Ask what Cognism costs and the honest answer is one word long. Unknown.
This site has read the pricing page three times, on 5, 12 and 25 August 2026, and found no dollar figure on any of them. Both main tiers route to Talk to sales. There is no free tier, no trial and no self-serve path, so the earliest a number exists is inside a sales process you have already entered.
That is not unusual in this category and it is not, on its own, the interesting part. The interesting part is that the page is not empty. It publishes a product list, a seat inclusion and a credit definition, and those three things are enough to do real work before the call.
A price you cannot see is a wall. A meter you can see is a lever.
What follows: exactly what the page publishes, what a credit is here and how to value one against vendors who print their rates, the seat inclusion and what it does to a small team's per-rep cost, the twelve Do Not Call registries that are the actual product, two places the vendor's own pages disagree with each other, a correction this site had to make to its own wording, and the questions that turn a demo into a price discovery exercise.
What does Cognism cost?
Not published, in any currency, at any tier, on any of three read dates. The pricing page names four things you can buy: Standard, Pro, CRM Enrichment and Data-as-a-Service, the last two available as add-ons or on their own. Every route ends at a sales conversation.
The only quantities on the page are a seat inclusion and a credit definition. Both main tiers read 5 seats included. One credit is consumed each time a contact record is revealed. Data-as-a-Service is priced on data volume and delivery method instead of on either.
The only number on the page that looks like a metric is a claimed 20 to 40% pipeline increase, checked 25 August 2026. That is a vendor-reported revenue outcome, not a property of the data and not a price, and it should be read as marketing rather than as evidence.
What the pricing page publishes, and what it does not
| Published | Not published |
|---|---|
| Four things to buy: Standard, Pro, CRM Enrichment, Data-as-a-Service | Any dollar figure |
| Five seats included on Standard and Pro | The per-seat rate |
| One credit per contact record revealed | How many credits a tier includes |
| Extra credits purchasable at any point | What extra credits cost |
| Data-as-a-Service priced on volume and delivery | Contract term, notice period or minimum |
Read 5 August 2026 and unchanged on the two later checks. The left column is more than most gated vendors give you and the right column contains every input a budget needs.
One further absence worth naming: Cognism publishes no contract term anywhere. Its FAQ refers to the contract without ever saying how long one is, and its public terms page governs website browsing rather than a subscription, checked 25 August 2026. This site previously asserted an annual commitment here and removed it on 12 August 2026, because the vendor never states one.
What is a Cognism credit?
One credit is used each time a contact record is revealed. That is unusually plain for this category, and it is the most valuable sentence on the page.
Credits come bundled with the subscription and more can be bought on top. So the shape underneath the unpublished price is a credit meter, quoted per seat, with the consumption rate set by how hard your team prospects rather than by how many of them there are. That is the same shape Apollo has run for years and the same direction Outreach moved its Amplify tiers. The category now bills on a meter while continuing to talk about seats.
Which means the seat rate is the wrong thing to negotiate hard on, and the credit allowance is the right one.
How to value a Cognism credit before the quote arrives
You cannot compute Cognism's price. You can compute what its credit has to beat, using two vendors in this directory that publish per-contact rates for a comparable unit.
| Vendor | What one credit buys | Published cost per credit | Basis | Read |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BookYourData | One contact, email and mobile together | $0.396 at the $99 / 250-credit break [computed] | Bought outright, no expiry, no subscription | 2026-08-07 |
| BookYourData, top break | One contact, email and mobile together | $0.010 at $24,999 for 2.5m [vendor] | Bought outright | 2026-08-07 |
| Lusha | One email; a phone number costs five | $0.106 to $0.125 [computed] | Annual billing only, no monthly option exists | 2026-08-12 |
| Lusha, phone plus email | Six credits for both | about $0.70 [computed] | Annual billing only | 2026-08-12 |
| Cognism | One contact record revealed | Not stated publicly | Not stated publicly | 2026-08-25 |
So the arithmetic to run on the day a Cognism quote lands is one division. Take the annual figure, divide by the credits included for the year, and compare against $0.396. Cognism's credit reveals a full record, which puts it in the same unit as BookYourData's and worth roughly six of Lusha's. If the division comes out well above forty cents a contact, you are paying for the compliance posture rather than for the data, and that may be the right decision, but it should be a decision rather than a surprise.
Our cost per verified contact work runs the same normalisation across eighteen vendors, and the spread it found was 15 cents to 83 cents at the same nominal tier.
Five seats included, and what that does to a team of two
Both published tiers read 5 seats included. The page does not use the words minimum, floor or starting at, and it does not say whether a smaller purchase is possible.
The practical arithmetic holds either way. If five seats come with the tier and you will field two people, work out the cost per rep you will actually deploy rather than the cost per seat on the quote: divide by two, not by five. At small headcount those are different numbers by a factor of 2.5 [computed].
A team of two evaluating this vendor should ask one question early, because the answer decides whether the rest of the conversation is worth having: can we buy fewer than five seats, and at what rate?
What you are actually buying: twelve Do Not Call registries
Cognism screens its telephone database against Do Not Call registers in twelve named countries: the UK on both TPS and CTPS, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Croatia, Sweden and Belgium. Taken from its own compliance page on 5 August 2026.
