What is Apollo.io used for?

Finding B2B contacts, building filtered lists against an ideal customer profile, and running multi-step email sequences from the same tool. Professional adds a US dialer and Organization an international one, so some teams also use it for calling instead of a separate telephony contract.

How much does Apollo.io cost per month?

Apollo lists Basic at $49, Professional at $79 and Organization at $119 per user per month billed annually, or $59, $99 and $149 billed monthly. A 10-rep team on Professional pays $9,480 a year before extra credits. Figures checked September 2026.

Can I use Apollo.io for free?

Yes. The free plan includes limited credits and 2 sequences. It is enough to reveal a sample of contacts and check whether Apollo's data covers your market, which is the one thing worth doing before paying. It is not enough to run outbound.

How did Apollo.io get my information?

Apollo's privacy policy says it collects business contact information from publicly accessible websites, professional directories and vetted third-party data providers, plus public regulatory and government sources. Its own customers also upload information about their business contacts, which is how records appear that you never published anywhere.

How do I remove my info from Apollo?

Apollo publishes a removal page at apollo.io/privacy-policy/remove for opting out of the sale and sharing of your data, and a Privacy Center at apollo.io/company/privacy-center. Its policy sets out rights to know, access, correct and delete, and privacy@apollo.io handles requests. Removal applies to Apollo's database, not to the original source.

Why was Apollo shut down?

It was not. Apollo.io still operates, and the question traces back to a 2018 data exposure rather than a closure. Have I Been Pwned records that a researcher found an unprotected Apollo database in July 2018 and lists 125.9 million unique email addresses, added to the service on 5 October 2018.

Is Apollo.io a real company?

Yes. It trades as Apollo.io and its legal entity is ZenLeads, Inc., a privately held US company. SiliconANGLE reported a $100 million Series D in August 2023 led by Bain Capital Ventures at a $1.6 billion valuation, with Sequoia Capital among returning investors.

Is Apollo owned by Palantir?

No. Apollo.io is ZenLeads, Inc., an independent privately held company with no Palantir ownership. The confusion usually comes from two unrelated firms that share the name: Apollo Global Management, the private equity group, and Apollo GraphQL, the developer tooling company.

Is Apollo.io worth it?

For a team under about 10 reps prospecting into North America by email, yes: Basic at $49 per user per month replaces a database and a sequencer. For phone-heavy motions, thin-coverage markets or a large SDR floor needing sequence governance, the credit model and the reporting depth both become the problem.

What can I use instead of Apollo?

Clay for enrichment across several data providers when you have an operator to run it, Reply.io when sequencing is the weak link, ZoomInfo Sales for enterprise coverage breadth, and Outreach or Salesloft once a large SDR team needs template approval and shared suppression.

Apollo.io pricing, features and alternatives

Item: Apollo.io
Author: Rajat Gupta

Apollo.io is the right buy for a lean outbound team that wants contact data and email sequencing on one invoice, and the wrong buy for anyone who needs guaranteed coverage outside North America. Apollo.io pricing starts free and runs to $119 per user per month on Organization, billed annually, but the credit allowance, not the seat price, is what decides your real bill.

By Rajat GuptaReviewed September 24, 2026How we review software

Pricing checked September 25, 2026 against Apollo's pricing and credits pages.

The short answer

Buy Apollo.io if you are a founder, a solo SDR or a team under about 10 reps, you prospect mostly into North America, and you would otherwise pay separately for a contact database and a sequencer. Basic at $49 per user per month billed annually replaces two line items.

Skip it if verified mobile numbers are central to your motion, if your ICP sits outside North America, or if you need sequence governance and reporting across a large SDR floor. Check the data against 100 of your own target accounts before you commit to a year.

Where Apollo.io fits

Apollo.io sits in the middle of two markets that are usually bought separately: a B2B contact database and a sales engagement platform. A rep builds a filtered list, reveals the contact details, and starts a multi-step sequence without leaving the tool or exporting a CSV. That bundle is the whole reason it sits in our sales engagement software directory and in prospecting software at the same time.

