Apollo vs ZoomInfo vs Lusha: Sales Intelligence Pricing, Credit Math, and the Verified-Contact Cost

A five-seat sales team needs 60,000 verified contacts a year. On Apollo Basic that is a $2,940 annual bill. On Lusha Starter it is $2,245.50 — cheaper on the seat, four times dearer on the contact. On ZoomInfo there is no published bill: the same team starts at a reported $14,995 for three seats.

What each vendor actually sells

Apollo combines a B2B contact database with search filters, email sequences, a parallel dialer, a Chrome extension, CRM sync, deal management, and conversation intelligence. It is the only vendor here that is both a data provider and an engagement platform: the same seat that finds the contact can sequence and call it. Its pricing page publishes four tiers — Free, Basic, Professional, and Organization — plus Custom by quote.

ZoomInfo is an enterprise data platform: contact and company search, buyer intent, website visitor tracking, engagement apps, and conversation intelligence, sold as Sales, Marketing, and Talent packages. No self-serve plan and no free trial of the paid platform — only ZoomInfo Lite, a free tier with 10 credits a month, or 25 with Community Edition.

Lusha is a prospecting tool built around the Chrome extension and the credit pack: search, enrich, and manage contacts and companies. It sells five tiers — Free, Starter, Professional, Premium, and Enterprise — priced per user: the seat buys the allowance, and the allowance buys the contacts.

The published price lists, verified 15 November 2026

Apollo's prices below are from the vendor's own pricing page, read 15 November 2026: the page's published structured data lists Free at $0, Basic at $49, and Professional at $99 per user per month, with Custom by quote. On annual billing — Basic $49, Professional $79, Organization $119 — the credit allowances are 900, 30,000, 48,000, and 72,000 credits per seat per year, confirmed by independent guides. Monthly billing costs more: Basic $65, Professional $99.

Lusha's prices are from the vendor's own pricing page structured data, read 15 November 2026. Starter is $49.90 a month on monthly billing and $37.45 a month on annual billing, billed as $449.10 a year, for 400 credits a month (4,800 a year). Professional is $69.90 monthly and $52.45 annual, billed as $629.10 a year, for 600 a month (7,200 a year). Premium is $399.90 monthly and $299.95 annual, billed as $3,599.10 a year, for 3,400 a month (40,800 a year). Free is $0 for 40 a month; Enterprise is by quote.

ZoomInfo's row is labelled reported for a reason. Its pricing page carries plan names and a sales form, not prices — the call to action is a Get Pricing form that asks for a name and job title before any number appears. The figures come from buyer-reported procurement data, principally Vendr, as compiled by 2026 pricing guides: a median contract of $33,500 a year across roughly 1,573 purchases, range about $7,247 to $156,032, average first-quote saving 22 percent. Tier figures converge — Professional around $14,995 a year for about 3 seats and 5,000 credits, Advanced $21,995 to $30,000, Elite $32,995 to $39,995 or more — but they are reported, not published: treat them as the opening position, not the price.

The credit meter: what one credit buys

The seat price is the sticker. The credit is the cost. Apollo prices every action in credits from one pool per seat: a verified email costs 1 credit, a phone number 8, enrichment 1 to 8, AI research 1 per run, and the U.S. dialer 2 per minute. Credits are pooled across the team, granted upfront each cycle, and unused credits expire at the end of the cycle — plan and add-on credits alike, with no rollover.

Lusha's credit is the pack itself: one monthly allowance per user, spent on contact reveals through the extension and the platform. Lusha does not publish a per-action credit table on its pricing page — the page sells the allowance, not the conversion — so this playbook budgets Lusha on credits, not on contacts. The honest comparison is cost per 1,000 credits.

Example A — Apollo Basic, annual. One seat costs $49 a month on annual billing, $588 a year, for 30,000 credits — $19.60 per 1,000 credits. The same seat on monthly billing costs $65 a month, $780 a year, for the same 30,000 credits — $26.00 per 1,000.

Example B — Apollo Professional, annual. One seat costs $79 a month on annual billing, $948 a year, for 48,000 credits — $19.75 per 1,000, barely above Basic. The Professional premium buys features, not cheaper credits: AI research and lead scoring, A/Z testing, unlimited mailboxes, call recordings, and automated workflows.

Example C — Lusha Starter and Professional, annual. Starter costs $449.10 a year for 4,800 credits — $93.56 per 1,000. Professional costs $629.10 a year for 7,200 credits — $87.38 per 1,000. Premium costs $3,599.10 a year for 40,800 credits — $88.21 per 1,000. Lusha's credit costs roughly four and a half times Apollo's on every tier.

