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. Re-read on 2026-08-12, and the whole ladder has been rebuilt since our first pass. The stops are now 40, 24k, 48k, 72k, 96k and 120k+, and every paid card reads billed yearly. The tier name is still 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:

Correction: we published that this curve ran backwards, and on the current page it does not. Our first reading found Premium at 40,800 credits costing more per credit than Pro at 26,400. Re-read on 2026-08-12, the ladder falls at every step, from 9.4 cents a credit on Starter to 7.6 on Premium at 120,000. Twenty-five times the volume still buys only about a nineteen percent better unit price, which is a shallow curve by any standard — but it is a curve, and it points the right way.

There is a discount ladder running down the page, and it is still easy to mistake for a volume rate. Starter is badged 25% off, Pro 30%, Premium 35%, and a separate badge above the slider deepens from 30% to 40% as you ask for more credits. When we first read this page the badges sat under a Summer Sale banner; that banner has gone and the percentages have not. The reward for buying bigger is expressed as a bigger discount from a figure nobody pays, and the price of a credit barely moves.

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 — a worse allowance at a better rate, $0.0857 a credit against $0.0859. The default view is not the cheapest way into Pro.

The seat charge is a second meter

Pro includes two seats, Premium five, and both cards still carry a stepper. On our first pass, adding a third seat to Pro raised the price without moving the credit allowance at all — seats and credits are separate purchases. We have not re-measured the seat increment against the rebuilt ladder, so the mechanism is recorded and the figure is not.

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.

And the rate card confirms the meter this review is built on. A phone number is still 5 credits against 1 for a verified email, an export to CRM is one credit per result where an export to CSV is one credit per 1-25 results, and an API call is one credit per 1-25. Read 2026-08-12.

We previously treated the struck-through figure as the real price and the lower one as a promotion. That was the wrong way round, and the page now makes it plain. There is no monthly billing on any paid tier and no billing toggle anywhere. The only figure a buyer can select is the lower one; the higher one exists to be crossed out.

The discount grows as the slider moves, and that is where the volume pricing actually lives. A badge above the slider reads additional credits: 30% off at 24k, 35% off at 48k and 40% off at 72k and beyond. Lusha expresses volume as a deeper discount from a number nobody pays rather than as a lower unit rate, which is why the per-credit column barely moves while the badges climb.

One line for the model, recorded as a mechanism rather than a figure. Seats beyond the included two on Pro and five on Premium are added with a stepper and grant no credits at all — seats and credits are separate purchases. We measured the increment on the old ladder and have not re-measured it on this one, so the behaviour is published and the number is not.