Apollo API pricing: credits, rate limits and pay-as-you-go alternatives

$ Set up https://www.routergrowth.com/SKILL.md, then find 25 [job title] at [type of company] in [country], get a verified work email for each, and tell me the cost per verified contact.

We make RouterGrowth, one of the alternatives on this page, and Apollo is one of the providers RouterGrowth routes to, so read it as a vendor's view. Everything about Apollo was taken from Apollo's own pricing page and developer documentation on 24 October 2026, and every other vendor's figures from its own pricing page the same day. All links are at the end.

The short answer: the Apollo API has no separate price. Every Apollo plan includes API access, and calls draw on the same credits as the app, which come bundled with seats. A work email through the API costs one credit, and a credit costs about two cents on a paid plan if you use the whole yearly pool. There is no pure pay-as-you-go option; the alternatives below charge per call or per found result instead.

What does Apollo API pricing look like in 2026?

Apollo prices per seat, and each seat carries a yearly pool of credits that the API spends.

The effective price assumes you use every credit in the year. Monthly billing is available at a higher price; Apollo puts the saving from annual billing at 24%. The Free plan lists API access, and Basic and above add API enrichment.

How many credits does each Apollo API call use?

Endpoints that create, update, list or manage records use no credits. These are the ones that do:

Apollo notes that some waterfall vendors charge per lookup even when nothing is found, and that paging through results or repeating searches adds up. Its advice is to run a small test and check usage before a large job.

What are the Apollo API rate limits?

Limits are per team, not per key, and per endpoint, enforced per minute, per hour and per day at once. The general limits by plan:

Enrichment endpoints get 1,000 requests a minute with no hourly or daily cap on paid plans, and search endpoints 50,000 a day; on Free both stay at 50 a minute and 600 a day. Going over returns a 429 with a retry-after header.

Is the Apollo API pay as you go?

No. Credits are bought with seats, on a monthly or annual plan, and paid credits are granted upfront for the year. The closest thing to pay as you go is the Free plan's 900 credits a year. Two other terms matter if you build on it:

• Free accounts must register with a work email to use several search and enrichment endpoints.
• Reselling or exposing Apollo data to people who are not Apollo users requires a custom contract with Apollo. If you are building a product, not an internal workflow, read that before you start.

What are the pay-as-you-go alternatives to the Apollo API?

RouterGrowth: best for agents

RouterGrowth is an API and MCP server for GTM jobs as calls. people.search builds a list by title, company and location; contact.find finds a work email through a waterfall of providers (Apollo is one of them) and charges only the one that finds it, from $0.0187; enrichment, verification, signals and sending run on the same balance. The price is shown before each call, there are no seats, and a miss on an email lookup is free.

• Pricing: per call, no subscription; plans lower the per-call price.
• Best for: prospecting run by an agent or a script, at uneven volume.

What it does not do: there is no database to browse, no dialer and no sequence builder, and calls routed to Apollo do not give you an Apollo account. If reps prospect in a browser all day, Apollo does that and RouterGrowth does not.

People Data Labs: best for products

A developer API for person and company records, used by products that embed the data. The free tier gives up to 100 credits a month with contact fields obscured; Pro starts at $98 a month for 350 credits with contact data, monthly or annual (20% off annually), and Enterprise adds licensed bulk data.

• Pricing: monthly or annual credit plans, volume discounts.
• Best for: records at scale inside your own product, under a data license.

Hunter Data Platform: best for email lookups

Hunter sells its API separately from its outreach product. Data Platform plans run 12 months with credits upfront: 1,000 search credits for $50, 1,000 verification credits for $11, or both for $61, with full API access and bulk tools.

• Pricing: yearly credit packs from 1,000 credits.
• Best for: finding and verifying emails when you know the company domain.

Icypeas: best price per found email

An email finder and verifier: $19 a month for 1,000 found emails, $39 for 4,000, $89 for 10,000, $499 for 100,000. One credit per found email, credits never expire, API and MCP included.

• Pricing: monthly credits that roll over without limit.
• Best for: steady email volume where cost per email decides.

Prospeo: best for search plus contact data

A B2B database with search, emails and mobiles. Free gives 100 credits a month without API access; Starter is $49 per user a month for 2,000 credits ($37 billed yearly), Growth $99 for 5,000 and Pro $249 for 15,000. One credit per verified email, ten per mobile, and API rate limits rise with the plan.

• Pricing: credits per user, monthly or yearly.
• Best for: an Apollo-style database with credits that roll over.

When is the Apollo API the right choice?

When your reps already work in Apollo and you want scripts or agents to drive the same account: sequences, contacts, deals and enrichment through one API, at no extra price. At about two cents a credit on a fully used pool, Apollo's own data is also one of the cheapest single databases to enrich from, and its API is one of the most complete in the category.

It fits less well when the work runs without people in seats, when volume is uneven across the year, or when you need the data inside a product for users who are not on Apollo.

How do you get Apollo-style data without an Apollo seat?

From an agent, the same jobs are three calls:

1. people.search for the list, filtered by title, company and location.
2. contact.find for each row without an email, a waterfall in one call.
3. contact.verify for anything catch-all or risky, before you send.

The prompt at the top of this page runs them and reports the cost per verified contact. The wider set of Apollo alternatives, browser tools included, is in Apollo.io alternatives, and the cost of a found email across waterfall tools in the cheapest waterfall enrichment API.

Sources

Read on 24 October 2026: Apollo pricing, Apollo API pricing and credits, Apollo API rate limits, Apollo developer FAQs, People Data Labs pricing, Hunter Data Platform plans, Icypeas pricing, Prospeo pricing.

What does each call cost?#

Prices below are the starting price per successful call. /v1/inspect returns the exact figure before the run and reserves it against your balance; failures and unbilled no-matches release the hold in full.

One prepaid balance covers every row. Capabilities marked coming soon are listed but not yet executable.

FAQ#

Is the Apollo API free?

API access is included in every Apollo plan, the Free plan too. Calls that return data spend credits: 900 a year per seat on Free, 30,000 to 72,000 a year per seat on paid plans.

How much does one Apollo API call cost?

Calls that manage records cost nothing. A person enrichment with an email costs one credit, eight more with a mobile number; an organization search costs one credit per page of up to 100 results. On a paid plan used in full, a credit works out at about two cents.

Does Apollo charge for API calls that find nothing?

People enrichment charges only when credit-consuming data is found, and there is no demographic charge when the match confidence is none. Searches charge per page, and Apollo warns that some waterfall vendors charge per lookup even on a miss.

Does Apollo have an MCP server?

Yes. Apollo publishes Apollo MCP and an Apollo CLI next to its API, and all three follow your plan, permissions and credits; none can do more than your account can.

Can I resell data from the Apollo API?

Not under a standard plan. Apollo's developer documentation says sharing, exposing or reselling its data to non-Apollo users needs a custom contract with Apollo.