Lusha Pricing: 5 Credits a Phone Number, 1 an Email

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

Both numbers are published, on the same page as the prices, under a heading called Credits breakdown. They decide what Lusha costs you far more than the tier name does, because the plans do not sell contacts. They sell credits, and credits buy very different things at very different rates.

Which matters because the field most buyers open an account for is the field the meter charges five times over for.

Think of it as a taxi that bills separately for distance and for stops. The fare on the window tells you what an hour costs. It does not tell you what your journey costs, and the two diverge fastest for the passenger who does the thing the taxi is famous for.

What follows: the full ladder with cost per credit at every stop, the four discounts recomputed against the badges that claim them, what five credits is in money, the export rule that costs twenty-five times more into a CRM than into a spreadsheet, a correction naming three different Lusha credit rates this site has published, and the one contradiction on the page worth getting answered in writing before you buy Premium.

What does Lusha cost?

Starter is $37.45 a month and every paid card reads billed yearly. Pro runs $171.45 to $188.95 and Premium $308.70 to $754.95, depending on where you leave the credit slider. There is a permanent free tier at 40 credits a month, one seat, no card.

Read that first sentence again for the part that surprises people. There is no monthly billing on any paid tier and no billing toggle anywhere on the page. The only figure a buyer can select is the annual one.

The per-credit column is the only one worth carrying into a spreadsheet, because the tier name is a label attached to wherever the slider happens to stop. Move the slider and the plan name stays put while the price and the allowance both move.

What the struck-through number is for

A struck-through price is a figure printed beside the one you can buy, so that the one you can buy looks smaller. It is not a former price you missed, and on this page it is not selectable in any state of the slider.

This site got that backwards once. An earlier reading treated the struck-through figure as the real price and the lower one as a promotion. The page makes it plain that the opposite is true, and the correction matters because dividing by the wrong one inflates every downstream number by about a third.

When the badges first appeared they sat under a Summer Sale banner. The banner has gone. The percentages have not, which is the usual sign that a sale price is simply the price.

The badges claim more than the two numbers describe

Each card carries a badge: 25% off Starter, 30% off Pro, 35% off Premium. Divide the selectable figure by the struck-through one on the same card and three of the four rows come out lower than the badge.

Starter is honest to within a rounding error. Pro is 5.4 points short. Premium is 1.6 points short at one slider position and 12.2 points short at another, on the same card, under the same badge.

The mechanism is simple once you see it. The badge is fixed per tier. The struck-through figure moves with the slider, and it does not move in step with the selectable one, so the gap the two numbers actually describe drifts as you ask for more credits. A buyer scaling up reads a badge that says the discount is deepening while the arithmetic says it is thinning.

There is a separate badge above the slider that deepens from 30% to 40% as you ask for more credits, and it is worded as applying to additional credits rather than to the plan price. That is a different claim about a different quantity, and this site has not verified it. It is named here so nobody reads the table above as a rebuttal of it.

The volume curve is real, and it is nearly flat

Twenty-five times the credit volume buys about a nineteen percent better unit price. From 9.4 cents a credit on Starter at 4,800 credits a year, down to 7.6 cents on Premium at 120,000.

This is worth stating as a correction rather than a finding. An earlier reading of this page found the curve running backwards, with Premium at 40,800 credits costing more per credit than Pro at 26,400. On the rebuilt ladder read 2026-08-12 it falls at every step. It is a shallow curve by any standard, and it points the right way.

One inversion does survive, inside a single tier. The page opens with the slider at its leftmost stop, and in that state Pro is quoted at $188.95 for 26,400 credits. Slide right to the 24k mark and Pro drops to $171.45 for 24,000, which is a worse allowance at a better rate: $0.0857 a credit against $0.0859. The view the page loads on is not the cheapest way into Pro.

The annual totals Lusha never prints

Every paid card says billed yearly and every card shows a monthly figure. The number a buyer signs for appears nowhere.

Those are twelve times the row above and nothing more, which is the only honest way to state a yearly cost for a product that quotes monthly and bills annually. They are arithmetic on Lusha's published rates, not figures Lusha prints.

So what does a phone number cost in money?

Between 38 and 47 cents at list, on the price a buyer can actually select.

The last row deserves more attention than it usually gets. A rep taking twenty calls a day spends 160 credits a day on recordings alone, 3,200 in a working month and 38,400 in a year. That is eight times the entire Starter allowance, from one rep, before a single contact has been revealed.

This site has published three different Lusha credit rates

That last one is the traceable error, and it is instructive. $49.90 is the struck-through figure. The selectable figure is $37.45, and $37.45 across the same 400 credits a month is $0.0936 [computed]. The gap between the two is the sale badge, applied to a page that has no sale on it.

Follow it downstream. The census prints a Lusha contact with an email and a phone at $0.749, and the review's FAQ puts a Lusha phone number at roughly 53 to 62 cents. On the selectable basis those become $0.564 and $0.47 [computed]. Nothing about Lusha changed between the two readings. Only the column being divided did.

It is published here rather than quietly fixed because a page telling you the vendor's card misleads has no standing unless it also says when its own arithmetic did. The correction runs in Lusha's favour, which is the direction a directory is least likely to catch on its own.

Where the rest of the credits go

The full breakdown, from the same page on the same date. Nine actions, nine rates, and this is the table almost nobody quotes.

