Six sourcing tools sell credits. No two of them sell the same unit. Loxo Professional works out at $0.0796 a credit and SeekOut Recruit Core at $0.298, close to a factor of four apart on products a recruiter would describe to you in the same sentence.
Normalising the units is the easy half. The number that decides your cost is the credit price divided by the share of credits that resolve to a working email, and exactly one vendor here has a verification rate anybody outside the company has measured.
Every price below is in US dollars, and most were read on the vendor's own pricing page on 4 September 2026. Two were not: Apollo's tier prices and LinkedIn's InMail allocations are carried from our own already-sourced pages and were not re-confirmed at source that day, and both are marked that way in the table.
One thing to settle before the table. Exactly one of its six rows has a verification rate anybody has measured. Four publish no rate at all, and one of those four, hireEZ, publishes no credit allowance either, so there is nothing to divide in the first place. The sixth row, LinkedIn, sells a unit that never resolves to an email address.
Those are absences, not assumptions. Each one is marked in the table and named again in the prose. This arithmetic only earns your trust if you can see which parts are measured and which parts are missing.
Three units that do not convert into each other
Two credit prices are hard to compare because the vendors are not counting the same event.
| Plan | Published rate | What the credit counter counts |
|---|---|---|
| Loxo Professional | $199 per seat per month, annual, paid up front | 2,500 credits per seat per month, pooled across the team, reset in full each cycle |
| SeekOut Recruit Core | $149 per month on annual billing, $179 billed monthly | Two separate counters: 500 contact credits per month and 1,000 exports per month |
| Juicebox Starter | $99 per month billed monthly, $119 on annual billing | 500 contact credits and 500 export credits, with one credit for an email and three for a phone number |
Loxo pools its allowance, so the ceiling belongs to the team rather than to you: five seats on Professional share one bucket, and a colleague running a heavy outbound week spends your credits too. Our Loxo pricing page has the detail, including that Professional advertised its sourcing as unlimited before the repackage put a number on it. Loxo now sells the allowance upward too, with Boost 2x at 5,000 credits per user per month and Boost 5x at 12,500.
SeekOut splits the event in two. Reveal 500 people on Core and export each once, and you have half your export allowance left and no contact credits at all. Juicebox prices the type of contact instead, so a desk working the phone at three credits a number burns its allowance three times faster than one working email.
Three more vendors sit outside that table because their units are stranger still. Apollo meters email and mobile credits separately, and a phone credit costs roughly eight times an email credit, per our Apollo guide. hireEZ publishes a Solo plan at $494 a month and states no contact-credit allowance anywhere on the page, for Solo or for the bundled Enterprise tier it declines to price per seat. LinkedIn sells InMail credits, which are not reveals at all: 30 per seat per month on Recruiter Lite, 100 on Recruiter Professional Services and 150 on Corporate, with overage at $8 to $12 and most commonly $10, per our own InMail cost math.
The only denominator that matters
Divide the plan price by the credit allowance and you get a credit price. That is not a cost per contact, because some share of those credits comes back as a bad address, a bounce, or a record with no email on it. The figure you want is that price divided by the share that resolve to a working email.
Apollo is the one vendor here whose share has been measured by somebody other than itself. Apollo's own B2B data page claims a 98% email accuracy rate from a seven-step verification process across 240 million contacts, with 72 million emails verified monthly. That is a company grading its own product, the weakest evidence there is.
Then Grou's 2026 email-finder benchmark tested Apollo in isolation. Its control was a 5,000-prospect list of B2B SaaS companies with 50 to 500 employees, with bounces measured through Smartlead detection plus a manual check. It reported a 91% find rate, a 3.2% bounce rate for 96.8% effective delivery, and $0.04 per verified email.
Put that next to Apollo's own sticker, keeping the two denominators apart. Basic at $49 a month for 1,000 email credits is $0.049 per credit purchased at list price. Grou's $0.04 is per verified email, priced on its own Apollo spend with the plan it bought unstated, so it is not the Basic row divided by anything.
Two different units. They still land within a cent of each other. That is rare enough here that Apollo holds the only range in the last column below: about $0.04 to $0.049 per working email, the outside measurement at one end and this row's own list credit price at the other.
