Here's the trap. You line up four data tools at $15, $29, $49 and $99 a month, divide each by its credit allowance, and pick the one with the cheapest credit. Then your reps ask for phone numbers and the cheapest tool turns out to be the dearest one you could have chosen.
A credit is not a unit. At UpLead one credit buys a contact with the email and the mobile together. At BetterContact a mobile number costs ten credits and the email costs another one. Same word, eleven times the quantity.
It works like buying rope from stalls that quote by the metre, by the coil and by weight. The cheapest number on any sign tells you nothing until you convert them all to the same thing.
So this page converts them. Below is what one contact costs at each vendor measured three ways, which tools change rank when you switch the measure, and the four that cannot sell you a phone number at any price while appearing in every roundup as though they can.
What does one contact actually cost?
The unit a caller needs is one person with a verified work email and a mobile number. Priced at each vendor's cheapest paid tier, at list, assuming the lookup succeeds:
| Tool | Cost per contact | How it is built |
|---|---|---|
| LeadMagic | $0.150 | email 1 credit + mobile 5 credits, at $0.025 each |
| Prospeo | $0.245 | mobile 10 credits, email included with it |
| Persana AI | $0.468 | email 1 + mobile 10, at $0.0425 each |
| UpLead | $0.582 | 1 credit buys both |
| FullEnrich | $0.638 | email 1 + mobile 10, at $0.058 each |
| BetterContact | $0.825 | email 1 + mobile 10, at $0.075 each |
A spread of 5.5 times, top to bottom. Prices read on 21 August 2026 from each vendor's own pricing page.
Why the cheapest credit is not the cheapest contact
Measure the same six vendors by email alone and the table falls apart. UpLead comes last of nine tools at 58 cents, more than twenty times the cheapest email in the category. Measure by mobile number and it is fifth. Measure by a contact with both and it is fourth.
| Tool | Rank by email | Rank by mobile | Rank by both |
|---|---|---|---|
| LeadMagic | 3rd | 1st | 1st |
| Prospeo | 2nd | 2nd | 2nd |
| Persana AI | 5th | 3rd | 3rd |
| UpLead | 9th, last | 5th | 4th |
| FullEnrich | 7th | 4th | 5th |
| BetterContact | 8th | 6th | 6th |
Nothing about UpLead changed between those columns. Only the question did. A ranking built on price per credit is measuring the word rather than the thing, and it is the ranking almost every roundup publishes.
The number that decides it: the mobile multiplier
How many credits a phone number costs, relative to an email, moves the answer further than the headline price does. No vendor publishes this comparison because it only looks bad in one direction.
- 1x. UpLead. One credit unlocks the contact with the email and the mobile direct dial together.
- 5x. LeadMagic and Lusha. LeadMagic charges 1 credit for a valid email, 5 for a valid mobile, and 0.25 for a validation.
- 10x. Prospeo, Persana, FullEnrich and BetterContact. Prospeo throws the email in with the mobile, which is why it prices better than the other three at the same multiplier.
If your team emails and never calls, the multiplier is irrelevant and you should buy on cost per email. If your reps dial, it is the only column that matters, and a 10x vendor will burn an allowance roughly ten times faster than the plan page implies.
Which tools cannot sell you a phone number at all?
Four appear in the same roundups as the six above and cannot answer the question at any price:
- Hunter.io has no phone product. Its credits buy an email find at 1 credit and a verification at half a credit, and that is the whole meter.
- Snov.io sells phone data as a separate subscription entirely, metered in tokens at $0.02 rather than in credits, with packages expiring after 90 days. Any table treating Snov's 1,000 credits as a thousand callable contacts is wrong.
- Dropcontact publishes no phone rate on its Email Finder plans, and prices in euros rather than dollars, so it does not belong in a dollar column at all.
- Lead411 meters exports rather than credits and publishes no separate mobile rate.
The four tools whose price you cannot read
ZoomInfo, Ocean.io, Findymail and Crunchbase are all behind bot challenges that returned 403 to every attempt on 21 August 2026. Apollo serves its prices client-side, and the structured data left in its HTML contradicts itself, labelling two different figures as monthly. We publish no figure for any of the five rather than borrowing one, which is where most numbers about these vendors come from.
Three tools where cost per contact is undefined
Not expensive. Undefined, which is a different answer and a more useful one.
- Store Leads states it provides "only non-personal" email addresses. Person-level contacts require a separate paid account with a third-party vendor. Its cheapest $75 tier also cannot export at all, which is in the comparison table but not on the plan card. The first tier that produces a list is $250.
- BuiltWith does export contact names, emails and titles, but it has no credit, no row cap and no published match rate, so cost per contact depends entirely on how many a given report happens to return.
- Crunchbase publishes export caps of 2,000 and 5,000 rows a month and makes no claim about email addresses or phone numbers on either product page.
What happened to Clearbit's pricing?
It stopped existing, twice. Clearbit's pricing page now redirects to a page announcing the HubSpot acquisition and shows no prices. The product that replaced it, Breeze Intelligence, was itself retired: between 2 and 15 June 2025 its credits converted into general HubSpot Credits.
The conversion was not at a constant rate. 100 Breeze credits became 3,000 HubSpot credits, 1,000 became 15,000, and 10,000 became 125,000. That is 30 times, 15 times and 12.5 times. The largest holding converted at under half the rate of the smallest.
HubSpot credits cost $0.010 each and expire monthly. But data enrichment does not appear anywhere on the published credit rate sheet, which prices AI agents and intent signals instead. Enrichment is bundled into the seat. So the cost per enriched contact is not high or low, it is unpublished.
So what should you buy?
Work out whether you need phone numbers first, because it changes the answer more than budget does.
- Email only, high volume: Hunter or Prospeo at roughly 2.5 cents an email. Hunter has a genuine free tier at 50 credits a month and Prospeo at 100, so both can be tested at zero cost before a card goes in.
- Reps who dial: LeadMagic at 15 cents a full contact, on the strength of the 5x multiplier rather than the headline price. It has no free tier, but publishes a 14-day refund on a first payment.
- Hard lists where single sources fail: a waterfall tool like FullEnrich or BetterContact, at roughly two to three times the per-email cost. That premium buys charging only on a successful, verified find, which is worth it exactly when your match rate is poor and not otherwise.
- Before any of it: run 200 records from your real target list through two free tiers and count what comes back. The cost per contact above assumes the lookup succeeds, and match rates vary more between vendors than prices do.
The answer to the question in the title is between 15 and 83 cents for a contact you can email and call, at entry pricing, from the six vendors who will tell you. The reason the range looks wider elsewhere is that most tables are dividing by a word instead of a thing. Before paying any of them, note that only three of fifteen free tiers let you export, which decides where you can test first.