Most Apollo.io alternative listicles rank vendors by feature count. This one asks a narrower question: what does 1,000 contacts you can actually email cost, once you account for the credits a plan includes, how those credits are spent, and how many of the resulting emails are valid? The method is shown first with Apollo’s own published numbers, then applied to ZoomInfo, Cognism, Lusha, Seamless.ai, Snov.io, Kaspr, Clay and LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
The cost-per-1,000-usable-contacts method
The formula is: annual plan price, divided by credits included per year, times credits consumed per email, times 1,000, divided by the share of emails that verify as valid. Apollo’s own published figures make a worked example. Under Apollo’s unified credit system, the Basic plan includes 30,000 credits a year, an email costs 1 credit and a phone number costs 8, as stated on Apollo’s own pages. Apollo’s month-to-month Basic price is reported as both $59 and $65, so both are shown. At $59 a month, $708 a year divided by 30 gives $23.60 per 1,000 credits, which at one credit per email is $23.60 per 1,000 emails. A verification vendor’s study of 100,000 Apollo contacts exported in the first half of 2026 found 73.2% valid, so $23.60 divided by 0.732 is $32.24 per 1,000 usable contacts. At $65 a month the same steps give $26.00 and $35.52. That assumes every credit buys an email and every reveal returns one; real cost runs higher, which is why the inputs are shown. The pricing and credits guide has the full plan table.
The alternatives at a glance
| Alternative | What it is | Pricing model | Emails included? | Best for | Inputs you need for the formula |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ZoomInfo | Enterprise B2B database and intent data | Quote-based, annual contract | Yes | Large sales orgs with budget approval | Contract price, included credits or seats, your own validity sample |
| Cognism | B2B database with phone-verified mobiles, strong in Europe | Quote-based | Yes | Teams that call as much as they email, EU compliance needs | Contract price, included records, validity sample |
| Lusha | Extension-first contact finder with a web app | Free tier plus published per-seat credit plans | Yes | Individual reps revealing contacts one at a time | Plan price, monthly credits, credits per email |
| Seamless.ai | AI-assisted real-time contact search | Free tier; paid plans quoted by sales | Yes | Teams wanting unlimited-style search, willing to verify | Contract price, credit allowance, validity sample |
| Snov.io | Email finder, verifier and outreach in one | Published credit-based tiers from a free plan | Yes | Small teams wanting finding plus sending in one tool | Plan price, credits, credits per found and verified email |
| Kaspr | LinkedIn-first extension, owned by Cognism | Free tier plus published per-seat credit plans | Yes | Prospecting from LinkedIn profiles | Plan price, credits, credits per reveal |
| Clay | Waterfall enrichment across many data providers | Published credit tiers from a free plan; credits consumed per provider call | Yes, via providers | Workflow builders who want several sources per row | Plan price, credits, average credits burned per enriched row |
| LinkedIn Sales Navigator | LinkedIn’s own advanced search | Per-seat subscription, published on LinkedIn’s pricing page | No | LinkedIn-first selling, account mapping | Seat price plus the cost of a separate enricher |
ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo is the enterprise incumbent: a large B2B contact and company database with org charts, technographics and intent signals, sold on annual contracts priced by quote. It does not publish prices, so the per-1,000 calculation has to start from the quote you receive and the credit or seat allowance written into it. Best for sales organizations with a procurement process, a need for US coverage at depth, and the budget to pay for intent data alongside contacts. Watch-outs: contract terms are the usual complaint on review sites, so read the renewal and seat-change clauses before signing, and ask for the validity rate in writing or run your own 500-row verification sample on a trial export. For a two-person outbound team the fixed cost usually makes the per-1,000 figure far higher than Apollo’s, regardless of data quality.
Cognism
Cognism is a B2B contact database with a European center of gravity, known for phone-verified mobile numbers and a compliance posture built around GDPR. Pricing is quote-based and not published, so, as with ZoomInfo, the formula starts from your contract. Best for teams whose outbound mix includes calling, for whom a verified mobile is worth more than an email, and for companies selling into the EU and UK where consent and notification rules shape what data you can hold. Watch-outs: if your targets are mostly US and you only email, you may be paying for phone verification you will not use, and the contract minimum can be high for small teams. Ask for the share of records with a verified mobile and a verified email separately; the two rates differ and both affect the per-1,000 figure.