The fit is clearest at small scale. Artisan's review calls Apollo good for solo SDRs and early-stage teams that need a decent sequencer with built-in data, with limits as teams scale. That matches what the pricing does: the free plan includes limited credits and 2 sequences, which is enough to test whether Apollo knows your market at all before you spend anything. Few data vendors let you do that, and most require a call before they will show you a record.

The practical test of fit is coverage, not features. Apollo's privacy policy says it obtains business contact information from publicly accessible websites, professional directories and vetted third-party data providers, alongside public regulatory and government sources and business contacts supplied by its own customers. That sourcing produces good density where company websites and professional profiles are rich, which in practice means North American technology, SaaS and services companies. It gets thinner for mid-market manufacturers, for non-English markets, and for roles that do not maintain a public professional presence.

Where Apollo wins against a specialist database is the handoff. If you buy contact data from one vendor and sequencing from another, somebody owns the export, the field mapping and the suppression list, and that somebody is usually a RevOps hire you do not have yet. Apollo removes that job at the cost of accepting one vendor's view of the market. If you do have that hire, the calculation changes: Clay exists because teams with an operator want to run enrichment across several providers and keep the best record, which is a different and better answer to the coverage problem. Our Clay and Apollo.io comparison is the head-to-head worth reading before you decide which of those two problems you have.

Apollo also fits teams that want the dialer without a separate telephony contract. The US dialer arrives on Professional at $79 per user per month and the international dialer on Organization at $119, so a team that calls into Europe is pushed to the top tier by one feature rather than by seat count. Price that against a standalone dialer before assuming the bundle is cheaper.

One fit question gets asked late and should be asked first: who owns suppression. Apollo pushes contacts and activity into the CRM, and the failure mode on every bundled prospecting tool is a rep sequencing an account that is already a customer or already in a live deal. Confirm how Apollo deduplicates against existing CRM records, and write the rule down in a CRM data dictionary before the first sequence sends.

Apollo.io pricing

Apollo.io pricing has four tiers: Free, Basic at $49, Professional at $79 and Organization at $119 per user per month when billed annually. Monthly billing runs about 20% higher at $59, $99 and $149, and Organization requires at least 3 users. Those figures were checked in September 2026. Apollo renders its plan grid in the browser rather than in the page source, which is why a plain fetch of the pricing page returns no numbers at all, so the figures were cross-checked against Salesmotion's June 2026 breakdown, which lists the same values.

What each tier adds

Free: $0. Limited credits and 2 sequences. Enough to test data quality against your own ICP, which is the only use it is good for.
Basic: $49 per user per month annually, $59 monthly. More credits and unlimited sequences. This is the tier that replaces buying a database and a sequencer separately.
Professional: $79 per user per month annually, $99 monthly. Adds the US dialer, more mailboxes and AI research. The mailbox count matters more than it sounds at volume.
Organization: $119 per user per month annually, $149 monthly, 3-user minimum. Adds the international dialer, SSO and advanced reporting.

What 10 seats costs

For a 10-seat outbound team the arithmetic on the verified rates is straightforward. Professional costs 10 x $79 x 12, which is $9,480 a year billed annually, or 10 x $99 x 12, which is $11,880 on monthly billing. The same team pays $5,880 a year on Basic and $14,280 on Organization. The gap between annual and monthly on Professional is $2,400 a year, so a team that wants to stay month to month is paying a quarter again for the option to leave.

None of those totals is the invoice, because credits sit on top. Apollo's credits page states that a verified email costs 1 credit, and several third-party breakdowns report that revealing a mobile number costs 8. Credits reset each billing cycle and do not roll over, and extra credits are bought in-app. A rep who reveals 400 emails and 100 mobile numbers a month is consuming 1,200 credits, where a rep working only from email consumes 400. The same seat price covers wildly different usage, which is why two teams on the same plan report costs that differ by half.

