Twelve free lead tools, and how many contacts each actually gives you

You need two hundred names with work emails by Friday, and you are not going to buy a subscription for one list.

So you search for free tools, and every page that comes back lists them. What none of those pages tells you is the only thing that decides whether this works: how many usable rows come out before the free tier stops, and what stops it.

Here is that number for twelve tools, taken from each vendor's own pricing or help page on 6 September 2026.

What each free tier actually gives you

Nine tools with a real free tier, and the largest of them tops out at 75 emails a month.

The wall is usually just the credit count

For Apollo, Hunter, Lusha, Kaspr and Seamless, nothing clever is happening. You get between 25 and 75 credits a month, one credit buys one email, and 200 is more than 75. You run out on day three and the interesting limits never come into play.

Apollo is the most generous of the nine and also the one most often described as unlimited, so it is worth being precise about what its own pricing page says. The free plan grants 900 credits per seat per year, granted monthly. An email costs one credit and a phone number costs eight. Spend the whole month's allowance on emails and nothing else and you have 75 rows. The free plan also caps you at one mailbox per user, 250 email sends a day, and a Gmail account as the only sender you can connect. We went through how Apollo's meter works in more detail in Apollo credits, explained.

Apollo's free plan also carries a limit called the Record Selection Limit, set to 25. That one is less binding than it looks. Apollo's own explanation describes it as a cap on how many records you can select at a time, and gives the example that saving 10,000 leads would mean clicking a 25-lead button 2,000 times. It is friction rather than a ceiling. The 75 credits are the ceiling.

Three tiers where the wall is somewhere else

Snov.io and Skrapp.io cannot export. Snov.io's own pricing page lists what the free tier does not include: "Premium features like integrations, bulk search, bulk verification, teamwork, email A/B testing, API & webhooks access and export are not available in Trial." The data-export row in its comparison grid has no value in the free column at all. Skrapp.io's table does the same thing, showing a dash against List Exports for the free plan. On both tools, a contact you find on the free tier cannot leave the platform as a list, no matter how many credits you have left. Snov.io adds a second wall on top: free accounts see only the first 20 prospects of any database search.

Snov.io is also the tool most often listed under headings about free plans that never expire, and its credits do genuinely renew every 30 days, forever. How many rows a month, and can they leave, are two separate questions and only the pair of them is useful.

RocketReach's free plan is not monthly. Its pricing page says free accounts get five free lookups with no credit card, which reads like an allowance. Its own help centre says otherwise, in a sentence worth reading twice: "A free RocketReach account includes three sets of Lookup Credits in total. Free credits are not issued every month, and they do not continue indefinitely." The second and third sets arrive only when you come back after exhausting the previous one, and after the third, nothing. RocketReach does not publish how many credits are in sets two and three.

Clay cannot be scored, and it is the one tool here where that is not evasion. Its free plan gives 100 data credits and 500 actions a month with a 200-row ceiling per table, and unlimited tables, so the row cap is softer than it sounds. What Clay does not publish is a flat rate for enriching one email. Data credits are spent across 150 or so data partners at rates that vary by provider, starting around five cents each. Without a rate, there is no arithmetic. We went through Clay's two separate meters in Clay for lead generation, and the multi-provider waterfall its free plan includes in waterfall enrichment.

What the free tiers do not tell you

Six of the twelve state plainly that no credit card is needed to start: Clay, Lusha, Skrapp.io, Kaspr, RocketReach and HubSpot. Apollo, Hunter, Snov.io, Seamless.AI and UpLead say nothing about it on their pricing pages, which is not the same as saying no. Cognism has no free tier for the question to apply to.

Two vendors contradict themselves about whether unused credits carry over. Lusha's general FAQ says monthly-plan credits roll over up to twice the plan's limit, while its own plan comparison table marks rollover as unavailable on the Free and Starter plans and available only from Pro upward. Apollo's pricing page treats credits as one pool, while its help centre says email and mobile data draw on separate credit balances. Apollo's page also returned two different answers to the same trial-credits question within one browsing session on 6 September 2026.

None of that is fatal to any of these products. It does mean the free-tier numbers on a vendor's page are a starting point for checking rather than a specification, and it is why every figure in the table above carries the date it was read.

When a free tier is the right purchase

Once. A one-off need for a few dozen contacts is exactly what these tiers are built to serve. If your list is 40 people and you are sending by hand, stop reading and go use Apollo's 75 credits.

Stacking works, with one thing to plan for. None of these vendors publishes what its database overlaps with, so assume the well-known companies appear in several of them and that you will otherwise spend credits twice on the same person. Give each tool a different slice of the list rather than running the same slice through all of them, and deduplicate on domain before you start rather than after.

The arithmetic turns at repetition. Two hundred contacts a month, every month, is 2,400 a year, and there is no combination of these nine free tiers that supplies it. At that point you are choosing between a paid plan and a slower list, and the honest comparison is cost per usable row rather than cost per month. That is the comparison we ran for the tools built for smaller teams in ZoomInfo alternatives for a company under fifty people.

Tamozo sells into that second case and has no free tier, which is the relevant disclosure for an article like this one. Everything above is what the vendors publish about themselves, checked on the same day, rather than a ranking with us at the top of it.

Every figure in this article was read on 6 September 2026 from the vendor's own pricing page or help centre: Apollo.io, Clay, Hunter.io, Lusha, Snov.io, Skrapp.io, Kaspr, Seamless.AI, UpLead, RocketReach, Cognism and HubSpot. Six of those pricing tables are rendered in the browser rather than in the page source and were read in a browser for that reason. Where a vendor does not state something, this article says the vendor does not state it.