How Much Is Apollo.io? $69 Monthly, $49 Annual

Apollo's pricing page opens on the annual toggle. The badge reads Annual billing Save 29%, and the four numbers under it are $0, $49, $79 and $119.

Click the toggle and they become $0, $69, $99 and $149.

Neither set is wrong. The problem is that a buyer who reads the page for thirty seconds leaves with $49 in their head and a monthly product in their basket, and every comparison they build after that is off by a fifth to a third depending on the tier. This is the most common single error in the category and Apollo is not unusual in causing it. What is unusual is how hard the page is to read correctly even when you are trying.

Fetch the same URL as a machine and 435,494 bytes come back with no plan price anywhere in them.

What follows: both price ladders, the annual badge checked tier by tier, the correction this site had to publish about its own Apollo figure, a disagreement inside this site's records that is still open, the three separate credit counters underneath the seat, and what a fixed 10,000-contact job actually costs.

What does Apollo.io cost?

$69 a seat a month billed monthly, or $49 billed annually, on the entry paid tier. There is a free tier, it is genuinely usable, and the whole thing is self-serve. You can buy Apollo, and upgrade it, without speaking to anybody.

The four annual totals are twelve times the row above them. They are arithmetic, not figures Apollo prints, and they are the only honest way to compare a monthly product against an annual one.

This site records $69, because the convention here is the monthly-billing rate: the price a buyer can actually pay without committing a year.

Does the 'Save 29%' badge survive checking?

On one tier of three.

The badge sits above the toggle and applies visually to the whole table, so the natural reading is that annual billing takes 29% off whichever plan you were looking at. Divide it out and that is true of Basic and of nothing else. The two tiers above it save roughly a fifth, which is still worth having and is not what the badge says.

Read it the other way and the gap is starker, because that is the direction a monthly buyer experiences it. Paying month to month costs 40.8% more than the annual rate on Basic, 25.3% more on Professional and 25.2% more on Organization [all computed]. Those are the numbers to carry into a comparison, not the badge.

This site published $65 for Apollo, and 65 was nowhere on the page

The mechanism is worth understanding because it will catch you too. Apollo's page is built so the prices arrive from in-page JavaScript after the document has settled, and the document never reaches the idle state that automated readers wait for. A text extractor times out and returns the page with the price slots still empty. Anything that fills those slots from somewhere else is filling them with a guess.

This site's own two records still disagree about $49

The reason to print that rather than quietly correct it is narrow and it matters. A directory that fixes its own contradictions in silence is indistinguishable from one that never had any, and the reader has no way to tell which they are holding.

The structured data does not match the rendered page

Apollo ships a JSON-LD OfferCatalog with its pricing page. It lists Free at 0, Basic at 49 and Professional at 99, and tags each one billingDuration: P1M.

That is wrong twice over. The 49 is the annual rate rather than a monthly one, so the tag contradicts the figure. And 99 is the monthly Professional price, not the annual one, so the two entries in the same block are not even on the same basis as each other. A crawler reading that markup is told a ladder Apollo does not sell.

Apollo is not alone in this and it is not the worst instance. This site found the same class of divergence on 10 of 21 vendor pricing pages re-read in a single day, and documented the mechanics in why a pricing page is not a price. The practical instruction is short: read the rendered page, note the toggle state, and treat anything you found in markup as a lead rather than a rate.

The seat price is not the meter

Credits are.

Every contact you reveal or export draws down an allowance, the allowance resets monthly, and on the lower tiers it runs out well before the month does for anyone prospecting at working volume. Two plans at similar seat rates can differ several times over in usable output, and the tier that looks expensive per seat is frequently the cheaper one per exported contact. Checking the credit allowance before the seat rate is the single most useful habit a buyer can bring to this product.

Apollo prices individual fields rather than records. Revealing an email address costs 1 credit. A phone number costs 8. One AI Research run also costs 1, which means prospect research and contact data compete for the same pool, and a team that switches AI Research on across a 10,000-row list has spent 10,000 credits before revealing a single phone number.

Three credit counters, and only one of them limits exports

The pricing page's own interface strings name three types: email credits, mobile credits and export credits. They are not interchangeable.

