B2B Contact Database Pricing: Apollo, Clay, ZoomInfo

Here's the trap. You put Apollo, Clay and ZoomInfo in three columns, find $49, $167 and a Contact Sales button, and conclude that Apollo is cheapest. Then you build one list and the bill has no relationship to any of those numbers.

No two of them meter the same thing. Apollo sells a seat and pours a credit allowance into it. Clay sells two separate meters, one for its own orchestration and one for the data it buys on your behalf. ZoomInfo sells a contract year priced on functionality, users and records under management, and will not tell you what any of those cost.

It is the difference between a supermarket, a buying agent and a wholesale account. Asking which is cheapest per item is a question none of the three has agreed to answer.

So stop comparing prices and fix the job instead.

One identical workload, 10,000 contacts with a work email and a mobile number: $1,764 a year on Apollo, $5,616 on Clay with $3,384 of it metered to the job, and no computable figure at all on ZoomInfo. Everything below is that arithmetic, shown.

What follows: the answer in one table, Apollo's per-field credit costs in its own words, Clay's per-provider costs read off eight of its own integration docs, what ZoomInfo's SEC filings say about contract size when its pricing page says nothing, a forty-minute audit you can run this week, and the one configuration where the expensive-looking option is the cheapest.

So what does the same job cost on each one?

Three columns, one job: 10,000 contacts, each with a work email and a mobile number, plus an intent signal on the account. All figures are annual-billing list prices read on 25 August 2026, and all of them are computed from published rates rather than taken from an invoice.

Apollo wins on paper by roughly a factor of two, and the number is real, but it carries a shape you may not want: you cannot buy 90,000 Apollo credits. You buy three seats for twelve months and the credits arrive with them. Clay costs more per record and buys from 150-plus providers Apollo does not have. ZoomInfo cannot be placed on the scale at all, and that last row is the product, not our laziness.

What is each one actually selling you?

A credit is a vendor-issued token you spend to reveal a piece of data. It is not a unit, because every vendor decides for itself how many of them a phone number costs, and the answer ranges from one to ten across the contact-data category. That is the single most important sentence on this page, and this site has written it before at more length.

Apollo is a database with sequencing, a dialer and AI assistants on one bill. Its meter is a single unified credit, and the allowance is attached to the seat. Buy more capacity and you have bought more people. [vendor]

Clay owns no contact data. It is an orchestration surface that buys from other people's APIs on your behalf, which is why it runs two meters: Actions for the work Clay does, Data Credits for the data Clay buys. Clay's own documentation puts it plainly: "Clay is doing work, and Clay is buying data on your behalf." [vendor]

ZoomInfo sells an annual platform contract. Its FY2025 10-K states the unit in a sentence its marketing site never uses: "We price our subscriptions based on the functionality, users, and records under management that are included in each product edition." [filing] Records under management is a third meter again, and it is the one nobody outside a ZoomInfo deal room ever sees a rate card for.

Three meters, three currencies, one job. Everything below is the exchange rate.

Apollo: the meter is bolted to the seat

Apollo's pricing page loads on the annual toggle by default, badged SAVE 29%, and the annual view is the one most buyers screenshot. Read on 25 August 2026 in a rendered browser rather than from raw HTML, because Apollo's page ships React payload markers that a naive search reads as dollar figures.

The three paid tiers land within 0.12 of a cent of each other per credit, which tells you something useful: on annual billing Apollo has essentially one price for data, about 1.96 cents a credit, and the tier names are buying features, not a better rate. Move to monthly billing and every credit costs between $0.0248 and $0.0276, a 25 to 41 percent premium for the right to leave. [computed]

The number Apollo publishes that nobody quotes

Buried in the Unlimited plan fair-use clause is Apollo's own internal valuation of a credit: the cap is "the lesser of (i) the dollar amount paid by the customer for the term of their subscription, divided by $0.025 or (ii) 1 million email credits per account per year." [vendor] Apollo values a credit at two and a half cents when it is protecting itself, and sells one for 1.96 cents on annual billing. The gap is the annual discount, expressed from the vendor's side.

What does Apollo charge per field, in its own words?

Apollo's pricing-page FAQ publishes the consumption table, which is more than most of this category does. Quoted verbatim, read 2026-08-25:

• "Accessing a contact's emails uses 1 credit."
• "Accessing a contact's phone number uses 8 credits."
• "Data enrichment uses up to 9 credits per record."
• "1 Power-up run uses 1 credit."
• US Dialer: "2 credits per minute". AI Research: "1 credit per run".

