What Apollo's credits actually buy, and how other vendors price the same two actions

You have two pricing pages open. One gives you 30,000 credits a year, the other gives you 4,800. The first looks six times better, and you have no way to check that from anything on either page.

On Apollo a phone number costs eight credits and an email costs one. On Lusha the same pair is five to one. On lemlist it is four to one. On UpLead and RocketReach a single unlock buys both at no surcharge at all. Every vendor sets that ratio privately and prints only the allowance, so the allowance tells you nothing about the size of the plan until you know which action you will spend it on. Two of the largest providers in this market publish no ratio, no price and no allowance anywhere on their own sites. The way to compare two plans is to convert both to a price per contact in the shape you actually need, which takes about two minutes once you have the ratio, and the ratio is printed on a different page from the price at every vendor here. All figures were read at source on 28 August 2026, except Clay's, which are carried from a check made the day before and not re-fetched.

What Apollo charges for each action

Apollo publishes the full table, which already puts it ahead of most of this field. From its own credits page: "Email = 1 credit... Apollo never charges more than 1 credit per contact" and "Phone number = 8 credits... This includes mobile, direct, office extensions, and more, each verified number costs the same."

The rest of the meter, from Apollo's pricing page:

Connected calls are billed in 30-second increments with a 30-second minimum, and a call that rings out, hits a busy signal, fails or gets cancelled costs nothing.

Plan allowances on annual billing, per seat per year: Free 900, Basic 30,000 at $49 a seat a month, Professional 48,000 at $79, and Organization 72,000 at $119 with a three-seat minimum.

Read the eight-to-one ratio against those allowances and the picture changes. Professional's 48,000 credits is 48,000 emails or 6,000 phone numbers, and if your process needs a mobile for every contact then the plan you are buying is one eighth the size the headline number suggests.

The ratio nobody standardises

Here is the same two actions across every vendor that publishes enough to compute it.

Eight, five, four, one. If there were a real cost basis under these numbers you would expect them to cluster, since every one of these vendors is buying or verifying mobile numbers from a similar supply. They do not cluster.

Two of them make the ratio disappear rather than answer it. UpLead's own glossary states it outright: "A credit unlocks a contact for download or CRM export and gives you access to their email and mobile direct dial. One credit equals one contact." RocketReach does the same thing through its lookup counts, where the Pro tier at $69 a month gives 250 lookups covering email and phone, the same 250 it would give if it sold email alone. Hunter sits outside the question entirely, because it has no phone product: one credit finds an email, half a credit verifies one, and a failed find or a failed verification costs nothing.

lemlist is the structural odd one out and worth understanding, because it is the only vendor here that decouples data from the subscription. Its plans meter sending, and data lookups run on a separate rechargeable balance at a published flat rate that does not vary by plan tier. In lemlist's own words, credits "are only charged when an action is successful. If you run out, you can top up anytime directly from your account, no plan upgrade needed."

Clay does not belong in this table and it is worth saying why. Clay does not own a database; it buys per row from what it calls 150 or more data partners, Apollo among them, so a Clay data credit is a blended marketplace price rather than one vendor's view of what a mobile number is worth. The two products are compared properly in Apollo vs Clay for outbound you send yourself.

What resets, what rolls over, and the annual-billing detail

Apollo's rule is the strictest in this group and it is stated plainly: "Your credits expire at the end of each billing cycle. Credits do not roll over into the following billing cycle or upon renewal."

The detail under that sentence is the one every third-party guide gets wrong. Apollo also states that "for plans billed annually, all credits are unlocked at the beginning of the annual billing cycle." So for an annual customer the billing cycle is the year. The full allowance lands on day one and expires twelve months later, which means the familiar advice that Apollo credits reset every month is accurate only if you pay monthly. If you paid for the year, nothing resets and nothing is protecting you from spending nine months of allowance in March.

Lusha's own comparison table is harder to read. The row labelled "Rolling over monthly credits" is blank for Free and Starter, reads "x2 monthly cap" for Pro and Premium, and reads "Not applicable" for Scale. Pro and Premium are sold as annual credit grants rather than monthly allotments, so a monthly cap on rollover sits oddly against them, and Lusha's page does not reconcile the two. It is worth knowing before you buy, and worth asking their sales team about rather than assuming either reading.