Apollo's FAQ defines the third plainly: you consume export credits whenever you export a contact outside of Apollo, for example by CSV, to a CRM, or through the Person API. So the headline credit allowance on a plan card is not the export allowance, and a plan compared on credits alone tells you nothing about how many rows you can actually remove from the product.

There is a fourth throttle that is not a credit at all. Apollo publishes a record selection limit governing how many leads can be saved in one operation, which its own FAQ describes in concrete terms rather than as a policy. Free trial plans grant 50 credits and 5 mobile credits, quoted as two separate numbers, which is the clearest available demonstration that the counters do not convert into each other.

Most vendors in this category run a multiplier instead: a mobile costs ten credits at Prospeo, Persana and FullEnrich, five at Lusha and LeadMagic, one at UpLead. Apollo's eight-credit phone sits inside that spread while its separate mobile counter sits outside the whole convention.

What does one Apollo credit cost?

Apollo answers this once, in a footnote, and the answer is not a price.

The only dollar figure visible in the rendered text of that 435,494-byte page is $0.025, and it appears in a fair-use clause capping credits rather than selling them. It is still the most useful number on the page, because it lets you convert a plan into a credit ceiling once you know the plan price. Set it against what a Basic seat actually buys and the footnote gets bracketed from both sides.

Apollo's page disagrees with itself about enrichment

The credit table on the pricing page reads 1-8 credits per enriched record. The FAQ underneath it on the same page reads up to 9 credits per record.

This site publishes the disagreement instead of choosing one. The gap is a single credit and it sounds trivial until you multiply it: at 10,000 records the difference between the two published ceilings is 10,000 credits, which on Basic is four months of a seat's entire monthly allowance.

The AI writing allowance gets worse as you climb

Apollo meters generated text by the word rather than by the message or the seat, which is unusual and, at the bottom of the ladder, generous. Free gets 5,000 words a month, Basic 250,000, Professional 800,000 and Organization 1,000,000.

Then the ladder stops making sense at the top step.

Professional buys 800,000 words at $99 and Organization buys 1,000,000 at $149. That is a 25% larger allowance for a 51% higher price, so the top tier is worse value per word than the tier below it. Anyone moving up for writing volume is buying the wrong thing. The reasons to go to Organization are single sign-on, security configuration, and the ability to bring your own model key, which appears on that tier and nowhere else.

The one component Apollo has not priced at all

The AI Assistant carries an INTRODUCTORY FREE badge on all three paid tiers, and the small print beside it says that features and pricing may change. Free accounts get 5 chats at 10 messages each.

Treat it as unpriced rather than included. A budget resting on a component whose future cost is a decision the vendor has publicly reserved is a budget with an open line in it, and the honest thing is to say that out loud rather than to model the assistant at zero forever.

Call recording is the opposite case and worth naming for contrast: it is metered in plain minutes, 4,000 on Professional and 8,000 on Organization, and it does not exist on Basic or Free at all.

What does a real workload cost?

This site priced one fixed job across three vendors on 25 August 2026: 10,000 contacts, each with a work email and a mobile number. On Apollo the cheapest published route was three Basic seats on annual billing, because the credits arrive attached to the seat rather than sold separately.

You cannot buy 90,000 Apollo credits. You buy three seats for twelve months and the credits arrive with them, whether or not three people exist to sit in them. That is the pricing model working as designed rather than a trap, and it is the shape to check for before assuming a per-seat vendor is cheaper for a team of one. The full three-vendor arithmetic, including what Clay costs for the identical job and why ZoomInfo cannot be placed on the same scale, is in the fixed-workload comparison.

How to read Apollo's pricing page without getting it wrong

What one exported contact costs across the vendors that publish a rate

The seat rate is the wrong axis for this comparison and the credit rate is the right one. This site priced the same fixed job across the data vendors that publish enough to be priced at all: 10,000 contacts, work email and mobile number on each, taking the cheapest published route each vendor offers rather than the tier it advertises. Apollo lands seventh of the nine on cost per record and third from the top on how many credits a mobile number costs.