So a phone number costs eight times what an email costs on Apollo. Our workload wants both, which is 9 credits a contact, 90,000 for the list. Intent is not metered: Basic ships with six intent topics and intent filters as a feature, and the free tier ships with one. [vendor] The intent signal in our workload therefore costs nothing extra on Apollo, and that is a genuine advantage worth naming.

Now the packaging. Basic grants 30,000 credits per seat per year, so 90,000 credits is exactly three Basic seats: 3 x $49 x 12 = $1,764, or 17.64 cents a contact. [computed] Professional would take two seats at $1,896 for 96,000 credits, which is more money for more credits you did not ask for. The cheapest published Apollo route to this job is the lower tier, bought three times.

Read that last paragraph again, because it is the whole shape of Apollo. The job needs 90,000 credits and one operator. Apollo will sell you 90,000 credits only if you also buy three seats and a twelve-month term. That is not an overage trap, it is the pricing model working as designed, and it is why seat minimums are a pricing mechanism rather than a licensing detail.

Clay: two meters, and only one of them buys data

Clay's pricing page also opens on annual, badged "Annual, Save 10%", and the headline card price is a sum of two independent pickers rather than a tier price. Launch reads $167 a month. That is 180,000 Actions a year at $54 a month plus 30,000 Data Credits a year at $113 a month. Growth reads $446, which is 480,000 Actions at $185 plus 72,000 Data Credits at $261. [vendor, read 2026-08-25]

Flip to monthly and the same two plans read $185 and $495. Clay's own FAQ, further down the same page, describes Launch as "(starting at $185/mo)" and Growth as "(starting at $495/mo)", without saying that those are the monthly-billed figures while the cards above show the annual ones. Two different numbers for the same plan, on one page, neither labelled with its billing period. This site keeps a running file of that specific failure.

The credit ladder, which is where the real rate lives

The whole volume discount on Clay data is about 15 percent inside each billing period, and it takes a twentyfold increase in commitment to get it: 5.00 cents down to 4.25 cents on monthly, 4.52 cents down to 3.826 cents on annual. [computed] Clay's own FAQ says "Data Credits start at $0.05 each and become more cost-effective as you grow", which is accurate and understates how flat the curve is. An Action, by contrast, costs between a quarter and four tenths of a cent, and Clay describes them as "a few tenths of a penny" each. [vendor]

What does each data provider cost inside Clay?

This is the part no ranking page has, because it is buried one integration document at a time rather than published as a rate card. Every figure below was read from Clay's own University docs on 25 August 2026, and applies to the Clay-managed account rather than your own API key.

A mobile number costs between two and nine Clay credits depending on who answers, which is a 4.5x spread inside one product for one field. An email costs one or two. The same asymmetry Apollo expresses as 1-versus-8 shows up here as 1-or-2 versus 2-to-9, because it is a fact about the data rather than about either vendor: mobile numbers are the expensive thing, everywhere, and any pricing page that quotes a per-contact figure without saying whether a mobile is in it is quoting the cheap half.

Clay's own guidance is that "each fully enriched record typically costs 6-20 Data Credits". [vendor] Our workload of an email plus a mobile sits at the bottom of that band, around 8 credits on a sensible waterfall, and the band's top end is what happens when you add social, company and AI research columns.

What is a waterfall, and why is it the pricing model?

A waterfall is a sequence of providers tried in order for the same field, stopping at the first one that returns a usable answer. It is cheap on a hard list and expensive on an easy one.

Clay's Work Email waterfall documentation states the billing rule directly: "You only pay credits for the provider that finds a match, making it one of the most credit-efficient ways to build email coverage at scale." [vendor] That is a vendor claim about its own billing, and every Clay cost estimate on the internet rests on it, including ours.

It also means the order of the ladder is a price decision. Put Icypeas at 1 credit first and Findymail at 2 second, and the average cost of an email lands nearer 1 than 2. Put Findymail's 9-credit mobile before LeadMagic's 6-credit mobile and you have raised your own bill without changing the output. Nobody's onboarding tells you this, and no other setting in the product moves your bill as far for as little work.

The free step most people never turn on

Clay ships an Infer Email step that guesses first.last@domain.com before calling any paid provider, costs zero credits, and is off unless you open Full configuration. Clay states that in its internal testing on a software dataset the default pattern "returned a valid email roughly 31% of the time." [vendor, vendor-reported, treat as a ceiling not a floor] If that held on your list, the email leg drops from 2 credits a record to about 1.38, saving 6,200 credits across 10,000 rows, or $310 at the five-cent entry rate. Whether it holds on a non-software list is the kind of thing nobody has measured, us included.

