Who writes this, and what it will not claim

What is covered

Sending platforms for cold outreach, the email finders and enrichment databases that feed them, and the domain-and-mailbox setup that has to exist before any of it runs. Five platforms are covered in depth because five partner programmes have been read; several more are named where they are relevant and linked plainly.

What is not covered: newsletters and opted-in marketing email, which are a different activity with different rules and different products; mailbox and email hosting; and general-purpose CRMs. Those decisions deserve their own research and doing them badly alongside this one would serve nobody.

How a price gets onto this site

It is read off the vendor's own pricing page, in a browser configured as a United States visitor — locale, timezone and language header all set — because vendors localise and a dollar figure seen from somewhere else is a vantage point rather than a price. Hunter served euros to that browser anyway, and its figures appear here in euros and are never converted.

Then every billing term is clicked and the cards are read again after each click, out of the page itself. Where a vendor's own panels disagree, both are printed and the gap is stated. Every figure is listed in the site's facts file with the document it came from and the day it was read.

What has not been done

No campaign has been sent through any of these platforms. There is no test account, no sample list and no measurement of delivery, replies or revenue, and so there are no such numbers anywhere on this site. Someone who tells you a tool achieves a given inbox rate has either measured their own list, which tells you little about yours, or is repeating marketing.

Reading a pricing page is also not the same as living with a product. This site can tell you that a plan includes 5,000 emails a month and that unused credits expire; it cannot tell you whether the sequence builder is pleasant on a Tuesday afternoon, or how support behaves when something breaks.

The legal material

Where this site describes a rule, the rule comes from the body that made it: the Federal Trade Commission's own compliance guide for CAN-SPAM, the Information Commissioner's Office's own guidance on PECR and on business-to-business marketing, and the platforms' own published terms. Each is quoted with its date, and the ICO's PECR guidance currently carries its own warning that it is under review following the Data (Use and Access) Act.

None of it is legal advice, and this site has no lawyers. It is a description of what the regulators have published, written for someone about to make a decision, and it is worth reading the source pages it links rather than trusting the summary.

Corrections

Prices move and pages get rewritten. Anything found to be wrong is fixed and the date on the page moves with it; the previous figure is not quietly swapped out of the facts file but marked with what replaced it. If a vendor believes something here misreads its page, the fastest route is the contact page with a link to the panel in question.