The column that changes the ranking

Read the last two columns together with the first. Apollo at $0.1764 a record is four times Lead411 and half of UpLead, which sounds like a mid-table result until you notice that UpLead and BookYourData put the mobile number inside the same credit as the email. A calling motion on Apollo draws eight credits where those two draw one, so the per-record figure understates Apollo for anyone whose reps dial and overstates it for anyone who only emails.

Computed from published rates, not measured. Each route is the cheapest one the vendor publishes for the stated volume, read on the date beside it. None of these figures is adjusted for match rate, which is the denominator nobody publishes and the reason the whole table is a floor rather than a forecast.

• Open it in a browser, not a fetcher. The prices arrive from in-page JavaScript after load. A curl or an extractor returns 435,494 bytes with the price slots empty, and anything that fills them for you is guessing.
• Click the toggle and watch the numbers move. The page opens on annual. Write down which basis you recorded, because a comparison table mixing the two penalises whichever vendors were captured on the dearer one by a fifth to two fifths.
• Read the credit line before the seat line, and find out which of the three counters it refers to. Export credits are the constraint. The headline allowance usually is not.
• Ask what one enriched record costs, in writing, and quote both of Apollo's published answers back: the table's 1-8 and the FAQ's up to 9. Whichever they confirm becomes your unit.
• Price the AI Assistant at something rather than nothing. Its badge says introductory and its footnote says pricing may change. A line item at an unknown rate is more honest than a line item at zero.

When Apollo is the wrong purchase

What breaks in month three

The credit pool empties earlier every month, and it is the team getting better that does it. An email costs 1 credit and a phone number costs 8, so the month a rep starts calling as well as emailing is the month the same list draws several times what it drew in month one. The invoice does not move. The work stops instead, usually in the last week, and it looks like a product fault rather than a meter.

The export counter is the one that decides whether you can leave. Apollo's own FAQ says export credits are consumed whenever a contact leaves the product, by CSV, into a CRM, or through the Person API. A team that has spent three months revealing contacts inside Apollo rather than exporting them has been drawing down the wrong counter, and finds out at the moment it tries to move the list somewhere else.

The AI Assistant line has no rate behind it. It carries an INTRODUCTORY FREE badge on all three paid tiers and a footnote reserving the right to change features and pricing. A budget that models it at zero forever is a budget with an open line in it, and the vendor has said in writing that the line is open.

One more, for anyone who bought annual to get $49. Credits arrive attached to seats, so the only way to buy more of them is to buy more seats, and on annual billing that decision is made once for twelve months. Three Basic seats is how you get 90,000 credits whether or not three people exist to sit in them.

So how much is Apollo, and what should you do about it?

$69 a seat a month on the monthly basis, $49 on the annual one, and neither is the number to budget from. Budget from the credit line, because that is the meter, and check which of the three counters the plan card is quoting before you compare Apollo to anything.

If you are emailing a North American mid-market technology list and you want one bill instead of three, buy it, take the free tier for a fortnight first, and do the hundred-row credit test while it is free. If your motion runs on mobile numbers, the 8x multiplier and the thin direct-dial coverage will send you to a second vendor inside a quarter, and the bundle economics that justified the purchase go with it.

And whichever you decide, write down which billing basis you recorded. Half the comparison tables that name Apollo are off by 40.8% on Basic because somebody read the page on the toggle it opens on and never clicked it.

When your motion runs on mobile numbers. Direct dials are the weakest field in this database, and teams calling for a living end up buying a second enrichment vendor for that one column, at which point the bundle economics that justified Apollo have gone.

When you sell outside its core. Apollo's data is contributory, which means it is dense where its own users already sell and thin where they do not. Coverage in North American mid-market technology is genuinely competitive with the specialists. European contacts, non-technology industries and companies under fifty people all degrade, and no seat price fixes that.

And when you already know exactly which part of your stack is broken. The bundle is the right first purchase for a team starting outbound and the wrong one for a team with a specific weak point, because a specialist in that area will beat it and Apollo will not become that specialist by being cheaper. If you wanted enrichment orchestration rather than a database, Clay is a different category. If you wanted the deepest North American coverage and will accept an annual contract, ZoomInfo is a different purchase.

What this page does not know