There is a second setting worth naming. Threshold for duplicate results defaults to 0, which disables it. Set it to 2 and the waterfall stops after the same invalid address comes back twice, "preventing credits from being spent running additional providers that are likely to return the same result." [vendor] A default of zero on a setting that only ever saves you money is a choice.

ZoomInfo publishes nothing. What do its filings publish?

ZoomInfo's pricing page directs to a sales conversation. There is no currency, no period, no number. By this site's standing rule, that means ZoomInfo has no price, and any ZoomInfo figure you find in a roundup came from somewhere other than ZoomInfo.

But ZoomInfo is public, ticker ZI, CIK 0001794515, and a 10-K is a rate card written for a different audience. From the FY2025 annual report filed 12 February 2026: [filing]

Now the arithmetic ZoomInfo did not intend you to do. If 1,921 customers hold more than half of total ACV, and total ACV is approximated by the $1,249.5m of FY2025 revenue, that cohort averages at least $325,221 a year each. The remaining 33,079-plus customers share the other half, averaging at most $18,887. [computed] A gap of at least 17.2x between the two halves of one customer base.

The approximation is doing work and you should see it: ACV is a point-in-time contracted figure, revenue is recognised ratably over the term, and ZoomInfo does not publish total ACV. Using revenue as the proxy is our substitution, not the company's, and it will be wrong by whatever the growth rate is. The 35,000 figure is also a floor, published as "over 35,000", which pushes the small-customer average down rather than up.

So which ZoomInfo contract are you actually being offered?

The derivation above puts a ceiling of about $18,887 on the average non-enterprise ZoomInfo contract, which is the most specific thing anyone can say about ZoomInfo pricing from a public source. It is an average and not a floor, and it is annual, and it is before any records-under-management sizing.

Sanity-check it the other way. If all 1,921 large customers paid exactly the $100,000 threshold, they would account for $192.1m, or 15.4 percent of revenue. To reach the disclosed "over 50% of total Company ACV" they must be paying, on average, more than three times the threshold that defines their cohort. [computed] The word "enterprise" in this market means a number with six digits in it.

Unearned revenue tells you about the cash shape. $477.8m held against $1,249.5m of annual revenue is 38.2 percent, which works out to roughly 4.6 months of billings collected before the service is delivered. [computed] Combined with the 53 percent multi-year share and the one-to-three-year term range, the picture is a business that takes the money up front on a term you cannot exit mid-flight. That is the mechanism behind the renewal complaints we have written up separately.

Net revenue retention is the number to watch and the number most often misread. It was 87 percent in the 10-K filed February 2025, 90 percent in the one filed February 2026, and 89 percent in the 10-Q filed 5 August 2026, which states 89 percent as of 30 June 2026 and 2025. Flat year on year, not a decline. It is dollar-based against a starting cohort, not a count of customers who stayed, and below 100 percent it means the installed base shrinks net of expansion.

The 10,000-contact bill, three ways

Everything above, applied. The job: 10,000 contacts, work email plus mobile number, plus an intent signal at the account level. Annual billing, list price, no negotiation, computed from rates read on 25 August 2026.

Apollo is 17.64 cents a contact and Clay is 33.84 cents, so Clay is 1.92x Apollo for the identical two fields. [computed] That is the headline, and it is also the least interesting row in the table, because the last row is the one that changes what you do.

Where does this arithmetic break?

Four places, named so you can argue with them rather than discover them in a budget meeting. This is the section a vendor's comparison page does not carry, and it is the reason the numbers above are worth anything.

The Action count is an assumption. We count one Action per enrichment column, so two per record, on the strength of Clay's statement that an enrichment costs "1 per enrichment" regardless of provider. Whether a multi-step waterfall bills one Action or one per provider step is not stated unambiguously anywhere we could find in Clay's docs. [not tested] If it turns out to be per step, Clay's Action cost on this job roughly triples, from $72 to about $216, which moves the per-contact figure by two tenths of a cent and changes nothing.

We have priced coverage as though all three return the same rows. They do not. Apollo's 9 credits buy Apollo's answer or nothing. Clay's 8 credits buy the first answer out of a queue of 150-plus providers. Say Clay returns a mobile for 55 percent of your list and Apollo for 35 percent: per useful row that is 61.5 cents against 50.4, and the gap narrows from 1.92x to 1.22x. [computed, on illustrative hit rates nobody publishes] Settling it needs a match-rate test on your own list, and this page has not run one.