UpLead, RocketReach and Hunter state nothing about rollover on their pricing or FAQ pages. Absence of a statement is not a policy in either direction.

The two vendors that publish nothing

Cognism lists two tiers, Standard and Pro, and both say "Talk to sales." There is no seat price, no plan allowance and no dollar figure anywhere on the page. The single mechanic it does state is "1 credit = 1 revealed contact," with no charge for viewing a contact you have already revealed. Whether revealing a mobile number costs the same one credit as revealing an email is never said. Mobile-specific features are gated to the Pro tier, which could mean mobile costs more or could mean mobile access is simply gated, and the page does not settle it.

ZoomInfo publishes less than that. Two attempts to reach its pricing pages on 28 August 2026 returned a bot-detection challenge rather than a page. That challenge was not worked around, so the honest statement is that no self-serve pricing, plan allowance or credit ratio could be found on ZoomInfo's own domain. Every dollar figure circulating for ZoomInfo comes from a third party, and the third parties publishing those figures are usually enrichment vendors selling against it.

That leaves a reader in a specific position with those two. You cannot compare them to anything until after a sales call, and after the sales call you will have a quote for your company rather than a price list, which is not the same information.

Where the pricing pages contradict themselves

Two live contradictions turned up in a single afternoon of reading, both on the vendor's own page, both still live at the time of writing.

Apollo's pricing page states in one panel that enriching data costs "1-8 credits." Three sections down, the FAQ on the same page states that "data enrichment uses up to 9 credits per record." Both sentences are Apollo's, on the same URL, on the same day. If you are budgeting an enrichment run of any size, the difference between eight and nine per record compounds quickly, and the page does not tell you which applies to you.

Something else on that page is worth knowing separately, and it is not an explanation for the discrepancy above. Apollo discloses that it is running two credit systems at once: "All new customers are automatically on our new credit system. We're gradually rolling out the new credit system to existing customers." So the rate that applies to your account may depend on when you signed up, and the page does not say what differs between the two.

The second is Lusha's rollover row above. Neither of these is a scandal. They are what a pricing page looks like when the pricing is complicated enough that the company has stopped being able to state it in one place, and that is exactly the condition that makes a headline credit number untrustworthy as a comparison tool.

This is the same problem one page over from the accuracy percentages, which turn out to measure different things at every vendor that publishes one. That is covered in how B2B data vendors define accurate.

Tamozo's own credit shape, on the same terms

An article about reading pricing pages should show its author's. Here is ours, read the same day as everyone else's.

Basic is $19 a month for 3 agents and 500 leads. Growth is $99 for 25 agents and 5,000 leads. Scale is $199 for 60 agents and 12,000 leads. A LinkedIn URL is included on every lead at every tier, and a lead we cannot match to an email is never billed.

Verified email addresses are sold separately: 1,500 for $99, or 5,000 for $249. They do not expire and they do not reset at month end. We do not call them credits, and the reason is the whole argument of this article. A credit is a currency whose exchange rate the vendor sets privately and changes without telling you. A pack of 1,500 addresses that sits there until you spend it is a quantity of a thing you can count.

Whether that is better for you depends on your mix, which is the point.

How to price a plan against your own mix

The arithmetic is short and nobody does it, because the pricing pages are built so that you compare the headline allowance instead.

Work out what one contact actually costs you in the shape you need. If you need an email only, Apollo Professional at $79 a month for 48,000 credits a year is 4,000 emails a month at roughly two cents each. If you need a mobile for every contact, the same plan is 500 contacts a month at about sixteen cents each. Same plan, same money, an eight times difference in what you get, decided entirely by a ratio printed on a different page from the price.

Then check three things the allowance does not tell you. Whether the credits expire, and against what cycle. Whether a failed lookup costs you anything, since Hunter and RocketReach refund a miss and Apollo refunds a bounce within 30 days. And whether the price you are comparing is a price at all, or a starting point for a call. If the answer to all three pushes you toward building the stack yourself instead, the published cost of doing that is understated against the same vendors' current price lists.

If you are picking between the self-serve tools in this group specifically, Apollo alternatives for people who send by hand covers the rest of the comparison.