Apollo.io’s pricing looks simple on its plan page and gets complicated the moment you try to work out how many contacts a plan actually buys. The reason is credits: since Apollo moved to a unified credit system during 2025 and 2026, every email reveal, phone reveal, export and enrichment draws from one yearly pool, and the pool size differs by plan (HeroHunt). This guide lays out the plans, the credit math, the free plan’s real limits, how the API is priced, and a worked cost per 1,000 usable contacts.
The four plans and their credits
| Plan | Unified credits a year | Emails max | Phones max | Month-to-month price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 900 | 900 | 112 | $0 |
| Basic | 30,000 | 30,000 | 3,750 | $59 or $65 (unconfirmed; sources disagree) |
| Professional | 48,000 | 48,000 | 6,000 | See Apollo’s plan page |
| Organization | 72,000 | 72,000 | 9,000 | See Apollo’s plan page |
Credit allowances come from Apollo’s own plan comparison. The Basic price is listed as both $59 and $65 in different places as of October 2026 and is unconfirmed here; Professional and Organization prices change with annual versus monthly billing and seat counts, so Apollo’s plan page is the authority. Emails and phones share the pool, so the maximums are either-or: a Basic user who reveals 2,000 phones has spent 16,000 credits and has 14,000 left for emails.
How the credit system works
One unified credit is the unit for everything that touches contact data. Revealing an email in the search grid, exporting a row with an email, or enriching an uploaded contact’s email each costs 1 credit. A phone number costs 8. Credits are allocated for the year and, depending on your plan’s terms, may be delivered monthly or up front; the per-seat allocation on team plans is pooled at the workspace level. What Apollo’s readable help articles do not say is whether exporting a row whose email was already revealed charges a second credit; that detail is unconfirmed, and a 25-row test export with a before-and-after credit check is the only way to know what your account does. The display and selection caps that sit alongside credits are in Apollo export limits.
The free plan: what 900 credits a year buys
Apollo’s free plan is a standing plan, not a 14- or 30-day trial, and its unified allowance is 900 credits a year, about 75 a month. That is 900 email reveals a year if you never touch a phone number, or 112 phone numbers if you never reveal an email. The free plan also keeps the same 100-page display cap as paid plans, so you can see 2,500 results of any search but reveal only 75 of them a month. The free tier was larger under the legacy credit system, which is why older articles describe generous free email allowances; those figures are legacy (HeroHunt). Apollo also ships a free Chrome extension that shows contact data on LinkedIn and company websites; reveals through the extension draw from the same 900 credits.
API pricing and the free tier question
Apollo publishes its API documentation openly, which leads people to search for “apollo api free”. Reading the docs is free; calling endpoints that return contact data is not, because those calls consume the same unified credits as the app, and the people-search endpoint returns at most 50,000 records per search (Apollo API docs). Which plans include API access, and at what rate limits, is set by Apollo per plan and has changed more than once, so confirm it on the plan page before building on it. In practice the API’s cost per contact is the plan’s cost per credit, and the 50,000-record cap means large searches must be split by filter the same way as in the app.
Worked example: cost per 1,000 usable contacts
Plan prices are only meaningful once you divide them by contacts you can actually email. Take Basic at the reported $59 to $65 a month, which is $708 to $780 a year for 30,000 credits.
| Step | Calculation | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per credit | $708 to $780 / 30,000 | $0.024 to $0.026 |
| Cost per 1,000 emails revealed | 1,000 credits | $23.60 to $26.00 |
| Apply measured validity | 73.2% valid in a 2026 study of 100,000 Apollo exports (BounceZero) | 732 usable per 1,000 |
| Cost per 1,000 usable emails | $23.60 to $26.00 / 0.732 | About $32 to $36 |
| Cost per 1,000 phone numbers | 8,000 credits | $189 to $208 |
The arithmetic assumes you use every credit, which heavy users do and light users do not; a Basic seat that reveals 10,000 emails a year costs three times as much per contact. Paste-URL export services price the same rows at $2.20 to $4.50 per 1,000 because they collect what the search already displays rather than paying Apollo’s reveal price; the trade-off is that they operate outside Apollo’s terms, as explained in is scraping Apollo legal. The Apollo Exporter paste-URL export bills per exported row at the per-1,000 price on /pricing, verifies emails before download, and includes 500 free credits on sign-up.
Professional and Organization: what the upgrade buys
Beyond credits, the paid tiers add sequencing volume, dialer minutes, more users, intent data and integrations; the credit pool rises from 30,000 to 48,000 to 72,000. For list-building alone, the credit pool is the only line that changes the cost per contact, and the jump from Basic to Professional raises credits by 60%. Whether that is worth it depends on the per-seat price Apollo quotes you, which is why the plan page, not this guide, should be your source for the final number.
Is Apollo worth it compared with alternatives?
For most small teams, Apollo’s free search plus a paid plan for reveals is still the cheapest way to prospect inside one interface. The cost per 1,000 usable contacts is where alternatives compete; our comparison of Apollo alternatives uses the same arithmetic across vendors. Before trusting any plan’s numbers, read Apollo database accuracy, because the validity rate is the variable that moves the final price most.