Every figure here is list price. Apollo's checkout will sell three Basic seats at $1,764 without a conversation, so that one is real. Clay's is real up to the Growth tier and negotiable above it. ZoomInfo's does not exist until a salesperson produces one, and the derivation above is a distribution across 35,000 customers, not a quote to you.

The intent leg is unpriced on two of the three. Apollo bundles six intent topics into Basic as a feature, so our workload's intent signal costs nothing there. Clay meters Signals in Actions and publishes no Data Credit cost for one. [not tested] ZoomInfo includes intent by edition and prices the edition. One field, three vendors, one of them willing to say what it costs.

The one configuration where Clay is cheapest

Clay's docs contain a sentence that inverts its own pricing: "If you already subscribe to data providers (ZoomInfo, Apollo, Clearbit, etc.) or AI providers, connecting your API keys to Clay will eliminate the Data Credit cost. Note that an Action will still be consumed." [vendor]

So Clay has two prices for the same enrichment: 8 Data Credits plus 2 Actions if Clay buys the data, or 2 Actions and nothing else if you do. At the Launch annual Action rate of $0.0036, bring-your-own-key enrichment costs 0.72 cents a contact in Clay fees. [computed] The 180,000-Action annual tier at $54 a month covers 90,000 records of two-column enrichment for $648 a year.

Add your own provider's bill. Our normalised cost-per-contact arithmetic puts LeadMagic at $0.150 for a contact with a verified email and a mobile at its entry tier, the cheapest of the nine we could price. That lands the whole job at about 15.7 cents a contact, under Apollo, with Clay's orchestration on top, and with no seat minimum in either bill.

The catch is real: you now hold two vendor relationships, two overage regimes and two support queues, and the coverage is one provider's rather than a waterfall's. Clay's credit-priced waterfall exists because no single provider covers everything. You are trading coverage for rate, deliberately.

How do you check all this on your own account in forty minutes?

Nothing above requires you to trust us. All three offer a free tier or a trial, and the whole audit costs forty minutes and no money.

Step 1: the twenty-record credit burn, 15 minutes

Take twenty contacts you hold truth for, closed-won CRM records or twenty names on a company's team page. Note your credit balance, run email enrichment on all twenty, note it again, run mobile enrichment, note it a third time.

Pass condition: the delta divided by twenty matches the vendor's published per-field cost within one credit. On Apollo that is 1 for email and 8 for phone. On Clay it is whatever the provider that answered charges, which is why you should also turn on "Output name of successful provider" before you start. Fail condition: the delta exceeds the published rate at all, which means you are being charged for attempts rather than results, and you should get that in writing before you scale.

Step 2: the coverage-and-overlap check, 15 minutes

Same twenty records, both tools. Count three numbers separately, because vendors quote whichever flatters: rows returned out of twenty, emails that survive a verifier, and mobile numbers rather than any phone number, since switchboard numbers push the second figure to near 100 percent.

Pass condition: coverage above 60 percent on your ICP and a direct-dial rate in the 10 to 30 percent band, which is roughly where this market actually sits. Then compute the overlap between the two tools' outputs. Above 70 percent overlap you are paying twice for one dataset, and the cheaper meter wins on arithmetic alone.

Step 3: the packaging question, 10 minutes

Open each pricing page in a private window. Record the currency, the default state of the billing toggle, and the number at checkout. Then find the tier your actual motion needs, which for most people is the first tier with API access and CRM write-back, and check whether it is also the first tier without a published price.

Fail condition: if the checkout number differs from the pricing-page number, the pricing page is marketing. If you cannot compute a unit cost from published numbers alone, record "meter not published" as a finding rather than a gap in your research. On ZoomInfo you will reach that state in under a minute, which is the fastest result this audit produces.

What this audit cannot detect: behaviour at your volume. Twenty records will not surface batching, throttling, silent truncation or the record-selection limits that appear at scale, and it will not tell you anything about recency. A correct-looking record for somebody who changed jobs four months ago passes every check above.

Apollo vs Clay vs ZoomInfo, line by line

The comparison that survives the fact that they are priced on different units. Every cell carries its basis, and the cells nobody can source say so.

