Lusha Review (2026)

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

Both figures are published, on the same page as the prices, under a heading called Credits breakdown that almost none of the pages ranking for Lusha pricing quote. They decide what this product costs you, because the plans do not sell contacts. They sell credits, and credits buy different things at very different rates.

Lusha is bought for direct dials. The meter charges five times more for a dial than for an email.

What a credit costs

The pricing page opens with a slider: I need a plan with N credits per year. Moving it repositions everything below. At 7,200 credits the recommended plan is Pro at $69.90 a month. At 26,400 credits it is still Pro, at $249.90. The tier name is not the price. Credit volume is the price, and the tier is a label attached to wherever the slider happens to stop.

Which makes cost per credit the only figure worth carrying into a spreadsheet. At list prices, billed annually, read off the vendor's page on 2026-08-05:

Sixteen times the volume buys a fifteen percent better unit price. That is the entire volume curve, and it does not even run in one direction: Premium at 40,800 credits costs more per credit than Pro at 26,400.

There is a discount ladder running down the page, and it is easy to mistake for a volume rate. Starter is badged 25% off, Pro 30%, Premium 35%, under a banner reading Summer Sale on annual plans. The reward for buying bigger is the sale percentage, which has an end date. The price of a credit barely moves.

Run the same division on the sale prices and the ladder inverts in one place. Pro at 7,200 credits works out at $0.082 a credit; Pro at 26,400 works out at $0.086. Buying three and a half times more credits on the same tier makes each one slightly dearer.

The seat charge is a second meter

Pro includes two seats, Premium five, and both cards carry a stepper. Adding a third seat to Pro moved the price from $249.90 to $287.35. The credit allowance stayed at 26,400.

So a seat is $37.45 a month, or $449.40 a year, for access and no data. That is also, to the cent, what a whole Starter plan costs during the sale. And the seat charge landed identically on the struck-through price and the discounted one, which means the sale does not apply to seats.

Where the credits actually go

The rest of the breakdown, from the same page on the same date:

Two rows deserve a second look. Exporting to CSV 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 spreadsheet costs twenty-five times as much, and the pricing page does not draw attention to it.

Conversation intelligence bills eight credits a recorded call. A rep taking twenty calls a day spends 160 credits a day on recordings alone, 3,200 in a working month, 38,400 in a year. That is eight times the entire Starter allowance, from one rep, before a single contact has been revealed.

Annual credits expire, and the annual plan is the discounted one

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 read that against the sale, which applies to annual plans. The cheaper unit price is attached to the plan that confiscates what you do not spend. If your consumption is lumpy, and prospecting usually is, the discount is conditional on a consumption pattern you cannot promise in advance.

The page also disagrees with itself about who can stop a rep spending the pool. 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 before buying Premium expecting it, because on a shared pool with no cap, one rep working a phone-heavy territory can spend the team's year.

Against the vendors it gets compared with

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 the other two publishes a figure, and Cognism will not say how many credits a tier includes.

The disadvantage is the same fact viewed from the other side. A published meter is still a meter, and this one is calibrated so that 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 there.

Free tier, no card, and you can be revealing contacts inside ten minutes. That makes evaluation genuinely cheap, as long as you measure the right thing while it is free.

• Test coverage on phone numbers, not on emails. Forty free credits a month is eight revealed numbers. A small sample, but a real one if you spend it on accounts you already know the answers for.
• Count credits before you count seats. The slider prices the plan from credit volume. Seats are $37.45 a month each on top and carry no credits.
• Pick monthly or annual on your usage shape, not on the discount. Annual is cheaper per credit and wipes the remainder at the end of the cycle. Monthly rolls over to twice the limit.
• Confirm the CRM export rate in writing. The breakdown prices an export to CRM at one credit per record and an export to CSV at one credit per twenty-five, and the vendor's own usage estimator mentions neither.

Two prices are shown against every tier, and this review uses the higher one. The lower is a Summer Sale rate on annual plans, badged 25% off Starter, 30% off Pro and 35% off Premium. A promotion is not a list price, and every figure below built on the sale rate stops being true the day it ends.

Take the sale if the timing suits. Just do not read the ladder as a volume discount you will still be getting at renewal, and do not budget next year off this year's per-credit figure.

One more line for the model: each seat beyond the included ones is $37.45 a month, undiscounted, and grants no credits at all. On a five-person team on Pro that is $1,348 a year buying nothing but logins.