Prospeo review: what a mobile really costs, and what the directories got wrong

A direct mobile costs ten credits on Prospeo, and the verified email that comes back with it costs one more. Eleven credits, billed only when something is found. At the add-on rate their pricing page publishes, 10 dollars per 1,000 credits, that is about eleven cents for a contact you can call and write to. I have run it since 2024, on every client account, and it has never left the waterfall. This is what it is good at, what it is not, and why the prices you read about it elsewhere are wrong.

The published price, in the unit that matters

Prospeo sells credits, not lookups, which is the part people get wrong when they compare it to anything else. The rule is short. One credit buys one verified business email. A direct mobile costs ten. Company data comes back with the person at no extra credit. Browsing and searching are free, and the meter only starts when you reveal or export.

The plans, read on their pricing page on 18 September 2026: Free at zero for 100 credits a month with no time limit, Starter at 49 dollars a month per user, Growth at 99, Pro at 249. Pay for the year and those become 37, 74 and 187. Extra credits are an add-on from 10 dollars per 1,000, and that add-on is the only rate on the page that lets you price a single lookup honestly.

Two things matter more than the tiers. Credits do not roll over, so unused balance dies at renewal and you should size the plan on the month you actually run, not on your best month. And exports charge on the result: one credit per email found, nothing for a row that comes back empty. A list that turns out to be bad costs you nothing to have tried, which is rarer than it sounds in this category.

Where the directories are wrong, and where the vendor contradicts itself

The large tool directories publish a Prospeo price that no longer exists. One of the biggest still shows a 39 dollar entry plan with 1,000 credits, a 199 dollar tier and a 369 dollar tier, plus a free plan of 75 credits. The live page on 18 September 2026 says 49, 99 and 249, with 100 free credits and no 369 dollar tier at all. Nobody is lying. A directory with four thousand tool pages cannot re-read four thousand pricing pages, so it freezes and drifts. That is the whole reason this site prints a verification date on every page.

The vendor is not perfectly consistent either, and it is worth saying out loud. Their own comparison table gives the Starter plan 2,000 credits a month, while the row underneath gives the same plan 1,000 credits delivered upfront on yearly billing. Both cannot be right. If you are sizing a yearly commitment on Starter, ask them to confirm the number in writing before you pay.

What someone else measured, on a dataset they published

I do not run public benchmarks, so here is one that does. ColdIQ tested mobile finders live on 23 July 2026 and published the dataset. Prospeo came back with 26 of 28 European mobiles and 25 of 25 American ones, at a 2.1 second median through their marketplace and 0.26 seconds on the direct API in a run two days earlier. The provider they compared it against on the same list returned 1 of 28 in Europe. Their leaderboard puts Prospeo first on mobile finding, and a separate study they cite, run by Clay with TitanX, ranks it first on European coverage.

One caveat on their numbers, since the point of this site is to say these things. The cost per found number they print, 0.39 dollars, is computed on the 39 dollar plan that is no longer sold. The coverage figures are theirs and they are dated. The price attached to them is stale, exactly like the directory pages.

What I measured, in production

We do not buy a finished waterfall. We built our own find-people chain across four sources, Icypeas, the Airscale database, Prospeo and basile.cc, and Prospeo holds the enrichment step in front of the broader database. It is not a replacement for anything we dropped. It was added because it completes the chain at the point where the chain was most expensive.

On 8,948 French decision-makers run through that chain in August 2026, 1,798 came back with a mobile. Twenty percent. That number is the whole waterfall and not Prospeo alone, and I would rather give you the honest version than a provider-level hit rate I cannot isolate. What it tells a buyer is simple: on a list of decision-makers, four names out of five will not have a reachable mobile anywhere, from anyone, and any vendor promising otherwise on European data is selling you something.

Two operational details that do not show up in any comparison table. First, there is no call shape that returns the number alone: the email arrives with it, inside the same price, so you never pay twice for the same person. Second, the person payload carries the job history, so the role someone holds today comes back with the contact details. That is a free second source on the function, and it catches the prospect who changed companies six months ago and whose record you were about to trust.

Who should not buy it

If your market is local businesses, this is the wrong shape of tool. Prospeo finds people who exist on LinkedIn, which means it works on markets that are already digital. A street of shops is a different rail entirely and costs a fraction of this one.

If you want the most exhaustive coverage that exists, one provider will not give it to you, and that is not a defect. It is one source. On any given list it will miss rows that a second source catches, which is the entire argument for running a chain instead of a subscription. The honest choice in this category is between building your own chain with two or three providers, and buying someone else who has already assembled one and charges for the assembly.

The verdict

It is the cheapest credible entry into a European mobile, it bills on results, and it hands you the email and the current job title in the same breath. Two years in, it is one of the few line items I have never had to defend. If you are assembling a stack rather than buying one, start the chain here.