Lusha Alternatives: 4 Cents a Record, or Lusha's 46

A Lusha phone number costs five credits. An email costs one.

That single ratio is why people search for alternatives, and it is why the alternatives are usually compared wrongly. Roundups line up tier prices, which measure nothing, because a tier is a label attached to an allowance and the allowances buy different things.

One unit fixes it: a contact with a verified email address and a mobile direct dial, together. That is the record almost every buyer in this category actually wants, and it is computable for ten vendors off their own published rates.

On that unit Lusha costs 46 to 56 cents, and the cheapest published alternative in this directory costs four.

One contact, ten vendors, one unit

What a credit is, and why the unit here is a record instead

A credit is not a unit. It is whatever each vendor says it is, and across the ten pricing pages above it buys things that differ by more than a factor of ten. At UpLead one credit reveals a contact with the work email and the mobile direct dial together. At Lusha one credit reveals an email and a phone number costs five. At BetterContact the mobile costs ten credits and the email costs another one. At Lead411 there are no credits at all and the meter counts exports.

That is why this page prices a record rather than a credit: one named person with a work email and a mobile direct dial attached, which is the thing a calling motion actually consumes. Converting a vendor's price into that unit is division, and the division is ours rather than the vendor's, which is why every derived figure on this page carries [computed].

Two more words are worth separating before the table, because the category uses them interchangeably and they multiply rather than substitute. Coverage, also sold as match rate, is how much of your list comes back with anything at all. Accuracy is how often what came back is right. A database can be excellent at one and poor at the other. Both sit in the denominator, neither is published by any vendor here, and a database size is a claim about neither.

Sorted cheapest first. Every figure is the cost of one record carrying a verified email and a mobile direct dial.

Lusha is sixth of ten on price and second of ten on legibility. Only BookYourData publishes as complete a meter, and no vendor in the bottom three rows publishes anything at all.

Why the multiplier matters more than the tier

Look at the third column rather than the second.

Three vendors charge one credit for both fields together: UpLead, BookYourData and Seamless.AI. Two charge five for the mobile: Lusha and LeadMagic. Four charge ten. Lead411 does something different again and meters exports rather than reveals, with the dial travelling inside the export at no extra rate.

That multiplier, not the plan price, is what decides your bill. A team whose motion is email-led barely notices it. A team that dials pays it on every record, and at 5x or 10x it swamps every other variable including the tier discount you negotiated.

Which is the honest reason to leave Lusha, stated without any complaint about the vendor. Lusha publishes its meter more completely than anyone else in this directory and the meter is calibrated so that the field it is famous for is the most expensive thing on it.

This site holds three incompatible records for one Lusha figure

One number, five records, three incompatible jobs. It is either a struck-through figure on the Pro card, or the selectable price of Pro at 26,400 credits, or absent from that card entirely, and this site currently asserts all three.

The FAQ contradiction is the sharpest of them, because both halves sit in the same document. The review's body table prices Pro at 26,400 credits at $188.95 and its FAQ, answering the question how much does Lusha cost per month, closes with the sentence that Pro at 26,400 credits a year is $249.90 a month. Same page, same read date, same allowance, two prices sixty-one dollars apart.

This is the fourth such disagreement found on this site and the first that its own checker cannot see. scripts/price-consistency.ts compares each entity's entryMonthly against the money figures in its review and has already caught three: Instantly at $47 against $37, lemlist at $69 against $39, and Sales Navigator at $119.99 against $99. It skips this one, because line 48 of that script exits early on any entity whose entryMonthly is null or zero, and Lusha's is zero on account of the free tier. A checker that only inspects priced entities cannot audit a vendor whose price lives in a contract record.

It is not resolved here. Resolving it needs a rendered browser on the vendor's page with the credit slider walked to every stop, and Lusha's robots.txt names ClaudeBot under Disallow, so no automated route was used to check it. What this page can do is refuse to pick one silently, and tell you that any Pro figure you read on this site should be treated as unsettled until somebody looks.

A second correction that has not propagated

Smaller, already diagnosed, and worth knowing if you read the older pages here.

This site published Lusha's cost per record with an email and a phone at $0.636 to $0.75, arrived at by dividing the struck-through figure rather than the selectable one. The Lusha pricing page corrected that to $0.456 to $0.564 and explained the error, which inflated every downstream number by about a third and ran against the vendor.

