Cold email software, compared by what each one actually charges for

Five platforms are covered here, and the first useful thing to say about them is that they do not sell the same thing. Instantly bills for messages sent. Woodpecker bills for people contacted. Apollo bills for seats, each holding a pot of lookup credits. Until you know which meter you are standing in front of, a price is a number with nothing attached to it.

Every figure below was read off the vendor's own pricing page on 24 September 2026, in a browser set to the United States, with each billing term clicked and the cards re-read after every click. That last part matters more than it sounds: two of these pages open on a panel that is not the one a reader assumes, and one of them prints three figures that do not reconcile with each other.

Nothing here has been tested. No campaign has been sent through any of these tools from this desk, so there are no open rates, no reply rates and no inbox-placement numbers on this page or anywhere else on this site.

The meter, before the money

Ask what a platform counts and the shortlist mostly writes itself.

• Messages sent. Instantly's Growth plan allows 5,000 emails a month; its Hypergrowth plan allows either 100,000 or 125,000, depending on which part of its pricing page you read. lemlist's Email plan allows 50,000 a month and does not care how many people you send them to.
• People contacted. Woodpecker charges $7.00 per 100 contacted prospects and gives the mailboxes away. Snov.io counts recipients — a prospect costs one recipient the first time you write to them, and every follow-up in that billing period is free.
• Seats, with credits inside. Apollo charges per seat and drops a yearly allowance of lookup credits into each one. lemlist's Multichannel plan is also per user.

A two-person agency writing to 400 carefully chosen companies a month and a four-person team blasting 80,000 messages are not in the same market, and the cheapest headline price will be wrong for at least one of them.

Instantly: unlimited mailboxes from $47.00, on a page that argues with itself

Instantly's Growth plan is $47.00 a month. That is the third-cheapest entry in this group — Woodpecker's 500-prospect setting is $35.00 and Snov.io's Starter is $39.00 — but it is the cheapest of the plans that meter by messages sent, and it includes unlimited email accounts and unlimited warm-up on every tier. Hypergrowth is $97.00 and Light Speed is $358.00.

The page carries a Monthly/Yearly switch above the cards. It is worth finding, because it is easy to miss and because it does not behave like a normal control: it ignored every scripted click and moved only under a real mouse click on the knob. On the annual side, Growth is $37.60, Hypergrowth is $77.60 and Light Speed is $286.30 — and each of those is still captioned "/monthly". The page never prints a yearly total anywhere.

Three of Instantly's own numbers do not line up, and they are worth knowing before you budget:

1. Hypergrowth's allowance is 125,000 emails a month on the monthly panel and 100,000 on the annual panel. The page's own comparison table, which does not move when the switch does, says 100,000. Two of the page's three statements say the lower figure.
2. Growth and Hypergrowth are exactly 20% off on the annual term. Light Speed is printed at $286.30, where 20% off $358.00 is $286.40.
3. Switch to the Instantly Credits tab and the annual discount changes size: 20% on Growth, but $97.00 becomes $87.30 on Supersonic and $197.00 becomes $177.30 on Hyper Credits, which is 10%.

None of that is a scandal. It is a pricing page that has been edited more often than it has been proofread, and it means a budget built from the card you happened to land on can be out by a quarter. Read the panel you are actually buying. The full write-up of Instantly's plans and credits goes through the credit tab as well.

lemlist: flat for email, per user for everything else

lemlist opens on its yearly panel, so the first prices a visitor sees are the discounted ones. On the monthly term, the Email plan is $69.00 a month and the Multichannel plan is $109.00. On the quarterly term they are $62.00 and $99.00. On the yearly term they are $55.00 and $87.00.

The structural difference between those two plans matters more than the $40.00 between them. The Email plan is flat: unlimited users, unlimited email senders, 50,000 emails a month. The Multichannel plan is per user, with five senders per user, and adds LinkedIn, SMS, WhatsApp and calling. A four-person team on Multichannel pays four times the headline. A four-person team on Email pays once.

lemlist's data add-ons are where its credits live: $20.00 a month, or $16.00 on the yearly term, buys 2,000 credits a month, which the page itself translates as "400 emails or 100 phones". That translation is the most honest sentence on any pricing page in this group, because it tells you what a credit is: five of them for an email address, twenty for a phone number. The page also says unused credits roll over without limit.

Snov.io: the arithmetic that actually adds up

Snov.io opens on its monthly panel. Starter is $39.00 a month and Pro S is $99.00. On the annual term they are $29.25 and $74.25, captioned "Save $117/year" and "Save $297/year" respectively. Both captions are exactly right, which sounds like faint praise until you have read the other four pages.