The disagreement on Apollo is worth as much as the agreement. Our Apollo guide carries a reported export bounce rate of 15 to 25 percent on recruiter exports, roughly five to eight times worse than the 3.2% Grou measured. Both can be true. Grou tested a prospect list drawn from B2B SaaS companies with 50 to 500 employees, and a recruiter exporting engineers by title asks that database a different question.
The spread among tools that have been measured shows what the divide step is worth. Grou put Clearout cheapest at $0.03 per verified email on a 78% find rate, and Clay at $0.18 on a 96% find rate. Mailsfinder's 2026 test ran 10,000 queries per tool across 16 tools and reports $0.005 to $0.582 per email, putting Apollo at the floor, eight times cheaper than Grou found, from a company that sells a competing email-finder. None of the tools in either test is a recruiting platform, which is the problem with the rest of the table.
Dollars per working contact, with the assumptions marked
| Plan | Price per credit | Verification rate | Cost per working email | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apollo Basic, $49/mo, 1,000 email credits | $0.049 | 96.8% measured independently, 98% claimed by Apollo | $0.04 to $0.049. Grou measured $0.04 per verified email on its own Apollo spend, plan unstated; $0.049 is this row's list price per credit purchased | Carried, not re-confirmed. Apollo's tier table did not load on 4 September, so the $49 rate comes from our own Apollo guide. Vendor claim and outside benchmark agree inside a cent |
| Loxo Professional, $199/seat/mo, 2,500 pooled credits | $0.0796 | None published or measured | Not computable | No rate published, by the vendor or anyone else |
| Juicebox Growth, $199/mo on annual billing, 1,500 credits; Starter, $119/mo on annual billing, 500 | $0.133 and $0.238 | None published or measured | Not computable | No rate published, by the vendor or anyone else |
| SeekOut Recruit Core, $149/mo, 500 contact credits | $0.298 | None published or measured | Not computable | No rate published, by the vendor or anyone else |
| hireEZ Solo, $494/mo | No allowance published, so no per-credit figure exists | None published or measured | Not derivable | No rate published, and no allowance either. Nothing on the page to divide |
| LinkedIn Recruiter, 30 to 150 InMails per seat per month | $6 to $8 effective per credit after seat amortisation | Not applicable: an InMail never resolves to an email address | Different unit | Carried, not re-confirmed. Allocations and effective rate from our own InMail page; priced separately, below |
Read the fourth column before the second. One row of six has a cost per working email in it. Four would need an assumed verification rate to produce one, because none of the four publishes a rate, and one of those same four, hireEZ, publishes no allowance to divide either.
There was an easier version of this table available. Pick a plausible rate, apply it to every row, and each cell fills with a dollar figure that looks exactly as authoritative as Apollo's, computed on an invented input, with a decimal point making it look measured.
Run your own rate anywhere between 70% and 95% and every dollar figure moves, but the ranking does not. One divisor applied to every row leaves the order exactly as it was, which is the same arithmetic our three-year ATS ranking sets out for seat rates. Only a rate that differs vendor by vendor can reorder anything, and nobody has published one. Without a rate, a credit price is not a cost.
Where the arithmetic breaks, and the four vendors with nothing to compute from
SeekOut, Loxo, Juicebox and hireEZ publish no numeric accuracy figure at all. Not a bounce rate, not a deliverability percentage, not a refund rule tied to a bad address. We searched for each of the four and found none, from the vendor or from anybody else.
What they publish instead is coverage, a different claim. Loxo's Connect page offers personal emails and phone numbers for 75% of the world's professionals, and Juicebox's data-sources documentation says over 200 million profiles have contact data available, from unnamed compliant partners, with no accuracy figure attached. Coverage tells you how often a search returns something. It says nothing about whether the something works.
Independent benchmarks do exist. They test the wrong vendors. Grou's eight tools and Mailsfinder's sixteen are sales and go-to-market email finders and verifiers: Clay, Hunter, Snov, Findymail, Clearout, Skrapp, ZeroBounce, RocketReach, UpLead. Apollo is the only name in either set a recruiter would also shortlist.
Dropping Clay's bounce rate into a SeekOut row because both sell contact data swaps one population for another, which is the mistake this table exists to avoid.
