lemlist costs $69 a seat a month on monthly billing, read on 11 August 2026, for the Email plan.
Multichannel is $109. Pay yearly and those become $55 and $87.
So it is priced per person, and that is the entire decision. Per-seat pricing suits teams where every rep sends real volume. It punishes teams where several people send occasionally, because you pay full freight for a seat somebody opens twice a week. Against a flat-rate sending tool the lines cross somewhere around six to eight seats. Above that, the infrastructure tools cost materially less for the same output, and the gap widens with every hire.
It is the difference between renting a desk per person and renting a room. Below a certain number the desks are cheaper and you are not paying for empty space.
Count seats before you compare features.
That is the whole argument, and almost no roundup for this query makes it, because features are easier to tabulate than a crossover point.
What follows: what lemlist actually costs on all three of its billing bases, a contradiction inside this site's own record for it that we are publishing rather than fixing quietly, all twelve sequencing tools with their rates and read dates, and eight of them matched to the specific condition under which each beats lemlist.
What does lemlist cost?
$69 a seat a month billed monthly for Email, and $109 for Multichannel. There are three billing bases, not two: the toggle offers monthly, quarterly at 10% off and yearly at 20% off, and the page opens showing the discounted figure with the monthly price beside it. Yearly makes those $55 and $87 a user. Read 11 August 2026.
There is a free tier and it is genuinely usable, which is rarer in this category than it should be. It allows building a complete sequence rather than taking a tour. One published figure that almost nobody else in this market gives you: one lemlist enrichment credit is one cent, stated on the pricing page, drawing on 25+ providers and billed pay per success. Apollo, Warmly and folk all meter in credits they never convert to a currency. lemlist simply closes the gap.
What "self-serve" and "flat rate" mean here
Two terms carry this page and both get one sentence.
Self-serve means you can complete the purchase without a sales call. Not a demo, not a trial with a card form at the end: a checkout. Flat rate means the bill is attached to a workspace rather than to a person, so it does not move when you add a colleague. Both fields are recorded per tool in this directory, and neither appears on a G2 or Capterra roundup. The reason they matter more than usual on this page is that lemlist is priced on the other model, so the second term is the one that decides whether you are overpaying.
| Test | Sequencing | Share of 12 | Directory-wide |
|---|---|---|---|
| Publishes a monthly entry price | 10 of 12 | 83.3% [computed] | 150 of 264 |
| Can be bought without a call | 12 of 12 | 100% [computed] | 156 of 264 |
| Carries a free tier | 4 of 12 | 33.3% [computed] | 109 of 264 |
| Carries a verified price date | 12 of 12 | 100% [computed] | 152 of 264 |
Sequencing is the only category on this site that scores 100% on both of those rows. Two others are unanimously self-serve, writing and messaging at 10 of 10 and enablement at 10 of 10, and neither has a verification date against every price. Compare all three with recording and coaching, where 6 of 16 have a checkout, and with the directory as a whole, where 108 of 264 do not.
This site's own lemlist figure disagrees with itself
The most likely reading is that $39 is a stale figure from an earlier check, or a tier this site no longer records. That is a guess, and a guess is not a price. It matters here more than it would elsewhere, because the crossover argument on this page depends on lemlist's seat rate. At $69 a seat, six seats is $414 a month and the flat-rate tools start at $25. At $39 it would be $234 and the comparison shifts. Use $69, note that this page cannot fully vouch for it, and re-read lemlist.com/pricing before you commit anything to a budget.
Per seat against flat rate, and where they cross
The two pricing shapes in this category are not variations on a theme. They meter different things.
Per seat charges for people. lemlist, Reply.io and Mailshake work this way. Your bill tracks headcount and is indifferent to volume.
Flat rate charges for a workspace. Instantly, Smartlead and QuickMail work this way. Your bill tracks contacts or mailboxes and is indifferent to how many people log in.
Woodpecker is a third shape worth naming because it is rare: priced per contacted prospect at $0.07 with a 500-prospect minimum, so the bill tracks how many people you reach rather than how many seats or mailboxes you hold.
| Seats | lemlist Email at $69 | Instantly flat at $47 | Smartlead flat at $39 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | $69 | $47 | $39 |
| 2 | $138 | $47 | $39 |
| 4 | $276 | $47 | $39 |
| 6 | $414 | $47 | $39 |
| 8 | $552 | $47 | $39 |
| 12 | $828 | $47 | $39 |
Every figure in the lemlist column is computed [$69 times the seat count], and every figure in the other two is the published entry rate, unchanged, because that is the point of a flat rate. The flat columns are not the whole bill: those tiers scale on contacts and features, so at real volume they rise. What they do not do is rise with headcount. What lemlist buys with the difference is LinkedIn in the same cadence. If you genuinely run that channel, the premium is buying something real. If your LinkedIn steps sit unconfigured for a month, you are paying per seat for a feature nobody switched on, and that is more common than any vendor in this category likes to admit.