Two rows deserve a second look. Published match rate is "not stated publicly" for all three, which is remarkable for a category whose entire proposition is coverage. And overage mechanism is the row where Clay is the most honest of the three: a 30 percent premium on top-ups is an unpleasant number, published, which beats Apollo's unpublished add-on rate and ZoomInfo's silence.

What breaks in month three?

Different things on each, and all three are visible in the published terms before you sign.

Apollo: the credits arrive once

Annual Apollo credits are "granted upfront" for the year, which sounds generous and means the whole allowance is exposed to a single bad month. Burn 60,000 of your 90,000 credits on a list that turns out to be the wrong ICP in March and you are buying add-on credits in April at a rate Apollo does not publish. The page also states that add-on credits bought mid-cycle "will be available until the end of the current billing period", so a top-up does not extend past your term. [vendor]

Clay: the page contradicts itself on rollover

Clay's plan comparison table has a row reading Rollover credits: 15% of annual credits for Launch and Growth. Its FAQ, on the same page, says "On Launch and Growth plans, unused credits can accumulate up to 2x your monthly credit amount" and assigns the 15 percent rule to Enterprise instead. [vendor, both read 2026-08-25]

Those are not the same rule. On a 120,000-credit annual plan the FAQ's cap is 20,000 banked credits and the table's is 18,000, about $83 apart at that plan's rate. The money is trivial and the signal is not: get the answer in writing before you buy.

ZoomInfo: the notice window is the product

The complaint that has followed ZoomInfo for years is not about data quality. On Hacker News item 34616003, Tell HN: Zoominfo Renewal Clause (1 February 2023, 5 points), a poster quotes a short-seller report: "ZoomInfo often renews contracts against the wishes of its customers, threatens litigation to enforce renewals, and has admitted to the Washington State Attorney General of sometimes doing renewals 'in error.'" That is a quotation of an adversarial financial publication, not a finding of fact, and the underlying report is from May 2022.

What corroborates the shape rather than the characterisation is the 10-K: 53 percent of contracts by annualised value are multi-year, terms run one to three years, and $477.8m sits in unearned revenue. [filing] A procurement team will find that thread inside ten minutes of searching. Have the notice window and the auto-renewal clause in front of you when they do.

What are you being asked to defend when you buy one of these?

All three of these companies sell contact details of people who did not hand them over, and the resulting litigation is now a standing feature of the category rather than an incident. Every item below is an allegation. None of them is a ruling, and each was checked against the docket on 25 August 2026.

• ZoomInfo Publicity Litigation. Putative class action filed 5 September 2024 in the Western District of Washington, alleging that ZoomInfo's use of individuals' names in public-facing web pages violates the Washington Personality Rights Act. The company states it intends to vigorously defend. [filing, quoting the FY2025 10-K]
• Quebec Privacy Litigation. Putative class action filed 17 March 2025 in the Superior Court of Quebec against three ZoomInfo entities under the Quebec Civil Code, the LPRPSP and the Quebec Charter. [filing]
• Colorado Consumer Protection Litigation. Filed 16 April 2025 in Washington State Superior Court, Clark County, alleging ZoomInfo listed cell phone numbers of Colorado residents in its online directory without consent, under Colorado's Prevention of Telemarketing Fraud Act. A parallel suit was filed against ZoomInfo subsidiary Datanyze on 26 June 2025 in the District of Colorado. [filing]
• Apollo, trading as Zenleads Inc. Cochrane v. Zenleads, 3:25-cv-04970, N.D. Cal., filed 12 June 2025 before Judge William H. Orrick III, removed from state court. Masry v. Zenleads, 3:24-cv-07924, N.D. Cal., filed 12 November 2024 before Judge Sallie Kim, terminated 17 September 2025. [docket]
• ZoomInfo Technologies LLC v. Zenleads Inc., 1:25-cv-00324, D. Del., filed 14 March 2025, a patent action. The two vendors on your shortlist are suing each other. [docket]

The consequence is procurement, not law. Any reviewer asked to approve these will find the list above in one search, and "our vendor is a defendant in a right-of-publicity class action" is a sentence to have an answer ready for rather than meet cold.

The contributory-network question is the one that surprises people. ZoomInfo's own 10-K describes ZoomInfo Lite as a freemium product where "if the user elects, they may also participate in our contributory network in order to receive additional monthly credits." [filing] A 2020 Ask HN thread, item 24822933, put it less diplomatically: "it is YOU who has signed over your entire contact list data to ZoomInfo." That is one person's framing on a public thread. The vendor's own filing and the thread describe the same mechanism, which is what makes it reportable.