The corrected figure is what the table at the top of this page uses. The Lead411 and BookYourData reviews still print the superseded range, and both use it in comparisons that favour their own subject. Neither has been rewritten, which is a propagation failure rather than a new disagreement, and it is named here so a reader who opens those pages next is not confused by two ranges for the same vendor.

The category, counted

Twenty-four data-research records in this directory, counted over entities.ts on 29 August 2026.

Those are better ratios than the directory as a whole manages, which is worth saying because this category gets criticised for opacity more than most. The three vendors people actually complain about, ZoomInfo, Cognism and Seamless.AI, are three records out of twenty-four and they are unusually loud.

Lead411, if you export in volume and there are two of you

$0.041 a record on Spark annual, $490 a year a seat for 12,000 exports, self-serve to two seats, read 6 August 2026. Nine times cheaper than the next thing on the table and thirteen times cheaper than Lusha at the top of its range [computed].

Two caveats from this site's own review of it, both material. Whether revealing an email on the entry plan spends an export is stated nowhere, which is the single most consequential thing its pricing page does not answer, and the four-cent figure depends on the answer. And self-serve stops at two seats, with no published rate above that, so a team of three is buying an unpriced product.

There is also a live uncertainty about whether the $49 is still shown to buyers at all. This site re-read the page on 11 August 2026 and found the plan cards did not render, with the only $49 in the served markup sitting in the meta description, which is the line written for search engines. That is either a rendering problem or the fourth vendor in this directory serving a number to crawlers that a visitor never sees.

BookYourData, if you buy lists occasionally

$99 for 250 credits at the floor, $0.396 a record, one credit buys the email and the mobile together, credits never expire, seats unlimited and free, read 7 August 2026.

It undercuts Lusha comfortably and sits inside UpLead's range rather than beneath it. The structural advantage is the one nobody prices: there is no renewal date, so there is nothing to diarise and nothing to forfeit. Against UpLead, whose credits are use-it-or-lose-it across a renewal, and Lead411, whose credits survive two months after a subscription ends only if you re-subscribe at the same level, that is a real difference rather than a marketing one.

The vendor's own claim of one quarter the cost of other providers is printed directly above the $99 pack and is false at that price. Tested against this site's figures for Lusha and UpLead, it first becomes true at 7,500 credits, an $899 purchase, and at 15,000 credits, $1,299, respectively.

UpLead, if you are one person and the mobile is the point

$99 a month for 170 credits, or $74 a month billed annually for 2,040 a year, one credit buys both fields, read 5 and 11 August 2026. That puts a record at $0.373 to $0.582.

Its cheapest published rate undercuts Lusha's cheapest by 18% and its dearest still comes in slightly under Lusha's dearest [computed on the corrected basis]. The annual discount is 25% and the page advertises no badge claiming it, which is the opposite of the badge-versus-arithmetic problem on Lusha's own cards.

Three things live in the terms rather than on the pricing page and all three matter. Cancellation requires sixty days' notice, under an FAQ describing the plan as having no long-term commitment. Credits are use it or lose it and do not carry into a renewal. And a contact whose company data has changed costs a fresh credit, so re-enriching an old list is not free. Every self-serve tier is also capped at one user, which is a ceiling rather than a minimum, so a second person means an unpriced annual tier.

LeadMagic and Prospeo, if you want the cheapest credits

LeadMagic at $49.99 for 2,000 credits, $0.150 a complete record, and Prospeo at $49 for 2,000, $0.245. Both read 7 and 21 August 2026, both self-serve, both API-first rather than interface-first.

LeadMagic is the cheapest complete record among subscription vendors here and the crossover arithmetic on the cost-per-contact page shows why that matters: four of its five nearest competitors would need a usable data rate above 100% to beat it on cost, which is impossible, so if they win they win on something other than price. Prospeo is the only one that can, needing a 63% better usable rate, which is reachable.

The catch on LeadMagic is that it has no free tier and says so, offering a fourteen-day refund on the first payment instead, which excludes annual plans on a page this site recorded as defaulting to annual. Prospeo has 100 free credits a month that renew and export, which is one of only three such free tiers in fifteen.

Cognism, if you sell into Europe and can take a sales cycle

No published price, no free tier, no checkout, verified 12 August 2026. Both self-serve tiers are gated behind Talk to sales and there is no figure and no currency anywhere on the page.

It is on this list anyway, because for notified-contact compliance in Europe it is built for the job and Lusha is not, and no unit price fixes a coverage and compliance mismatch. This site also removed an assertion about its contract term on 12 August 2026, because Cognism publishes no contract length anywhere, its terms URL returns a 404, and its pricing page contains zero occurrences of the word annual. We had asserted a commitment the vendor never states.