Every sequencing tool here, priced
Twelve tools. The rate is the published entry price on the monthly-billing basis, and the date is when it was read off the vendor's own page.
| Tool | Entry / mo | Model | Free tier | Buy without a call? | Price read |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MailReach | $25 | Flat | No | Yes | 2026-08-07 |
| Mailshake | $29 | Per seat ($58) | No | Yes | 2026-08-07 |
| Woodpecker | $35 | Per prospect | Yes | Yes | 2026-08-06 |
| Saleshandy | $36 | Flat | No | Yes | 2026-08-07 |
| Smartlead | $39 | Flat | No | Yes | 2026-08-11 |
| Instantly | $47 | Flat | Yes | Yes | 2026-08-06 |
| Salesforge | $48 | Usage | No | Yes | 2026-08-11 |
| QuickMail | $49 | Flat | No | Yes | 2026-08-07 |
| Reply.io | $59 | Per seat | Yes | Yes | 2026-08-07 |
| lemlist | $69 | Per seat | Yes | Yes | 2026-08-06 |
| Klenty | No monthly rate | Per seat, annual | No | Yes | 2026-08-07 |
| Meetz | Not published | Flat | No | Yes | 2026-08-12 |
Twelve out of twelve are self-serve.
In a directory where 108 of 264 tools have no checkout, sequencing is one of three categories that has decided, without a single exception, that a buyer can be trusted with a credit card.
lemlist is the most expensive published entry price in its own category.
That is not automatically wrong, and it is worth knowing before someone tells you it is mid-market.
Two rows publish no monthly price, and only one is a gap
Klenty has no monthly billing at all. The toggle offers annual or quarterly only: Starter is $50 a month billed annually, or $60 a month billed quarterly, which is the shortest term you can buy. That is $600 a year at the annual rate, and it is recorded on this site as a published annual figure rather than as a monthly one, because dividing an annual commitment by twelve prints a price nobody can actually pay. Starter is priced per workspace; Growth and Plus are per user. Checked 7 August 2026.
Meetz is the real gap. meetz.ai is live and serves a real page, checked first-hand on 12 August 2026, but /pricing returns a 404, so the $49 this site used to carry has no current source and the record shows nothing. A researcher reported the domain had expired; it has not. What is missing is the price, not the company.
Ten of twelve publish a monthly rate you can act on, and the two that do not are different problems rather than the same one.
Who should stay on lemlist
This is the best-designed product in its category, and interface quality is not cosmetic when adoption is your actual problem. Reps use it, which is more than can be said for several better-specified competitors.
- You genuinely run email and LinkedIn together rather than intending to. A cadence that runs an email, then a profile view, then a connection request, then a call task, all logged in one place, is a different object from two tools stitched together.
- Your team is small enough that per-seat is still competitive, which on the arithmetic above means under about six people.
- Adoption is the bottleneck. A new rep is productive in an afternoon, which is not true of everything on the table.
- Your outbound is considered and curated rather than high volume across many domains.
One more, and it is genuinely unusual. lemlist ships an MCP server, a command-line interface and a set of Claude Skills on the $69 entry plan, so a model you control can operate the tool directly. Nobody else in this directory offers that, and Apollo puts the nearest equivalent on its dearest tier. Scope the credentials before you scope the prompt: the usual guardrail on outbound is a human clicking send, and that is exactly what an MCP integration exists to remove.
Who is on the wrong product
Anyone above about eight seats. The flat-rate tools cost materially less for the same output, and the integration cost of running a separate LinkedIn tool is a one-off rather than a monthly line.
Anyone whose team sends occasionally. Per-seat pricing punishes exactly this shape hardest, and it is the most common shape in a company where account executives send a little and one SDR sends a lot.
Anyone doing multi-domain volume. There is no unlimited-mailbox model here, which is a deliberate positioning choice rather than an oversight. Deliverability is better than the CRM platforms and not as good as the infrastructure specialists.
And anyone who will only ever send email. At that point you are paying $69 a seat for a multichannel product running single channel, and $25 to $47 buys the same emails.
Eight alternatives, and the one condition each wins on
Instantly, if you need mailboxes rather than seats
$47 a month flat, free tier, self-serve. Read 6 August 2026. Infrastructure first and a sequencer second: unlimited mailboxes, warmup across a shared network, sender rotation and deliverability testing. It beats lemlist the moment your constraint is sending capacity rather than message quality. The hidden cost nobody puts in the comparison is domains: running forty mailboxes means buying and maintaining ten or so, which is a few hundred dollars a year and an administrative task somebody has to own.
One threshold before you scale anything. If reply rate is under 2% on a clean, well-targeted list, the constraint is your offer, and spreading a bad message across forty mailboxes reaches more people with a bad message.
Smartlead, if you run outbound for several brands
$39 a month flat, no free tier, self-serve. Read 11 August 2026. The cheapest credible full sequencer in the table. Unlimited sending identities aimed squarely at agencies running many clients from one account. It beats lemlist on the condition that you need workspace separation per client, which no per-seat tool solves cleanly. If you sell to a small named list, this is the wrong shape entirely.
