Apollo pricing in 2026: what a seat really costs

The three numbers that decide your Apollo bill

Apollo is priced like most sales software: per person, per month, with a pool of credits. Three things set what you pay.

1. The seat price. As of October 2026, on annual billing: Basic $49, Professional $79, Organization $119. Monthly billing is higher (third-party guides report $59 to $65 for Basic).
2. The seat count. Every seat on an account must be on the same plan, and Organization needs at least three.
3. Credit use. Credits are pooled across the team, granted up front each billing cycle, and do not roll over. Basic includes 30,000 credits a year. A verified email costs one credit; phone numbers cost more.

Everything else on the pricing page (sequences, dialer, integrations, AI features) decides which plan you need, not what each lookup costs.

What does Apollo cost per year? Three worked cases

All figures use the annual prices above. They exclude tax and any credit top-ups.

The jump from case two to case three is the one to watch. If you are two people and want an Organization feature, you pay for a third seat whether or not anyone sits in it.

How do the credits behave?

Apollo is fairer on misses than its reputation suggests. Per Apollo's own documentation:

• No valid email, no charge. A contact without a valid email does not cost an email credit.
• Bounce refunds, with conditions. If an Apollo-verified email bounces when you send through Apollo within 30 days of requesting it, the credit comes back in the next billing cycle. Emails sent from another tool are not covered, and mobile numbers are never refunded.
• The waterfall bills per source that returns data. If you connect extra providers, each one that returns an email charges, verified or not. Apollo's help article says connected providers charge for each unverified email found before a verified one turns up. A validator, if connected, charges separately after each source.

That last point is the one that surprises people. Apollo's own database lookup is cheap and predictable. The optional waterfall is where cost per verified contact can climb, because you can pay two or three times on the way to one usable address.

The cost per usable contact, not per credit

Credits are a poor unit for comparing tools. The unit that matters is what you paid for each contact you could actually email.

Say you are a solo founder on Basic. Your year costs $588 and gives you 30,000 credits, far more email reveals than one person will use. Suppose you reveal 2,000 contacts over the year. Sticker cost per contact: $588 ÷ 2,000 = $0.29.

Now adjust for bounces. Third-party tests report Apollo bounce rates between 15% and 35% and accuracy around 88% in the US, lower internationally. Take 20% as a middle case. Of 2,000 contacts, 400 bounce. If you send through Apollo inside 30 days, those credits come back, but your sending domain has still taken 400 bounces. Your usable contacts are 1,600, so the real cost is $588 ÷ 1,600 = $0.37 each, before you count the deliverability damage. We explain why that damage matters more than the credits in cold email bounce rate.

The fix is not exotic: verify again before sending, and suppress anything that comes back catch-all or unknown. Our guide on how to verify email addresses walks through it.

Where Apollo is better value

For many teams Apollo is the right answer, and it is worth saying why.

• One tool does the job. A large database, sequences, a dialer and a waterfall in a single login. Most alternatives need two or three products to match it.
• Integrations. Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach and Salesloft. If you run Salesforce, that alone may decide it.
• Generous credits on paper. 30,000 a year on Basic is a lot of email reveals for one person.
• Bounce refunds. Not universal in this market, even with the 30-day and send-through-Apollo limits.

If you want to search a big database by job title, sequence the results and call them from one place, Apollo is hard to beat at $49 to $79 a seat.

Where it costs more than it looks

• Seats multiply. A five-person team on Professional is $4,740 a year before top-ups.
• No rollover. A quiet quarter is credits lost.
• Data quality varies by region. Reported international accuracy (60% to 73% in third-party tests) is well below the US figure.
• Billing disputes. Apollo's Trustpilot score sits at 2.9, mostly over billing and account suspensions (third-party). Read the cancellation terms before committing to annual.

When something else fits better

Apollo is built around searching a database by job title. If your best leads are people who just said something (complained about a competitor in a review, asked for a recommendation on Reddit), that is not a database query.

Sluice starts from those traces instead and has no seats: Working is $39 a month for the whole team, directory reveals cost 5 cents each and only for people who score 70 or more, a miss is not billed, and a bounce is refunded exactly what it cost. It has no dialer, only integrates with HubSpot, and is too new to have public reviews. See Sluice vs Apollo for the full comparison, or Apollo alternatives for other options.

The decision

If you need a database, sequencer and dialer in one, and especially if you run Salesforce, buy Apollo on annual billing and verify before you send. If you are a team of more than three and seat cost is what hurts, price the alternatives with no seat charges before you renew.