· 8 min read · By Marwene Amor
Hunter's published prices tell you almost nothing on their own. The number that decides whether a plan fits is the credit meter, and Hunter changed how it works between 2025 and 2026: the old split between searches and verifications is gone, replaced by one pool. That single change moved the real cost per contact on every tier.
Below are the current figures, checked against Hunter's live pricing page in September 2026, then the arithmetic nobody publishes: what a found-and-verified contact actually costs you on each plan.
| Plan | Monthly | Yearly (per month) | Credits/mo | Email accounts | Recipients per sequence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 50 | 1 | 500 |
| Starter | $49 | $34 | 2,000 | 3 | 2,500 |
| Growth | $149 | $104 | 10,000 | 10 | 5,000 |
| Scale | $299 | $209 | 25,000 | 20 | 15,000 |
| Enterprise | Custom credits, custom features, account manager | ||||
Yearly billing takes about 30 percent off each tier. In absolute terms that is $180 saved on Starter, $540 on Growth and $1,080 on Scale across twelve months. Unlimited team members come with every paid plan, which matters more than it sounds: most competitors charge per seat, so a four-person team pays once here and four times elsewhere.
| Action | Cost |
|---|---|
| Find one email (Domain Search, Email Finder, bulk finder) | 1 credit |
| Verify one email (Email Verifier) | 0.5 credit |
| Repeat a search already run in the same billing period | Free |
| Discover searches, enrichment, result counts, list management | Free |
That last row changes how you should work. Searching the database, filtering it and counting results costs nothing, so you can build and refine a target list at length and only spend credits at the moment you pull addresses. Teams that treat every click as billable end up under-researching and paying for contacts they should never have pulled.
One contact taken from unknown to verified costs 1.5 credits: one to find the address, half to verify it. Divide the plan's credits by 1.5 and you get the honest capacity of each tier.
| Plan | Contacts found and verified | Cost each, monthly | Cost each, yearly billing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 33 | $0 | $0 |
| Starter | 1,333 | 3.7¢ | 2.6¢ |
| Growth | 6,666 | 2.2¢ | 1.6¢ |
| Scale | 16,666 | 1.8¢ | 1.3¢ |
Cost per contact roughly halves between Starter and Scale, and yearly billing takes another third off whatever tier you land on. The cheapest verified contact Hunter sells costs 1.3 cents, on Scale paid annually.
Read the middle column before the price column. Starter's 1,333 contacts a month is far more than three sending inboxes can responsibly approach, so on the small plans the credit ceiling is almost never what stops you. The sending side hits its limit first. That is the single most common sizing mistake we see: people buy Growth for the credits when their real constraint was inbox count.
Check Current Pricing on Hunter →
Fifty credits a month, permanently, with no expiry date attached. That is 33 contacts found and verified, or 50 addresses found if you skip verification, which you should not.
It is not enough to run outbound. It is enough to answer the only question that matters before you pay: does Hunter have good data on your targets? Coverage varies enormously by country, company size and sector. A tool with excellent coverage of US software companies can be close to useless on mid-size German manufacturers. Spend the 50 credits on twenty domains you actually intend to contact, not on a sample list from a blog post.
The free plan also carries one connected email account and 500 recipients per sequence, so you can send a small real campaign through it. Treat that as a functional test of the sending module, not as a channel.
Hunter used to be a finder you bolted onto a sender. That stopped being accurate. Starter at $34 to $49 now carries the finder, the verifier, three connected inboxes, sequences with A/B testing, and warmup. For a solo operator starting from zero, one Starter subscription covers the whole early motion with no second subscription.
The comparison people run in their heads, Hunter against a bundle, is out of date. The current question is narrower: is Hunter's disciplined bundle enough, or do you need a dedicated sender underneath it?
Twenty connected inboxes on Scale is the hard ceiling. Any agency or high-volume team running inbox rotation across dozens of mailboxes runs out of room, and no amount of credit spending fixes that. At that point Hunter stays upstream as the data layer and the sending job moves to a dedicated platform like Instantly or Smartlead.
