ZoomInfo alternative: what each one costs per contact

Pick Apollo for the cheapest full seat when a small team needs data and sending together; pick Prospeo when you pay for contacts by the result and your list includes European mobiles; stay on ZoomInfo while a paid contract still runs. Before anyone gets a card, push 40 contacts from your real list through the free tiers for one week and count what comes back.

I have run Prospeo since 2024, on every client account, as one of four sources in the find-people chain we built ourselves. I have never run an Apollo, Lusha, Cognism or ZoomInfo seat, so their side of this page comes from their own pricing pages, read today, and from third parties I name, two of which sell rivals. Worth knowing before you trust any list on this query, including this one: most of the pages ranking for it are vendors ranking themselves, Demandbase first on Demandbase's list, Cognism first on Cognism's.

Price the contact before the seat

ZoomInfo's pricing page prints no dollar figure at all: it lists Professional, Copilot Advanced and Copilot Enterprise behind a View pricing button that opens a sales form. Every alternative below prints its ladder in public, and that difference is the first filter. The gap gets filled with contract data instead: Vendr, which collects anonymised purchases, puts the median ZoomInfo contract at 33,500 dollars a year across 1,581 deals, ranging from 7,267 to 156,000 dollars. Pin, a vendor selling its own alternative, claims entry at about 14,995 dollars a year for three seats, on terms that lock you in if you miss the cancellation deadline. Treat that as Pin's claim, not ZoomInfo's.

Credits are not a currency two vendors share, so no line of that table converts into another. The comparison that holds is the same rows through each free tier, which costs nothing and is the whole test below. What the table does show is the shape of each bill: Apollo and Lusha charge per revealed field, Cognism per revealed contact held for the contract term, and Prospeo per contact actually found, with nothing owed on a miss, a rule its pricing FAQ states in writing.

Count what a phone reveal costs

If your outreach includes calls, the phone is where the budgets part. Apollo's own docs price people enrichment at 1 credit for the email and demographics, plus 8 credits when a mobile number comes back. Lusha's page prices an email at 1 credit and a phone at 5. Prospeo's page prices a mobile at 10 credits and the email arrives in the same call for 1, so 10 + 1 = 11 credits for a contact you can both call and write to. Cognism's page prices a revealed contact at 1 credit, spent again only when that person changes jobs, which over a contract year is the cheapest shape of the four if you re-touch the same people. Read each of those as the vendor's own unit price, and let the 40-row test turn them into found rates you can actually compare.

The mobile is also where accuracy claims fall apart fastest. The live test I can point to is ColdIQ's run of 23 July 2026: Prospeo returned 26 of 28 European mobiles and 25 of 25 American ones, median 2.1 seconds, first on their leaderboard. Our own ceiling is published and lower: across 8,948 French decision-makers run through our whole chain in August 2026, 1,798 came back with a mobile, which is 1,798 / 8,948 = 20 percent. A vendor promising far more European mobiles than that is selling you a list, not a contact.

Run 40 contacts through the free tiers for a week

Every route here has a free way in except Cognism. Apollo's free plan holds 900 credits per seat per year, granted monthly, so 900 / 12 = 75 a month. Lusha's free plan gives 40 credits a month with no end date, which is 40 emails or 40 / 5 = 8 phone reveals. Prospeo's plans start at 100 credits a month, no time limit. ZoomInfo Lite costs nothing and hands you ten credits each month. Cognism's pricing page lists neither a trial nor a self-serve tier; the way in is a demo, and third-party pricing pages describe a free data sample matched to your profile, though they disagree on whether to call that a trial, so ask for the sample and its size in writing.

The test itself is the one we run before any purchase, and the fuller method is in count before you buy the list. Take 40 contacts you already have answers for, from the exact segment you sell to, and push them through each free tier. Count verified emails, callable numbers, and rows flagged catch-all rather than clean. Then send to whatever came back and watch the bounces for one week. A provider that finds fewer contacts than the ones already in your CRM saves you nothing at any price.

Read Apollo's free plan limits before you build on it

Apollo is where most small teams start, and its free tier carries the most conditions of the four. Email campaigns are included on every account, but free plans connect Gmail accounts only, so a Microsoft 365 shop cannot even test sending. Credits never roll over, the pricing FAQ is explicit about it, and that applies to purchased add-on credits too. The record selection limit rises with the tier, and the Organization plan at 119 dollars per seat carries a three-user minimum.

The figure that decides whether Apollo fits a big list sits on Apollo's own insights page: the same 10,000-contact batch costs anywhere from 10,000 credits to well over 250,000, because standard and waterfall enrichment consume at very different rates. Run their recommended 50 to 100 record test batch first and multiply the real usage instead of trusting the headline credit count.

Watch for outdated rows and bounces

The complaint that repeats across every alternative is stale data: emails that bounce because the person left, numbers that reach a switchboard. Two habits protect you whatever you buy. First, distrust accuracy figures written by the seller: Apollo's own page prints 98 percent email accuracy; Lusha's pages claim the same figure for emails, plus 86 percent global and 85 percent US phone accuracy and a database of 520 million contacts refreshed daily, and neither publishes the list or the method behind the number. Second, re-verify before the send. On our stack a verification costs a tenth of a credit on Icypeas, and one hard bounce costs more than a thousand checks, on top of the sender reputation it burns. The send-side rules are in six steps to stay out of spam.

What breaks, concretely, each tied to a figure or a condition: the free tier that cannot test your real workflow, Gmail-only sending on Apollo and 25-row selections on Prospeo's free plan; the credit balance that dies at renewal on Apollo and Prospeo both; the catch-all domain that comes back valid and bounces anyway; the phone that arrives as a switchboard line you pay full credits for. Lusha is the one that rolls monthly credits over, capped at twice the plan allowance. And the costliest break is not in any alternative: it is walking out of a contract that still has months to run.

Decide when staying with ZoomInfo pays

Stay on ZoomInfo in two cases, and neither is loyalty. The first is contractual: Pin's page claims annual-only contracts with auto-renewal and a 60 to 90 day cancellation window, and missing that window locks another year, so a mid-term switch means paying twice. Find your own renewal date before you shortlist anything. The second is functional: intent signals, buying-group filters, website visitors and orchestration across sales, marketing and talent teams are platform features, and the tools in the table above are contact databases. If your team actually uses those features, a cheaper database is not a replacement, it is a downgrade. If you only reveal contacts and export them, none of that matters and every alternative here does the job at a published price.

There is a free way to check which case you are in: ZoomInfo Lite, the permanent free tier on ZoomInfo's own pages. Run the same 40 rows through it. If Lite's data matches what you sell to, the contract is doing its job and the problem sits elsewhere. If it does not, you have your answer before the renewal window opens.

Match the situation to the tool

The depth on any single pairing is in the pieces we have already published: Prospeo vs Lusha covers the two 49-dollar entry plans field by field, the Prospeo review carries the real cost of a callable contact, and waterfall enrichment explains why ordering sources by billing rule changes the bill.

Prospeo is an affiliate of this site: we earn a commission if you buy through the link on the Prospeo fiche. Apollo, Lusha, Cognism and ZoomInfo are not.