Is anyone actually running these side by side?

Less than the volume of comparison content would suggest. Hacker News, searched on 25 August 2026, has no thread comparing all three. What it has is thin, and the thinness is worth naming.

Item 46752457, Replaced Clay.com with Claude Code Agent (25 January 2026, 4 points, 2 comments), is the most 2026 artefact in the category: someone swapping a $185-a-month orchestration product for a coding agent. It carries no cost detail and two off-topic replies, so it evidences a sentiment rather than a saving. Items 45493974 and 43756298 propose open-source Clay alternatives, in October 2025 and April 2025, neither with a shipped product.

Item 46050471 (25 November 2025, 123 points, 25 comments) is the largest ZoomInfo thread of the last year, and it is about tracking rather than pricing. Read it for the top sceptical reply, which is the honest counter to the post above it: "User opens DevTools and loads pretty much any website on the internet, film at 11." One commenter's dismissal is not a rebuttal, but a finding about one vendor's landing page is often a finding about ad tech.

The question people do keep asking is provenance rather than price. Item 36125723 (30 May 2023) asks flatly "How do data enrichment tools (Apollo, ZoomInfo) acquire their data?" and item 24822933 asks how the category is legal at all. Neither reaches a conclusion, which is itself a finding: buyers arguing about these three in public are arguing about where the records came from, not about which meter is cheaper. Read both before your legal review does.

Reddit would be the obvious place to look, and this page does not quote threads it has not read in full. r/salesdevelopment, the obvious-sounding home for this argument, has 6,396 subscribers against r/sales at 387,191, so even with access the corpus would be thinner than the topic deserves.

Which one should you buy?

Answer the meter question, not the brand question, and the choice makes itself.

• You need email and phone on a list, and you have one to three people doing outbound. Buy Apollo Basic, annual, at the seat count that matches the credits you need rather than the headcount you have. Three seats is 90,000 credits for $1,764 and covers 10,000 fully enriched contacts a year. Check the credit maths before the seat count, because on Apollo the credits are the purchase and the seats are the packaging.
• Your list quality is the bottleneck and a single source keeps missing. Buy Clay Launch, turn on Infer Email in Full configuration on day one, set the duplicate threshold to 2, and order your waterfall cheapest-provider-first. Those three settings are worth more than the tier you pick.
• You already pay a data provider and you want orchestration. Buy Clay Launch at the 180,000-Action tier for $648 a year, connect your existing API key, and pay Clay nothing for data. This is the cheapest configuration on this page at roughly 15.7 cents a contact, and it is the one Clay's own pricing page is least keen to lead with.
• Your ICP is North American mid-market and up, and you have procurement. ZoomInfo has the coverage. Go in knowing the distribution: the non-enterprise half of its book averages at most $18,887 a year, so if you are quoted materially more than that for a small team, ask which half of the book you are being priced into. Read the notice window before the rate.
• Your bottleneck is cost per contact and nothing else. None of these three is the answer. The readable end of this market runs from about 15 cents to 83 cents for a contact with a verified email and a mobile, and we set out the normalised arithmetic separately.

One disqualifier, because it saves some readers the rest of the decision. If you need contact data for a European ICP under a notified-contact regime, none of the three above is the default answer and the compliance posture matters more than the meter. That is a different page and a different shortlist.

So, Apollo or Clay or ZoomInfo?

On one identical job of 10,000 contacts with an email and a mobile: Apollo at $1,764 a year, Clay at $5,616 with $3,384 of it metered to the job, and ZoomInfo at a number nobody outside its sales team can produce. Apollo wins the arithmetic by 1.92x and loses the shape, because you cannot buy the credits without buying three seats and a year.

The version of this comparison that actually changes a budget is narrower than the question people type. Apollo is the answer when the workload fits inside a seat count you can live with. Clay is the answer when no single source covers your list, and its cheapest form is the one where you bring the data yourself and pay Clay 0.72 cents a record to orchestrate it. ZoomInfo is the answer when coverage of North American mid-market accounts is worth entering a procurement cycle for, and its filings say the cycle ends in a one-to-three-year term with roughly 4.6 months of your money collected in advance.

The one thing you should not do is anchor a budget to a ZoomInfo number you read in a roundup. ZoomInfo's own pricing page shows no price, and every figure attributed to it elsewhere came from somebody else's contract, somebody else's guess, or a competitor's comparison page. Price the two you can read, use them as your anchor, and make ZoomInfo's salesperson justify the gap.