The verified-contact cost: emails versus phone numbers

On Apollo the credit converts directly into contacts, because the per-action charges are published. One credit buys one verified email, so 1,000 verified emails cost $19.60 on Basic. A phone number costs 8 credits, so 1,000 phone numbers cost $156.80, and one Basic seat's whole annual allowance of 30,000 credits buys at most 3,750 phone numbers.

On Lusha the conversion is not published, so the playbook does not print one. A buyer who needs a phone-number cost from Lusha should run a one-month Starter pack and count the reveals per credit on real prospects — the measured conversion, not the marketing page, is the number that belongs in the budget. The same discipline applies to ZoomInfo: at the reported Professional figure of $14,995 a year for 5,000 credits, 1,000 credits cost about $2,999 — a reported contract divided by a reported allowance, so verify both numbers in the quote first.

Team math: 1 seat and 5 seats, annual billing

The 5-seat ZoomInfo figure needs its assumption stated plainly. Professional at the reported $14,995 covers about 3 seats; a 5-seat team needs two extra seats, reported at $2,000 to $8,000 each. At $3,000 per extra seat — inside the reported range — the total is $14,995 plus $6,000, which is $20,995. At the top of the reported range the same team pays $30,995.

Example D — the 60,000-contact year. The five-seat team from the opening needs 60,000 verified emails a year. On Apollo Basic, five seats carry 150,000 credits — more than double the need — for $2,940, and the 60,000 emails consume 60,000 credits, costing $1,176 of the allowance at $19.60 per 1,000. On Lusha Starter, five seats carry 24,000 credits for $2,245.50 — less than half the need — so the team must buy more credits or a higher tier before the year is half over. On ZoomInfo Professional, the reported 5,000-credit allowance covers one twelfth of the need, and the overage meter — reported at roughly $0.20 to $0.60 per credit — becomes the real bill.

The accuracy ceiling nobody publishes

None of the three vendors publishes an independently audited accuracy rate on its pricing page. Apollo's page carries customer testimonials — one reports email deliverability rising from 72 percent to 94 percent — but a testimonial is not an audit. ZoomInfo's scale is a trust signal, not a measured error rate. Lusha publishes a 4.3 aggregate rating from 1,619 reviews in its structured data, which measures satisfaction, not correctness.

The honest ceiling is the buyer's own test. Run 500 known contacts — people whose real email and phone you already hold — through each vendor's enrichment before signing, and measure the match rate, the bounce rate, and the stale-title rate yourself. A vendor that matches 480 of 500 beats a vendor that matches 420. Budget the test into the decision: Apollo Free carries 900 credits a year and Lusha Free 40 credits a month, so the test is free on both, while ZoomInfo Lite's 10 free credits a month cannot run it.

The decision table

Who should not buy what

Do not buy ZoomInfo for a solo seller or a five-seat team that only needs emails: the reported entry contract is $14,995 a year for three seats, the credits are the thinnest in the comparison, and the annual auto-renewal locks the spend before the team knows its real consumption. Do not buy Lusha Premium for email prospecting at scale: at $88.21 per 1,000 credits it costs four and a half times Apollo's rate for the same verified email, and the premium buys volume, not a discount. Do not buy Apollo Organization for a team under three seats — the three-seat minimum means the smallest Organization bill is $4,284 a year. Do not choose on the seat price alone: Lusha Starter is the cheapest seat and the dearest contact.

The engagement-sequencing half of this decision lives in the Salesloft vs Outreach vs Apollo sales engagement pricing playbook, which prices the cadence, dialer, and AI-credit meters that sit on top of the data. The cold-email sending half lives in the Lemlist vs Instantly vs Smartlead cold-email pricing playbook. This playbook prices the data itself.

Buying checklist

• [x] Step 1 — Count the need: Verified emails and phone numbers per rep per month, for the next 12 months. Phone numbers cost 8 Apollo credits each — count them separately.
• [x] Step 2 — Price the credit: Divide each annual cost by its annual credits. Apollo Basic $19.60, Lusha Starter $93.56 per 1,000.
• [x] Step 3 — Run the accuracy test: Enrich 500 known contacts on Apollo Free and Lusha Free and measure the match rate yourself. ZoomInfo Lite cannot run this test — ask sales for a trial allowance in writing.
• [x] Step 4 — Price the team: Multiply the per-seat annual price by real headcount. Apollo seats must all sit on one plan; ZoomInfo's reported $14,995 covers about 3 seats.
• [x] Step 5 — Calendar the traps: Apollo credit expiry at each cycle end; ZoomInfo auto-renewal 60 days before the renewal date.
• [x] Step 6 — Buy annual, once: Annual billing cuts Apollo Basic by 25 percent and Lusha Starter by 25 percent. Never start on monthly billing unless the app is a 30-day trial.

Run the five-seat total for your own team shape through the ROI calculator before signing: the calculator turns the annual bill into a payback period.