Before you sign, get two numbers in writing: how many credits the plan includes, and whether the allowance is per user or pooled across the team. Third-party sources disagree on the second, and it changes the model completely. A pooled allowance lets one heavy prospector burn the team's month; a per-user allowance strands credits on the reps who do not use them. Model per-rep usage with a sales tool business case template rather than taking the headline seat price into a budget conversation.

The credit trap in practice

The useful comparison is not Apollo against another seat price, it is Apollo's bundled credits against what the same volume costs from a specialist. If a mobile number does cost 8 credits, phone-heavy prospecting exhausts an allowance roughly eight times faster than email-only prospecting, and the top-up purchase is where the budget goes. Teams that discover this in month three usually end up either rationing phone reveals, which defeats the point, or buying a specialist data provider anyway and keeping Apollo for sequencing. Decide which of those you are willing to do before the contract, not after.

Treat the quoted seat price as the floor. Apollo.io pricing is genuinely cheap for a team that prospects by email into North America, and genuinely unpredictable for a team that reveals phone numbers at volume or sells into thin coverage. Confirm current credit allotments with Apollo directly, because they have changed before and the figures above were checked in September 2026.

What Apollo.io gives up

Coverage is the first thing you give up, and it is the one that kills deployments. Apollo's data density follows its sourcing, so a team selling into North American software gets a usable database and a team selling into European manufacturing often does not. Reviewers rate accuracy well in general, which is not the same as rating it well for your ICP. Pull 100 of your real target accounts, reveal the contacts, and check titles and emails by hand. If you will not do that during the free plan, you are buying on someone else's market.

Second, you give up predictable cost. The credit model moves the variable from headcount to behavior, so a budget built on seats is wrong the moment a rep starts dialling. That is a real difference from a flat per-seat sequencer, where the only question is how many people you hire.

Third, you give up sequence governance at scale. Apollo is built so an individual rep can run outreach without asking anyone, which is exactly what a founder wants and exactly what a 40-rep floor cannot allow. A large SDR organization needs approval on templates, shared suppression, enforced sending windows and reporting that a manager can defend in a forecast call. Teams that reach that point move the sequencing to Outreach or Salesloft and keep a data provider underneath. Our Reply.io and Apollo.io comparison covers the step before that, where the sequencing is the weak link but the budget is not enterprise yet.

Fourth, you give up deliverability headroom. Sending from the same tool that generated the list means your domain reputation is exposed to the quality of that list, and a thin-coverage segment produces bounces. Check the sending limits per mailbox and how Apollo handles bounces and unsubscribes at your planned volume, because the mailbox count is a tier feature and the consequence of running out is spreading sends across inboxes you have not warmed.

What you do not give up is the ability to leave. Apollo is bought a seat at a time and sequences are not hard to rebuild, so the switching cost is low compared with a CRM migration. That is worth something: it makes the annual commitment the main risk rather than the architecture.

How Apollo.io compares

Apollo.io is almost never evaluated on its own. The four tools below are what buyers put next to it, and each one is better than Apollo at exactly one thing. Prices are the verified figures from our own profiles where a vendor publishes a rate, and quote only where it does not.

Tool	Best for	Price	Where it breaks
Apollo.io	Lean outbound teams that want data and sequencing on one invoice	Free; $49 to $119 per user per month annually	Coverage outside North America, and cost predictability once reps reveal phone numbers
Clay	Teams with an operator who want enrichment across several providers	Quote only above the entry tiers	Needs someone to build and own the tables; it is not a sequencer
Reply.io	Multichannel sequencing when the data comes from elsewhere	Per seat, published	Thinner native database, so it assumes you already solved contact data
ZoomInfo Sales	Enterprise coverage breadth and intent data	Quote only	Annual commitment and price level that small teams cannot justify
Outreach	Sequence governance and reporting across a large SDR floor	Quote only	No contact database, and the admin overhead needs a dedicated owner

What to test in an Apollo.io trial

Apollo's free plan is the trial, and it is unusually honest: limited credits and 2 sequences are enough to answer the only question that matters, which is whether Apollo knows your market. Run these five checks before you give anyone a card. Use a software pilot plan so the result is a decision rather than an impression.

