Free Cold Email Software: What the Free Tiers Actually Give You

There is no free cold email sending platform among the tools covered on this site. Every one of the five charges from the first month. What exists instead is free tiers on the data side, sized to let you check whether the database covers your market, and one genuinely free component that every outbound programme needs.

That is a less satisfying answer than the search deserves, so this page sets out exactly what each free tier contains, converts the allowances into things you can count, and says where the money starts.

The three free tiers, converted into lookups

Apollo's is the most usable of the three and it is still an evaluation allowance. Seventy-five credits a month is seventy-five email addresses if you take nothing else, and about nine phone numbers if you take those instead, because Apollo charges 8 credits for a number against 1 for an address. Two sequences and identification of 20 website-visiting companies a month come with it.

Hunter's free plan is the only one of the three that includes any sending at all — one connected email account and 500 recipients per sequence. Its 50 monthly credits cover the finder, verifier and domain search, though its pricing page never states how many credits one lookup consumes, so this page does not either.

Snov.io's 50 credits are a sample of the database rather than a working tier. Both of its paid plans then start at $39.00 a month, or $29.25 on the annual term.

What a free tier is genuinely good for

Checking coverage, and nothing else. The question a free tier answers well is whether a given database actually holds the people you sell to — which varies enormously by country, company size and industry, and which no vendor's marketing will tell you honestly.

Seventy-five lookups is plenty for that. Pick twenty companies you know well, look for the people you already know work there, and see how many come back with a current address and a correct title. A database that misses half of a list you can verify yourself will miss more of one you cannot.

What a free tier is not good for is running a programme. Fifty to seventy-five records a month is below the threshold at which outbound does anything at all, and the sending side of every free tier here is either absent or capped at a single mailbox.

The part that is genuinely free, permanently

The authentication setup. SPF, DKIM and DMARC records are DNS entries at whoever manages your domain, and they cost nothing beyond the time to add them. They are also the part of the stack with the clearest published requirements — Microsoft asks domains sending more than 5,000 emails a day into Outlook.com for SPF to pass, DKIM to pass and DMARC at "At least p=none".

A suppression list is free too, and is a spreadsheet until it needs to be anything more. The ICO describes keeping a "do not email or text" list of businesses that object as good practice; US law makes honouring an opt-out within 10 business days an obligation. Neither requires software.

Google Postmaster Tools costs nothing, has no affiliate programme and never will, and shows you what one large provider thinks of your sending domain. It is named here on merit and pays this site nothing, like every source and free tool on this page. The whole free half of the setup is in the sending setup guide.

Where the money actually starts

Sooner than the free tiers imply, and in a smaller amount than most people expect. The cheapest genuinely workable arrangement among the platforms compared here is Woodpecker at its 500-prospect setting: $35.00 a month, or $23.33 on the annual term, with unlimited mailboxes, unlimited team members, unlimited email verification and two warm-ups included.

Against that, Instantly's Growth plan at $47.00 monthly or $37.60 annually allows 5,000 messages, and Snov.io's Starter at $39.00 or $29.25 allows 1,000 credits and 5,000 recipients. None of those is a large amount of money relative to the cost of the mailboxes and the time spent writing the sequence, which is the honest framing: the software is rarely the expensive part.

The full set, with what each one meters, is in the platform comparison.

Free trials, which are not the same thing

Several of the paid platforms offer a time-limited trial rather than a free tier, and the distinction matters for planning. Woodpecker advertises a 14-day free trial with all features included and no card required; Apollo offers a 14-day trial on Basic and Professional alongside its permanent free plan; lemlist's buttons read "Start free trial".

A trial answers a different question from a free tier. A tier lets you keep checking coverage indefinitely at a trickle; a trial lets you run the real thing briefly. For evaluating whether a sequencer suits how you work, the trial is the better instrument, and it is worth starting one only when the list and the sequence are already written — otherwise most of the fortnight goes on setup.

The free thing that costs the most

A list you did not pay for. Free lists, scraped exports and files that arrive from a contact are the cheapest possible way to acquire records and the most expensive way to acquire obligations — you cannot document where any of it came from, which makes the ICO's requirement to provide privacy information "no later than one month from the date of collection" impossible to satisfy, and you have no idea which entries are sole traders, who under PECR are treated as individuals and may not be emailed without consent.

A paid database at least tells you what it is and when you got it. What it still cannot tell you is whether you may write to any given person — that is the rules, from the regulators, and the answer differs by country and by the legal form of the recipient.