Some years ago, an effort was made to estimate a number of the public costs that are potentially incurred when early childhood mental health concerns go unaddressed. That study compared the per-child cost of providing early childhood mental health consultation to the per-child cost of five other services: TANF; child welfare, special education; juvenile incarceration; and later mental health treatment costs. The cost of mental health consultation paled by comparison. However, that earlier study addressed neither the actual likelihood of service use, nor the proportion of service use that could be averted by providing mental health consultation. Although we still lack data on actual service use, this study builds upon the earlier work by including 1) evidence regarding the effectiveness of the Kid Connects mental health consultation model, 2) data on average use of services, and 3) by using the effectiveness data to estimate the proportion of the service costs that might be averted. In this way, we estimate the potential for Kid Connects to avert costs in the long run. We also put the cost of Kid Connects in context by asking just how effective it has to be in redirecting children and families away from other systems involvement in order to earn back the up-front cost of program delivery. In other words, we ask how effective Kid Connects has to be to pay off financially. (author abstract)