Which of these is actually cheaper than Lusha?

Five of the ten, and the margins are wider than the tier prices suggest.

The two on-success vendors being dearer is not a criticism of them. They charge only for results and the per-attempt vendors charge for misses, so the nominal gap closes by whatever your failure rate is, and at a low enough hit rate it inverts entirely.

When you should stay on Lusha

• Your motion is email-led and phone numbers are occasional. At one credit an email, Lusha is not the expensive option; it is the expensive option for dialling, which is a different sentence.
• You want the whole meter published. Lusha prices nine separate actions on its own page, including exports and AI search, and no other vendor in this directory does that.
• You are one rep or a very small team, where a five-seat floor elsewhere is dead weight and a 40-credit free tier is a real evaluation.
• Legibility is worth more to you than four cents. Lead411 is eleven times cheaper and its pricing page omits the word seat, does not state its middle tier's export allowance and does not mention the one-year commitment its own checkout shows.

The switch test, before you move anything

What breaks in month three, once you have moved

The unit price you compared in week one is not the cost you carry in month three, and four mechanisms move it. None of them appears on a pricing page and all four are in this site's own records.

Credits expire on schedules nobody reads at checkout. Lusha wipes unused credits at the end of the annual cycle, and annual is the only paid basis it offers. UpLead's are use it or lose it and do not roll into a renewal term. BookYourData's never expire, which is the single largest structural difference on this page and does not show up in a cost-per-record comparison at all. NeverBounce expires pay-as-you-go credits twelve months after purchase. Read the clause, not the badge.

The cancellation term is usually somewhere other than the pricing page. UpLead's terms require sixty days' notice on a plan its own pricing FAQ describes as having no long-term commitment. Lead411's checkout shows a one-year commitment its pricing page never mentions, and neither self-serve tier goes past two seats. The rule that falls out of this site's own corrections is to read the checkout rather than the marketing page, and it is written up in the record of the four times a price on this site was wrong.

Decay eats the list you already bought. B2B contact data goes stale as people change jobs at a rate usually quoted between 2.1 and 3 percent a month. The figure circulates widely, the versions conflict, and no traceable primary study sits behind any of them, so treat it as a working assumption rather than a measurement. Run it forward at 2.5 percent and a list sold as 95 percent accurate is roughly a 70 percent list twelve months later, with nobody having said anything false.

And suppression removes rows you have already paid for. California's DROP platform went live on 2026-01-01 and lets one request delete a person from every registered data broker at once, permanently and with no refund. ZoomInfo's own 10-K names roughly twenty state privacy regimes as of January 2026. Coverage therefore decays for reasons that have nothing to do with your vendor's effort, which is an argument for budgeting re-verification rather than treating a purchased list as an asset.

• Count what proportion of your reveals are phone numbers. Above about a fifth, the 5x multiplier is the whole bill and every vendor at 1x wins. Below a tenth, switching saves less than the migration costs.
• Take 200 records from your real target segment and run them on two vendors' free tiers. Only three of fifteen free tiers both renew and permit export: Hunter, Prospeo and Persana. Prospeo's 100 credits a month covers half the sample.
• Count emails and mobiles separately. They are different datasets at a five-to-one or ten-to-one price ratio, and a blended hit rate hides which one you are buying.
• Check what happens to unspent credits at renewal on every shortlisted vendor. BookYourData never expires, UpLead forfeits at renewal, Lead411 gives two months only on a same-or-higher re-subscription, and Lusha annual wipes the balance at cycle end.
• Ask about the seat ceiling, not the seat minimum. UpLead stops at one user and Lead411 at two, and both then move to unpriced tiers.

So which should you buy?

If you dial and there are one or two of you, Lead411's Spark annual at $0.041 a record is eleven times cheaper than Lusha and nothing else on this table is close. Get the answer on what spends an export before you sign, because the whole figure depends on it.

If you want credits rather than exports, LeadMagic at $0.150 is the floor among subscription vendors and Prospeo at $0.245 is the one alternative that can beat it on price-adjusted quality. If you buy lists occasionally rather than continuously, BookYourData at $0.396 with no expiry and no renewal is a different and better shape of purchase than any subscription at the same rate.

And if what you actually valued about Lusha was that you could read the whole meter and buy it this afternoon, the honest answer is that you should probably stay. Five of these ten are cheaper per record and only one of them publishes as much about how the meter works.

What this page does not know