Everything else it sells can be bought elsewhere, usually for less. Coverage, mobile numbers, intent data: none of that is unique. The screening is the product, and a review that leads with contact counts has it backwards.
It processes personal data under legitimate interest, Article 6(1)(f) of the GDPR, states that it has run the relevant assessments, and acknowledges the obligation to inform data subjects that it holds their data. Read that obligation carefully, because it does not stop at the vendor. Your outbound inherits the lawful basis your data vendor established, and if that basis is weak the regulator's letter arrives at your company rather than theirs.
Screening is a claim rather than a guarantee. It reduces exposure; it does not transfer liability. Our notes on what to ask a vendor about sub-processors cover the neighbouring questions.
Two places the vendor's own pages disagree with each other
Both are checkable in under ten minutes and both bear on the thing you are paying for.
First, the credit model. Cognism's live press release announcing Sales Companion promises a shift away from the restrictive, credit-based model to a transparent, subscription-based approach, so that teams are no longer limited by arbitrary data caps. The pricing page has a section headed Cognism Credits: one credit reveals one contact, each seat gets an allocation the page will not quantify, and additional credits can be purchased at any point. Both pages were live on 12 August 2026. The same announcement promises transparency on a site that publishes no price.
Second, the registry count. The compliance page headline claims screening against 15 major Do Not Call and TPS lists. The FAQ below it names twelve countries and thirteen registries. A separate product post announces coverage for Norway and Finland and then describes only Norway, with Finland named twice and never explained. The registry list is the reason to buy this vendor, so it is the one list that should reconcile with itself.
Neither is a scandal. Both are the kind of thing you raise in a first call to find out how the vendor handles being asked a precise question, which is information you will want before signing something with no published term.
Cognism against the alternatives, on what is knowable
| Vendor | Published entry price | Self-serve | Free tier | Credit definition | Read |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cognism | Not stated publicly | No | No | 1 credit per contact record revealed | 2026-08-12 |
| ZoomInfo | Not stated publicly | No | No | Not stated publicly | 2026-08-12 |
| Seamless.AI | Not stated publicly | No | Yes, 50 credits | 1 credit per phone and email together | 2026-08-11 |
| Apollo | $69/seat/mo monthly, $49 annual | Yes | Yes | Export credits capped separately from search | 2026-08-25 |
| Lusha | $449.40/yr, no monthly billing exists | Yes | Yes | 1 email, 5 for a phone number | 2026-08-12 |
| UpLead | $99/mo | Yes | No | 1 credit per contact, email and mobile | 2026-08-11 |
| Lead411 | $49/mo | Yes | No | Metered in exports, not credits | 2026-08-06 |
| BookYourData | $99 once for 250 credits | Yes | No | 1 credit per contact, credits never expire | 2026-08-12 |
Three of these eight publish nothing a buyer can act on, and Cognism is the only one of the three that also publishes a usable credit definition. That is a genuinely better position than ZoomInfo's, whose pricing page returned a bot challenge when this site tried to read it on 21 August 2026.
Across the whole data-research category here, 7 of 24 tools publish no monthly, per-seat or per-minute rate, and 5 require a sales call. Cognism is in both sets.
What breaks after you sign
Running out of credits mid-term, at a top-up price nobody negotiated. The pricing page says extra credits can be bought at any point and does not say what they cost, which means the rate is set at the moment your leverage is lowest.
The second thing is renewal, and it is the reason a missing contract term matters more than it looks. This site could not find a published term, notice period or renewal mechanism for Cognism. Where those are unpublished across this category the pattern documented on the ZoomInfo exit page is worth reading first, because auto-renewal disputes are the single most common complaint attached to gated data vendors.
The third is litigation risk in the abstract, and it should be stated carefully. Galli v. Cognism Inc., No. 1:25-cv-13153, was filed in the District of Massachusetts on 27 October 2025. Those are unruled allegations, not findings of fact, and this page draws no conclusion from the existence of a docket. It is here because your security or privacy review will find it in ten minutes, and it is better to have an answer prepared than to be surprised in front of your own general counsel.
Six questions to get answered in writing
- What does one credit cost at the volume we would buy, and what does the next thousand cost? A package figure you cannot decompose is a figure you cannot compare or renegotiate.
- How many credits does each tier include? Not published, and it is the denominator in every calculation on this page.
- Does re-revealing the same contact later consume another credit? This decides your real annual cost more than the seat rate does.
- Can we buy fewer than five seats, and at what rate? Ask early; the answer decides whether the rest of the call is worth having.
- What is the contract term, the notice period and the renewal mechanism? None of the three is published anywhere.
- What is the remedy if a sample fails our accuracy threshold? Tie it to your own fifty-account test, in the contract, not in an email.
The reason to ask all six in one conversation is that they are cheap together and expensive apart. A vendor that answers all six plainly is worth buying from whatever the page does or does not show.
So should you buy it?
If you sell into Europe and someone in your organisation has asked what your lawful basis is, this is close to the only comfortable answer available, and the price you cannot see is the price of that comfort.
If you sell only into North America, no. Coverage there trails ZoomInfo and Apollo, and you would be buying a compliance posture for a jurisdiction you do not operate in.
If you are two people, ask about the seat inclusion before anything else. If you need to test the data before committing, there is no trial, so the test happens inside a sales process rather than before one, and you should plan for that rather than discover it.