Credits also do not roll over. An unused month is gone. If your prospecting comes in bursts, monthly billing costs more per month but wastes far less than a yearly commitment sized for your busiest period.
Solo founder, light prospecting. Free plan first, for a month, on your real targets. Then Starter. The three inboxes and bundled warmup mean you will not need a sender for a while, and 1,333 contacts a month is more than you can follow up on alone.
Small team, steady outbound. Growth. Not for the credits, which you probably will not exhaust, but for the ten inboxes. Unlimited team members are included, so headcount does not change the bill.
Agency or high volume. Scale for the data, paired with a dedicated sender. Buying Scale as a sending platform is the wrong purchase; buying it as a 16,666-contact-a-month data supply at 1.3 cents each is the right one.
Before you commit to a year. Run three consecutive months on monthly billing and look at your actual credit consumption. Most teams use between a third and a half of what they bought. Size the plan to the real number, then switch to yearly and take the 30 percent.
Entry tiers land within roughly ten dollars of each other, so price alone will not decide this. What differs is the meter. Hunter runs one credit pool, which is the simplest to predict. Snov.io runs credits plus a separate recipients limit, and hitting either one pauses that module, which catches people out. Apollo bundles a much larger contact database with weaker sending, so its price buys data breadth rather than deliverability.
We took the data quality question apart properly in Hunter vs Snov.io, and the full feature picture is in the Hunter review.
There is a permanent free plan, not a time-limited trial. It gives you 50 credits a month, one connected email account and up to 500 recipients per sequence. Fifty credits is enough for roughly 33 contacts found and verified, so it covers testing the data quality on a real list. It does not cover running outbound.
Fifty credits per month, one connected email account, 500 recipients per sequence, and access to Domain Search, Email Finder, the Email Verifier and the browser extension. The credits reset monthly and do not roll over. Discover searches, enrichment lookups, result counts and list management cost no credits at all, so you can explore the database freely and only spend when you pull an actual address.
Starter is 49 dollars a month or 34 a month billed yearly. Growth is 149 or 104. Scale is 299 or 209. Enterprise is negotiated. Yearly billing takes roughly 30 percent off every tier, which works out to 180 dollars saved on Starter, 540 on Growth and 1,080 on Scale over twelve months.
Not in the usual sense, and that is better for you. Instead of a 14-day countdown on a paid tier, Hunter runs a free plan that never expires. You get 50 credits every month for as long as you keep the account. Test on your own target domains rather than a demo list, because data quality varies a lot by country and company size.
One credit finds one email address through Domain Search, the Email Finder or the bulk finder. Verifying one address through the Email Verifier costs half a credit. Repeating a search you already ran inside the same billing period costs nothing. So one contact taken from unknown to verified costs 1.5 credits, and that is the number to size your plan on.
Divide the credits by 1.5, because a found-and-verified contact costs 1.5 credits. Starter gives about 1,333 such contacts for 49 dollars, which is 3.7 cents each, or 2.6 cents on yearly billing. Growth works out to 2.2 cents monthly and 1.6 cents yearly. Scale lands at 1.8 cents monthly and 1.3 cents yearly. Cost per contact roughly halves between Starter and Scale.
The discount is real at about 30 percent, but it locks twelve months of credits into a monthly meter that does not roll over. If your prospecting is seasonal or project-based, you will pay for months you barely use. Pay monthly until you have three consecutive months of steady credit consumption, then switch and take the saving.
They are priced close and the entry tiers sit within about ten dollars of each other, so price is not the deciding factor. Hunter is the sharper finder with cleaner data on business domains and a simpler single credit meter. Snov.io bundles more, including a LinkedIn extension and a heavier drip module, but runs a dual meter of credits plus recipients that is easier to hit unexpectedly. Pick Hunter for data quality, Snov.io for breadth.
Prices verified against Hunter's live pricing page in September 2026. Plans change; confirm on the official site before subscribing.