What a B2B data provider costs per contact, and how to calculate it

An email found through a B2B data provider costs us $0.007 and a mobile number $0.12, measured on our own accounts on 21 September 2026. The provider's public price list says $0.008 and $0.15, and the gap comes from how we query the database. This article shows the calculation, run on Airscale, so you can repeat it on any provider you're evaluating.

Count what an email and a mobile really cost you

Neither number tells you what a contact costs, because both ignore which plan you're on and how often the provider comes back empty-handed.

First input: the real cost of one credit on your plan. We read Airscale's pricing page on 25 September 2026, and the spread between tiers is wide. The Starter plan is $49 a month for 4,000 credits, which the page itself prices at $0.01225 per credit. The Pro plan is $99 for 12,000 credits, at $0.00825 per credit. The Growth plan starts at $189 for 25,000 credits and the per-credit cost drops to $0.00756. Same database, same finds, and the credit you spend depends entirely on the tier you picked. If you're comparing providers on their entry plan, you're comparing them at their worst price.

Second input: credits per find. On the same page, Airscale states that a verified professional email costs 2 credits, and that you're not charged when no email is found. That last sentence is worth more than the whole pricing table. Some providers charge for the attempt. When they do, your cost per found contact is the attempt price divided by the hit rate, and the hit rate is a number no provider we've audited publishes, because it depends entirely on your market and how you query. That's why we run it on our own accounts: on Airscale, an email lands at $0.007 once the invoice has been through, against the $0.008 displayed on the pricing grid.

Third input: what you actually asked for. A direct dial costs more than an email on every provider we've seen, and a generic company contact costs less than a named decision-maker. If you blend them in one export, your average cost per contact means nothing. Split the bill by contact type before you compare anything, because a provider can look expensive on emails and cheap on phone numbers, and the reverse for the account next door.

Put the three together and you have the only number worth arguing about: dollars per found contact, per type, on your plan, on your market. Everything else on a pricing page is decoration. The full breakdown is in our Airscale review.

Order your searches narrowest first

Start with the narrowest query you can build, because the order in which you ask decides what you pay before any provider setting does. The expensive way to use a contact database is to start broad: pull a list of records matching an industry and a region, enrich the lot, and throw away the rows that were never in your target. You paid for every one of those rows, found or not, depending on the provider's charging rule.

The cheap way is to narrow before you enrich. Filter on company size and on the job title you call, and only then spend credits on the rows that remain. On Airscale this costs nothing to do: the list builder lets you stack filters before any enrichment runs. We keep our Airscale account on a single credit balance precisely so we can see the difference between a broad run and a narrow one on the same meter.

There's a second-order effect too. Narrow queries return rows that match your actual target, so the contacts you pay for are the ones your sequence will touch. A broad run inflates your database and your invoice at the same time, and neither helps you book a meeting.

Query by name and company, then check the domain

The second setting is how you phrase the query itself. When you enrich a list row by row, give the provider the full name and the company name rather than a domain alone. A domain-only query on a company with several offices or a rebrand tends to return whichever record sits closest to the string, and you pay for an email that belongs to nobody you wanted.

Then check the domain on the returned email before it enters your sequence. The verification step happens on the provider's side for the verified flag, but the domain check is yours. This is the difference between the displayed price and the real one in its purest form, because the provider charges the same for a usable address and a dead one. Our review article counts what those dead rows do to the per-contact figure over a full run.

Compare providers in dollars, never in credits

Here's the rule we apply before signing anything: no comparison between two B2B data providers means anything while it's expressed in credits. The unit is defined by whoever sells it, so it compares nothing.

Convert both providers to dollars per found contact before you look at anything else. Take the plan you'd buy, divide the monthly price by the credit volume, multiply by the credits per find, and divide by whatever hit rate you can measure on a sample of your own list. We keep the tools we've run this calculation on in our B2B data category, and the same logic drives the order of calls in a waterfall enrichment setup, where the provider you put first decides what the expensive ones ever get asked.

Read the free count before you export

One last habit, and it's the cheapest. Before any large run, query the free count endpoint so you know how many rows the search will return. On Airscale, the total field in the paginated response comes back as zero, so the free count is the only reliable denominator you'll get. Read it, sanity-check it against your filters, then run.

Run the calculation on Airscale and on whoever else is on your shortlist, and compare the two in dollars per found contact, per contact type. The pricing pages stop telling you what to think.