Saleshandy, if you would otherwise buy data and sending separately
$36 a month flat, no free tier, self-serve. Read 7 August 2026. Database, warmup and sequencing on one bill, positioned explicitly against buying Apollo and Instantly as two subscriptions. It beats lemlist for a small team that has no list, because lemlist assumes you bring one. Bundled data is rarely as good as specialist data, so if your ICP is narrow or non-US, verify coverage on your actual list before committing.
Woodpecker, if you want to pay for people reached
$35 a month, free tier, self-serve, priced at $0.07 per contacted prospect with a 500-prospect minimum. Read 6 August 2026.
The only meter in the category that tracks the thing you actually care about. It beats lemlist when your list is small and precise, because you stop paying for capacity you are not using in either direction. One warning: the pricing page renders in the visitor's local currency, so check the selector before quoting a figure from it, including ours.
Reply.io, if you want lemlist's shape for $10 less
$59 a seat a month, free tier, self-serve. Read 7 August 2026. Multichannel sequencing with an AI SDR layer sold on top. The most direct swap on this list: same per-seat model, same email plus LinkedIn plus calls cadence, ten dollars a seat cheaper. It is breadth over depth, each channel competent and none best in class, so if one channel carries your motion you should buy the specialist instead of either of these.
Salesforge, if volume is the whole point
$48 a month, no free tier, self-serve. Read 11 August 2026. Cold email and LinkedIn sequencing, sold as one of six separate subscriptions.
It beats lemlist on cost per email at agency volume and on nothing else. Two things to price before you sign: mailboxes are a separate subscription entirely, and the expensive meter is AI personalisation, which the Growth plan includes for 2% of the emails it includes. Unlimited mailboxes in the software is not unlimited mailboxes in the price.
Mailshake, if you want a sequencer that has stopped changing
$29 entry, $58 a seat, no free tier, self-serve. Read 7 August 2026. Sequencing with phone and social steps and no enterprise pretensions. Feature development has been slow relative to the category, which is the honest description and also the reason to buy it. If you want stability and you do not want the AI layer everyone else shipped, that is a legitimate preference. Note the shape though: the seat rate is $58, nearly double the entry price, so this is only cheaper than lemlist for one person.
Klenty, if you call as much as you email
No monthly billing. $50 a month billed annually or $60 billed quarterly, which is $600 a year at the annual rate. No free tier, self-serve. Read 7 August 2026. Sequencing with a built-in dialer, for a genuine phone-and-email cadence, and the only row here that will not sell you a single month. Starter is priced per workspace while Growth and Plus are per user, so the model changes as you move up the ladder. The dialer is single-line: if calling is your primary motion, a parallel dialer changes your connect rate and this will not.
The 30-minute check to run before you switch
- Count the people who will hold a licence, then multiply by $69. Two minutes. If that number is above $300 a month, the flat-rate rows are cheaper for the same sending and the rest of this page is detail.
- Open your lemlist account and count how many LinkedIn steps ran in the last 30 days. If the answer is zero, you are paying the multichannel premium for a single channel, and that is the single most common finding here. Pass mark: LinkedIn steps on at least a quarter of your active sequences.
- Check your reply rate on your cleanest list. Under 2% and no tool on this page fixes anything. That is an offer problem, and switching sequencers is the most expensive way to avoid confronting it.
- Sign up for the two cheapest rows that fit and send one real sequence through each. Every row here is self-serve, so this costs an afternoon and no calendar time. That is the entire practical advantage of a category with twelve checkouts.
What breaks in month three
The seat you forgot to cancel. Per-seat products bill for licences, not for use, and the account executive who tried it in January is still a line item in March. This is the specific failure mode of the pricing model, not of the product.
Domains, if you moved to the infrastructure tools. Forty mailboxes across ten domains is an ongoing administrative job with a renewal calendar. Nobody includes it in the comparison and it is the line that surprises people.
And the strategy decaying underneath you. Spamhaus, whose blocklists a large share of the internet consults before accepting mail, classifies unsolicited commercial bulk email as spam. Filters adapt to volume-across-domains specifically, so a setup that worked eighteen months ago needs revisiting rather than trusting. That is a reason to re-test deliverability quarterly, not a reason to avoid the tools.
So which one should you buy?
Under six seats running genuine multichannel, stay on lemlist at $69. The interface advantage is real, the LinkedIn cadence is real, and nothing cheaper does both well.
Under six seats sending email only, move to Instantly at $47 or Smartlead at $39 and put the difference into domains and list quality. Above eight seats, move regardless of what you send, because the per-seat arithmetic has already decided it for you.
If you are one person and the list is small, Woodpecker at $35 with its $0.07 per contacted prospect is the closest thing here to paying only for what you use. And if you have no list at all, Saleshandy at $36 is the only row that bundles one, which is a different purchase from everything else on this page.