Starter buys 1,000 credits, 5,000 recipients, three email warm-ups and unlimited team seats. Pro S buys 5,000 credits, 25,000 recipients and unlimited warm-ups. Two separate meters run side by side: credits for finding and verifying addresses, recipients for writing to them.

Snov.io is also the only vendor here whose documentation says plainly what most buyers assume is impossible. Its knowledge base explains that it charges one credit for a "green" address it has verified as valid, and one credit for a "yellow" one it could not fully verify. Nothing is charged for an address it fails to find or knows to be dead. That is a fair policy, clearly stated, and it is also the clearest proof that a credit is a lookup and not an outcome.

Apollo: a database that sequences, billed per seat

Apollo is the odd one out. It is primarily a B2B contact database with sequencing attached, rather than a sending tool that happens to have data, and it prices like a sales platform: per seat, with a credit allowance inside each seat.

Its page opens on the annual panel under a banner reading "SAVE 24%". On that panel, Basic is $49.00 per seat per month, Professional is $79.00 and Organization is $119.00 with a three-seat minimum. On the monthly panel the same three plans are $65.00, $99.00 and $149.00 — and the monthly panel labels Organization "Annual Only", which is a price for something the same panel says you cannot buy that way.

The banner is true of one plan. Moving Basic from monthly to annual saves 24.6%; the same move on Professional saves 20.2% and on Organization 20.1%. Budget Professional at the banner's own 24% and you expect $75.24 a seat a month where you pay $79.00 — $45.12 a seat a year.

Apollo's credits are the strictest in this group in one respect and the clearest in another. An email costs one credit and a phone number costs eight, both stated outright on its own credits page, and you are only charged for an address Apollo can verify. But: "Your credits expire at the end of each billing cycle. Credits do not roll over into the following billing cycle or upon renewal." On an annual plan the whole year's allowance unlocks at the start, and whatever is left at the end is gone.

Woodpecker: priced by the people you write to

Woodpecker does not sell inboxes, messages or seats. It sells contacted prospects, on a slider, at $7.00 per 100 on the monthly term. At the 500-prospect setting that is $35.00 a month, and the plan throws in 8,000 emails a month, two warm-ups, unlimited email verification, unlimited team members and unlimited email accounts, each marked free on the page.

For a small team writing carefully to a short list, that is the cheapest honest arrangement here, because the thing being metered is the thing you are actually doing. On the annual term the rate drops to $4.67 per 100 and the same setting prints "$24 /monthly" alongside "$420 $280 billed anually" — the vendor's spelling — and a $140.00 saving.

Those figures do not quite agree either: $24.00 a month for twelve months is $288.00, which is $8.00 more than the $280.00 the same panel says will be billed. The true monthly equivalent of $280.00 is $23.33. It is a rounding artefact rather than a trap, but it is the third pricing page in five to disagree with itself, which stops being a coincidence.

Woodpecker's feature list also claims "GDPR 100% compliant" and "CCPA 100% compliant". That is the vendor's claim about its own software, and it is not the same claim as your sending being lawful — see the rules, taken from the regulators.

What none of them sell you

Not one of these platforms sells a list you may lawfully write to, and several of them sell something that looks like one. A database of 450 million business contacts is a database of personal data about 450 million people, and the question of whether you may send any of them a sales email is answered by a regulator, not by a vendor's filters.

Nor does any of them sell delivery. Warm-up features, mailbox rotation and deliverability dashboards are real and useful, and what they do is make sure a message you were entitled to send is not discarded for a technical reason. They do not make an unwanted message wanted, and this site will not describe any technique for making one look like something it is not. The setup that does belong before a first send — a separate domain, authentication records, a realistic ramp — is on the sending setup page.

Choosing in one pass

1. Count your people, not your messages. If the honest number is a few hundred a month, Woodpecker's meter matches what you are doing and its mailbox allowance costs nothing extra.
2. Count your seats. Anything per-user — Apollo throughout, lemlist's Multichannel plan — multiplies. A flat plan at a higher headline can be cheaper at three people than a per-seat plan at a lower one.
3. Decide whether you are buying data or sending. If you need addresses more than you need a sequencer, Apollo and Snov.io are competing for that job and the finder comparison is the relevant page, not this one.
4. Then look at the term. The annual discounts here run from 10% to 33% and are not uniform within a single vendor, let alone between them.

There is no winner at the top of this page because the five tools are not answering the same question. What can be said without qualification is which one has the clearest pricing: Snov.io's savings captions are the only ones in the group that reconcile exactly with its own monthly rates, and it is also the only vendor that documents what it charges for an address it could not verify.