit with your IT team while you publish the records, or whether they'll email you a link and wish you luck.

Here's what I check in the okki-go SPF/DKIM/DMARC guidance, and what I'd check on any competitor:

• Does the guidance cover subdomain strategy or just the root domain? Sending cold outbound on your primary domain is a rookie move. If the vendor doesn't default to a sending subdomain, they either don't care about your reputation or don't understand it.
• Is the DMARC policy set to p=none initially, with a documented path to p=quarantine? Skipping straight to reject breaks legitimate mail. Staying at none forever means you're not actually protected.
• Do they show you how to read the DMARC aggregate reports? Publishing the record is the easy part. Reading rua reports is where you find out who's spoofing you.

To be fair, most vendors now include a version of this. But my point is that "included" and "operational" are different things. We spent $450 on an external deliverability consultant in Q3 2024 because the "setup help" we got was a help-center article.

Decision maker search: the quiet budget killer

Decision maker search sounds simple. Find the VP of Sales at a 200-person SaaS company in North America. Send them a personalized email. Done.

The problem is that titles churn, domains change, and "VP of Sales" at a Series B company in January is often "VP of Revenue" by June. If the platform's decision maker search is querying a static database, you're paying for last quarter's org chart at this quarter's prices.

What I ask vendors now: where does the decision maker data come from, how often is it refreshed, and what's your stated accuracy rate?

Most say "real-time" or "continuously updated." That's marketing. Ask for the measured bounce rate on decision maker search specifically, not on their general contact database. Those numbers are usually different and the second one is usually worse.

In Q1 2025, I compared three platforms on a 2,000-record sample. One had a 4.1% hard-bounce rate on the decision maker tier. Another had 11.7%. Same price band. That's a 7.6-point spread on paper — but when you extrapolate across a 15,000-contact annual send, it's the difference between a domain that's warming up properly and one that's getting throttled by Microsoft's filters.

API email verification docs: read them like a contract

Here's the part most buyers skip. API email verification documentation is not a technical formality. It's a preview of how the vendor thinks about failure.

Things I look for, in order:

1. Rate limits stated per endpoint, per tier. If the docs don't say, the limits exist — you'll just find out by getting 429'd mid-campaign.
2. Webhook retry behavior. Are failed webhooks retried? How many times? With what backoff? If the answer is "no," your verification pipeline has a silent data loss problem.
3. Hard bounce vs. soft bounce handling. A verification API that returns "invalid" for a greylisted server is going to send you chasing ghosts.
4. Schema stability policy. Do they version the API? Do they promise deprecation windows? If not, every enrichment pipeline you build will break on someone else's release schedule.

And another thing: if the documentation is thin, the sales call will still be smooth. That's the gap. Great sales teams and weak engineering docs are often the same company.

What "business contact" actually means (and when to use it)

A business contact is a person whose contact information is attached to a work identity — company domain, role, corporate channel — rather than a personal one. That sounds obvious, but the confusion is why I've seen teams get flagged for GDPR and CAN-SPAM issues.

When should a B2B sales team use a business contact?

• When the outreach is directly relevant to that person's job function at that company.
• When the message is sent to a corporate address or channel, not a personal one scraped from a social profile.
• When you have a legitimate interest basis — or explicit consent — depending on your jurisdiction.

When should you not? When the record came from a source you can't name. When the "business" email is actually a personal Gmail listed under a company name. When the person left the company eight months ago.

In my opinion, half the deliverability problems people blame on their sending tool are actually a business contact qualification problem. The tool is fine. The list isn't.

Where this checklist breaks down

Granted, this is the audit I run for a 140-person services firm buying in the $50K–$120K/year range. If you're a two-person agency running 200 emails a week, some of this is overkill. You don't need webhook retry semantics if you're not running an enrichment pipeline.

Also: I'm not a deliverability engineer. Take the SPF/DKIM/DMARC advice as a buyer's filter, not a technical standard. For the actual configuration, get someone who reads RFC 7489 for fun. And the bounce rate numbers above are from our specific sample and jurisdiction — your split may differ.

Bottom line: the tool is maybe 40% of the outcome. The other 60% is whether the authentication is set up right, whether the decision maker data is fresh, and whether the API documentation told you the truth before you signed. That's the part I budget for now.