Nobody has done this arithmetic for recruiting tools. The closest page is HeyTalent's "10 Affordable Sourcing Tools for Recruiters", which promises the point at which each tool stops paying for itself. It then carries no dollar figures and no per-contact cost at all, only a sentence about tools that improve the ratio between credits consumed and useful contacts. Its ten tools do not overlap with the six priced above.
LinkedIn belongs in a different frame, and forcing it into this one would break the unit. An InMail credit buys a message delivered to a profile inside LinkedIn. It never resolves to an email address, and it cannot bounce on bad data. Its effective price turns on your reply rate instead: LinkedIn refunds the credit on any reply within 90 days and rolls unused credits forward to a cap of four times the monthly allocation.
We walked that math forward to a cost per placement in the real cost of a LinkedIn InMail. This page stops earlier, at the moment you hold a working email address, before a message is sent.
Two sets of figures could not be re-read at source. Apollo's tier table is client-rendered and returned no text on five fetch attempts on 4 September. Basic, Professional and Organization at $49, $79 and $119 are carried from our own Apollo guide. LinkedIn's Recruiter help pages refuse automated access, so those allocations come from our own page.
Three of these five vendor pages also moved after we published on them. hireEZ now publishes a $494 Solo rate, where our hireEZ pricing guide opens by saying hireEZ does not list prices on its website, which was true when written. SeekOut Recruit Core now states a contact-credit allowance our SeekOut pricing page says exists for no tier. Juicebox has changed tier prices and credit structure since we verified it in July 2026.
The Loxo, SeekOut, Juicebox and hireEZ credit figures above are the 4 September read of those four vendor pages rather than the sibling page's. Apollo's is the sibling page's, carried and not re-confirmed, and so are LinkedIn's $6 to $8 effective per-credit rate and its InMail allocations.
What to ask before you sign
Our hireEZ guide puts one item at the top of its negotiation list, and it is the right first question for any vendor here. Ask for seat cost, credit cost, implementation, integration and support broken out separately. A bundled quote hides which line is inflating. Then four questions no pricing page above answers.
What does one credit actually buy. An email, a phone number, an export, or all three metered separately. Juicebox charges three credits for a phone number, Apollo charges roughly eight times more for a mobile credit, and SeekOut meters exports on a second counter. Ask the vendor to price the exact action your desk repeats a hundred times a week.
What is the measured bounce rate on exported emails, and will you put it in the contract. Expect not to get a number. Ask anyway, because the answer tells you whether anyone there measures it, and a rate a vendor will commit to beats any published accuracy claim.
Do credits pool, roll over, or expire. Loxo pools across the team and resets each cycle, Apollo's expire at the end of the billing cycle, and LinkedIn rolls forward to a cap and refunds on a reply. Three treatments of one word, on three invoices that all say credits.
What does an overage credit cost, and what happens to the allowance at renewal. Apollo's overage has been reported at about $0.20 each with a 250-credit minimum, roughly four times its Basic list rate. It is worth re-confirming with the vendor before you budget on it, because we could not re-source that figure on 4 September. Overage is what you pay in your busiest month. A credit ceiling is also a price that can change without the price changing, which is the Loxo case our three-year ATS pricing documents.
One filter belongs before the credit is spent rather than after, because everything above prices a reveal and the cheaper move is usually to reveal fewer people. Glozo puts a market compensation estimate and an Open to Offers signal on every candidate for free and charges only on reveal, so whether someone is worth a credit gets decided before the credit leaves your balance.
When per-seat cost is the better question
Credit math is the right lens when your spend moves with your volume, and the wrong one when what you are buying is a system of record. An ATS seat costs the same whether you source through it or not.
There the unit is the seat and the horizon is the contract. We priced it separately. What an agency ATS costs over three years normalises ten published plans across five vendors at one, three and five seats. The two pages overlap on one vendor, Loxo, on different axes: that one prices the $199 Professional seat, this one prices what the 2,500 credits inside it cost per contact revealed.
Run both if you are replacing a stack. Fixed seat cost sets the floor, and marginal credit cost sets what a busy quarter does to it. The two rarely name the same vendor.
If your shortlist puts a sourcing tool against a LinkedIn Recruiter seat rather than another ATS, that comparison is in LinkedIn Recruiter alternatives. If the number you need is cost per placement, the solo desk P&L starts there and works backward through the hours and the tools.