Build one list for your exact ICP using the filters, then reveal 100 contacts and check email and title accuracy by hand. Record the hit rate. Anything you would not defend to your VP is the real coverage number, not the one in a review.
Reveal 10 mobile numbers and watch the credit counter. This tells you what the reported 8-credit cost means against your plan's allowance, and it is the single most useful number you will get from the trial.
Ask Apollo in writing how many credits your intended plan includes and whether the allowance is per user or pooled. Do not accept a verbal answer: third-party sources disagree, and the difference changes your annual cost.
Connect the CRM in a sandbox and push 50 contacts, then check what happens to a record that already exists. Dedupe behavior is where bundled prospecting tools email your own customers.
Send one real sequence from one mailbox at your planned daily volume and read the bounce rate. If bounces are high on your own ICP, that is the coverage problem showing up as a deliverability problem, and it gets worse with every seat you add.

Apollo.io questions buyers ask

What is Apollo.io used for?: Finding B2B contacts, building filtered lists against an ideal customer profile, and running multi-step email sequences from the same tool. Professional adds a US dialer and Organization an international one, so some teams also use it for calling instead of a separate telephony contract.
How much does Apollo.io cost per month?: Apollo lists Basic at $49, Professional at $79 and Organization at $119 per user per month billed annually, or $59, $99 and $149 billed monthly. A 10-rep team on Professional pays $9,480 a year before extra credits. Figures checked September 2026.
Can I use Apollo.io for free?: Yes. The free plan includes limited credits and 2 sequences. It is enough to reveal a sample of contacts and check whether Apollo's data covers your market, which is the one thing worth doing before paying. It is not enough to run outbound.
How did Apollo.io get my information?: Apollo's privacy policy says it collects business contact information from publicly accessible websites, professional directories and vetted third-party data providers, plus public regulatory and government sources. Its own customers also upload information about their business contacts, which is how records appear that you never published anywhere.
How do I remove my info from Apollo?: Apollo publishes a removal page at apollo.io/privacy-policy/remove for opting out of the sale and sharing of your data, and a Privacy Center at apollo.io/company/privacy-center. Its policy sets out rights to know, access, correct and delete, and privacy@apollo.io handles requests. Removal applies to Apollo's database, not to the original source.
Why was Apollo shut down?: It was not. Apollo.io still operates, and the question traces back to a 2018 data exposure rather than a closure. Have I Been Pwned records that a researcher found an unprotected Apollo database in July 2018 and lists 125.9 million unique email addresses, added to the service on 5 October 2018.
Is Apollo.io a real company?: Yes. It trades as Apollo.io and its legal entity is ZenLeads, Inc., a privately held US company. SiliconANGLE reported a $100 million Series D in August 2023 led by Bain Capital Ventures at a $1.6 billion valuation, with Sequoia Capital among returning investors.
Is Apollo owned by Palantir?: No. Apollo.io is ZenLeads, Inc., an independent privately held company with no Palantir ownership. The confusion usually comes from two unrelated firms that share the name: Apollo Global Management, the private equity group, and Apollo GraphQL, the developer tooling company.
Is Apollo.io worth it?: For a team under about 10 reps prospecting into North America by email, yes: Basic at $49 per user per month replaces a database and a sequencer. For phone-heavy motions, thin-coverage markets or a large SDR floor needing sequence governance, the credit model and the reporting depth both become the problem.
What can I use instead of Apollo?: Clay for enrichment across several data providers when you have an operator to run it, Reply.io when sequencing is the weak link, ZoomInfo Sales for enterprise coverage breadth, and Outreach or Salesloft once a large SDR team needs template approval and shared suppression.