Read rows three and four together. Exporting to a spreadsheet costs one credit per twenty-five records. Exporting to your CRM costs one credit per record. Moving the same hundred contacts into Salesforce rather than into a CSV costs twenty-five times as much, and the pricing page draws no attention to it.

That is not a trap so much as a toll on the workflow every buyer intends to run. Nobody buys contact data to leave it in a spreadsheet.

Annual credits expire, and annual is the only plan there is

Monthly plans roll unused credits forward and let them accumulate to twice the plan limit. Annual plans grant everything up front and reset whatever is left at the end of the cycle.

Now set that against the fact that every paid tier is annual. The plan carrying the discount is the same plan that confiscates what you do not spend, and there is no other plan to move to. If your consumption is lumpy, and prospecting usually is, the unit price you computed above is a ceiling on value you may not reach.

Cancellation is at any time, effective at the end of the cycle, with credits usable until then. That is more forgiving than most of this category and it does not give you the money back.

The seat is a second meter, and the sale does not touch it

Pro includes two seats and Premium five. Both cards carry a stepper for more.

Adding a seat raises the price and does not move the credit allowance at all. So a seat is $37.45 a month, or $449.40 a year [computed], for access and no data, which is to the cent what a whole Starter plan costs. The seat charge landed identically on the struck-through price and the discounted one, meaning the discount does not apply to seats.

Who can stop one rep spending the team's year?

The page disagrees with itself. The plan comparison lists credit allocation as a Premium feature. The FAQ says limiting credit usage per user is available on Scale plans, which is the tier above it.

Get that answered in writing before buying Premium expecting it. On a shared pool with no per-user cap, one rep working a phone-heavy territory spends five credits a dial against a colleague's one credit an email, and the annual allowance is gone in a quarter. The behaviour of a credit balance when it runs out is the part of these products nobody evaluates until it happens.

Is the free tier enough to decide?

It is enough to answer one question and not the others.

Forty credits a month, one seat, no card. That is forty email reveals or eight phone numbers. Eight is a small sample and a real one if you spend it on accounts whose contact details you already know, because then a miss is unambiguous. Spend it on strangers and you learn nothing, because you cannot tell a wrong number from a number you failed to check.

What it cannot tell you is what your consumption shape looks like across a month of real work, and consumption shape is what decides which slider stop you need.

How to size a Lusha plan before you pay

• Spend the forty free credits on phone numbers, not emails. Eight reveals against accounts you can independently verify. The phone is the field costing five times the rate and the field the product is bought for.
• Count credits, then count seats, in that order. The slider prices the plan from credit volume. Seats are a separate charge carrying no credits.
• Walk the slider to every stop before choosing. The page does not open on the cheapest way into Pro, and the tier name will not tell you when you have crossed into a better unit rate.
• Model your export path, not just your reveal path. One credit per twenty-five to CSV and one credit per record to CRM is a twenty-five-fold difference on the step every buyer intends to take.
• Ask which tier can cap a rep's usage, and get the answer in writing, because the plan comparison and the FAQ give different answers.
• Divide the selectable price, never the struck-through one. This site got that wrong on one of its own pages and the error inflated every downstream figure by about a third.

Lusha against the vendors that publish nothing

Here is the whole data-research shelf in this directory on the two things Lusha does publish and most of its rivals do not: a rate a buyer can select without a call, and a date on which somebody actually read it. Twenty-four tools, every value taken from this site's own entity records.

Seventeen of the twenty-four carry an entry price in the record and seven do not. Two of those seven publish something the monthly field cannot hold rather than nothing at all: BookYourData sells credits outright at $99 for 250, and Dropcontact prices in euros. Nineteen sell without a sales call, fourteen run a free tier, and two carry no read date at all, which is a different problem from a high price and is flagged in both rows rather than smoothed over. Across the full directory of 264 tools the same counts are 114 publishing no rate and 108 with no self-serve checkout, so the data category is unusually open by the standards of the site, and Lusha is at the open end of it.

Lusha's advantage over ZoomInfo and Cognism is not coverage. It is that you can read the price, buy it this afternoon, and compute the unit cost without speaking to anyone. Neither of those two publishes a figure, and Cognism will not say how many credits a tier includes.

So Lusha is dearer per record than three vendors that publish and infinitely cheaper to evaluate than three that do not. That is the actual trade, and it is a reasonable one for a buyer whose alternative is a sales cycle.

The disadvantage is the same fact from the other side. A published meter is still a meter, and this one is calibrated so the phone numbers Lusha is known for are the most expensive thing on it. Apollo bundles sequencing and a dialer into its published price. Lusha sells data and stops.

When Lusha is the wrong purchase

When your motion is phone-first. Five credits a dial against one an email is the whole meter, and a calling team burns the annual allowance at five times the rate the plan was sized at.

When you sell into Europe. Cognism is built for notified-contact requirements and Lusha is not, and no unit price fixes a coverage and compliance mismatch.

When your consumption is lumpy. Annual is the only paid basis, annual credits reset at the end of the cycle, and a quarter of dead pipeline burns credits you have already paid for and cannot carry.

And when what you actually wanted was sequencing on the same bill. That is a different purchase with a published price, and the three-way comparison of contact database shapes is the page for it.

What this page does not know