Cold Email Pricing Per Inbox: Almost Nobody Charges That Way

"What does cold email software cost per inbox?" is the question people search, and the honest answer is that almost none of it is sold that way. Instantly, Woodpecker and lemlist's Email plan all include unlimited sending accounts. Snov.io includes unlimited senders. Only lemlist's Multichannel plan ties sender count to the thing you pay for, at five senders per user.

That is not evasion on the vendors' part. Mailbox count stopped being a useful thing to charge for once outbound teams started spreading volume across a dozen accounts as standard practice. What replaced it is four different meters, and working out your cost means picking the right one.

What each platform includes for sending accounts

Read the last column rather than the third. Four meters are in play — prospects, recipients, messages and seats — and the one that fits your work decides your bill far more than any headline rate does.

Where the per-inbox cost actually sits

With the software, nowhere. With the mailbox provider, everywhere. Every one of those "unlimited" allowances means the platform will not charge you for connecting an account; each account is still a real mailbox at Google, Microsoft or a smaller provider, billed by them per user per month, and none of the figures above includes that.

So the real per-inbox arithmetic is: your provider's per-user rate, multiplied by however many mailboxes you decided you needed, plus one flat platform subscription that does not move when the count does. This site does not recommend a mailbox provider and earns nothing from any of them; what it can say is that the variable cost lives there and the fixed cost lives with the platform.

Two of the platforms also sell mailboxes themselves as an add-on — Apollo lists "Domain & Mailbox Purchasing" from Basic, and Hunter's pricing page offers custom domains and email accounts as a paid extra. Neither publishes that as part of the plan price, so neither appears in the table above.

How many mailboxes a programme actually needs is a separate question, and the answer is usually fewer than guides suggest. It is covered in the sending setup guide, along with the reason each extra one costs more than money.

The comparison that does work: cost per contacted person

If per-inbox is the wrong unit, the useful one is what it costs to write to a person — because that is the act that consumes someone's attention and carries the legal obligations.

Woodpecker makes it trivial, because that is literally its meter: $7.00 per 100 prospects monthly, or $4.67 per 100 on the annual term. Seven cents a person, or under five.

For the message-metered tools it depends on sequence length, and the difference is large. Instantly's Growth plan allows 5,000 emails a month for $47.00. A four-step sequence spends four messages per person, so 5,000 messages reaches 1,250 people — about 3.8 cents each. A two-step sequence reaches 2,500 people at about 1.9 cents each. Same plan, same money, and the cost per person doubles purely on how many times you follow up.

Snov.io sidesteps that entirely: it counts recipients rather than messages, and its documentation says follow-ups to the same person within a billing period are free. Starter's 5,000 recipients at $39.00 is 0.8 cents a person regardless of sequence length — though its 1,000-credit allowance will bind first if the list is also sourced through Snov.io, which is the structural point made in the Snov.io review.

And Apollo is per seat, so the cost per contacted person depends on how hard one person works rather than on any published allowance.

Sizing it for a real team

Take a two-person consultancy writing a four-step sequence to 500 new companies a month, all on annual terms, and the picture separates immediately.

• Woodpecker meters exactly that: 500 prospects at $4.67 per hundred is $23.33 a month, with the mailboxes and both team members included.
• Instantly Growth at $37.60 allows 5,000 messages; four steps to 500 people is 2,000, so it fits with room to spare.
• Snov.io Starter at $29.25 allows 5,000 recipients, which is ten times what is needed — but only 1,000 credits, which will bind if the 500 companies are being researched there too.
• lemlist Email at $55.00 allows 50,000 messages, twenty-five times what is needed, for both people.
• Apollo Basic at $49.00 per seat is $98.00 a month for the two of them, and is being bought for the database rather than the sending.

The spread is $23.33 to $98.00 for the same work, and nothing in that range is explained by inbox count. It is explained by which meter the vendor chose. The full pricing of each sits in the platform comparison.

Why the meter changed

Sending accounts used to be the obvious thing to charge for, because a mailbox was a seat and a seat was a person. Outbound broke that link. Once teams began spreading a single campaign across several sending accounts, charging per mailbox meant charging one person several times for doing one job, and every vendor that tried it was undercut by one that did not.

What replaced it is the four meters in the table above, and each one is a bet about what the customer values. Woodpecker bets you care about people. Instantly and lemlist bet you care about volume. Apollo bets you care about the database and will bring your own mailboxes. None of those is wrong, and the reason the prices look incomparable is that they are answers to different questions.

The one case where sender count really is the price

lemlist's Multichannel plan gives five senders per user at $109.00 a month, or $87.00 on the yearly term. Needing a sixth sender means buying a second user, which means $87.00 more. That is the only arrangement among the five where adding a mailbox has a direct, published price attached to it.

For teams that genuinely need multichannel sequencing it may still be the right plan; the point is only that it is the one place where the per-inbox question has a real number in it, and the number is $87.00 for every five.