Lusha
Lusha is a contact finder used mostly through its browser extension on LinkedIn and company sites, with a web app for list building. It publishes its plans, starting from a free tier with a small monthly credit allowance and rising through per-seat paid tiers, with credits consumed per revealed contact. That makes the per-1,000 formula easy to compute: plan price divided by monthly credits, scaled to 1,000, divided by your measured validity. Best for individual reps or small teams who reveal contacts one at a time while prospecting rather than exporting lists in bulk. Watch-outs: the credit allowance on lower tiers is sized for reveals, not for list building, so a 10,000-contact list can exhaust a year of credits quickly, and bulk export is a higher-tier feature. Verify a sample before committing an annual plan.
Seamless.ai
Seamless.ai positions itself as a real-time search engine for contacts rather than a static database, with an AI-assisted search and a free tier for testing. Paid plans are quoted by sales rather than published, so the per-1,000 figure starts from your contract and its credit allowance. Best for teams that want to run broad searches and are prepared to verify the output before sending. Watch-outs: because results are assembled at search time, the validity rate is the number to pin down; run a verification pass on a few hundred rows from the free tier before buying, and check the cancellation and auto-renewal terms on the vendor’s own site before signing an annual agreement, as you should with any contract-based data vendor.
Snov.io
Snov.io bundles an email finder, an email verifier and outreach sequences in one product, with credit-based tiers published on its pricing page from a free plan upward. Credits are consumed per found email and separately per verification, so the formula needs both rates; the upside is that the validity step is built in rather than bought elsewhere. Best for small teams and founders who want to find, verify and send from one tool without building a stack. Watch-outs: Snov.io is an email-first product, so phone coverage is thinner than the database vendors, and its database is smaller than Apollo’s for some segments, which means more searches that return no email. Test your target segment with free credits before upgrading.
Kaspr
Kaspr is a LinkedIn-first prospecting extension owned by Cognism, with a free tier and published per-seat credit plans. It reveals emails and phone numbers from LinkedIn profiles and syncs them to a CRM, which makes it a direct alternative for anyone who uses Apollo mainly through its LinkedIn extension. The per-1,000 formula is plan price over credits, times credits per reveal, over validity. Best for reps who prospect profile by profile and want European phone coverage from Cognism’s data. Watch-outs: it is not a list-building tool, so bulk exports of thousands of rows are not what it is for, and credits are per reveal rather than per export, so a reveal that returns no email may still cost you depending on the plan rules.
Clay
Clay is not a database. It is a spreadsheet-style workflow tool that runs waterfall enrichment: for each row it calls a sequence of data providers until one returns an email or phone, and charges credits per provider call. Pricing is published in credit tiers from a free plan, but the per-row cost depends on how many providers fire before a hit, so the formula needs your average credits burned per enriched row, which you only learn by running a sample. Best for teams that already have a list source, including an Apollo export, and want the highest possible hit rate by combining sources. Watch-outs: costs are harder to forecast than a flat credit plan, the learning curve is real, and Clay still needs a source of names, which is why many users feed it an exported Apollo search.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Sales Navigator is LinkedIn’s own advanced search, sold per seat with the Core tier published on LinkedIn’s pricing page at roughly $100 per seat per month at the time of writing; check the page for the current figure. It is the most accurate source for who works where right now, because people update their own profiles. It supplies no email addresses or phone numbers, so for list building it is half a stack: the per-1,000 formula must add the cost of an enrichment tool such as Lusha, Kaspr, Clay or a finder like Snov.io on top of the seat. Best for account mapping, LinkedIn-first selling and teams that already pay for it. Watch-outs: LinkedIn restricts automated export from Sales Navigator in its own terms, search results are capped per query, and the combined seat-plus-enrichment cost per 1,000 usually lands above Apollo’s.
Or keep Apollo and export smarter
Run the formula on your own numbers before switching, because the most common complaint behind “apollo alternative” searches is not coverage but friction: credits spent on reveals you never use, the 100-page display cap, and the per-record cost of native CSV export. If Apollo’s database already covers your market, the cheaper fix is to keep the subscription and change how you get data out. Apollo Exporter takes an Apollo people- or company-search URL and runs the export through your own logged-in Apollo session via a bridge extension, with no shared accounts and no credentials handed over. Rows come page by page from the same search you see, every email is verified before download, and the file is a CSV or XLSX with the 25 standard Apollo people fields. Billing is per exported row, with per-1,000 prices on the pricing page and 500 free credits on sign-up. The Apollo scraper product page shows the flow, the export limits guide explains the caps, and the data accuracy guide covers what to expect from Apollo’s emails before you compare any vendor’s per-1,000 figure.