How to Find Emails in Apollo and What Each Lookup Costs

To find someone's email in Apollo, you give it a name plus a company domain (or a LinkedIn profile), then reveal the address. A reveal that returns an email costs 1 credit. A lookup that finds nothing costs 0 (Apollo people enrichment docs). On a paid plan, if you use every credit, that is about 2 cents (our arithmetic from Apollo's published prices at the time of writing).

You can run that lookup three ways:

1. The web app. Search by name, filter by company, reveal.
2. The Chrome extension. Open it on a LinkedIn profile. Its store listing says it also works inside Gmail, Google Calendar, popular CRMs and company websites (Chrome Web Store listing).
3. Bulk and API. Send a list to the people enrichment endpoint and get records back in batches.

A found address that bounces costs you sender reputation, and that bill is far bigger than 2 cents. Apollo is one of several databases my team builds lists from, never the only one. Apollo publishes no accuracy numbers for the finder, so I give none. What I can show is what a reveal costs and what has to happen between the reveal and the send.

Why does Apollo sometimes return nothing for a real person?

The finder can only match what you give it. The docs warn that a name with no domain or email may return a 200, the code for a successful request, with no record enriched. The person exists, but Apollo could not tell which one you meant.

Every match carries a match_confidence value: high, medium, low or none. Apollo does not say which inputs earn which score, so here is what each input gives the engine to work with.

A safe working rule: count only high as found, review medium by hand, and treat low and none as misses. Apollo charges when it finds credit-consuming data, so assume a low-confidence record that returns an email still costs its credit.

Status labels are the other trap. The same reference shows "verified" as an example email_status and defines no other status values. So do not guess what a label such as catch-all or unverified promises. Treat any address carrying one as unproven, verify it like the rest, and use this guide on whether to send to catch-all addresses to make the call.

How many Apollo credits does one email lookup cost?

Credits are the cost driver, and Apollo charges them only when it finds credit-consuming data (Apollo API pricing docs). Apollo publishes no price per credit, so you work it out from the plan. Apollo's pricing page lists these annual-billing prices, at the time of writing:

The math for Basic: $49 a month over a year is $588, and $588 / 30,000 credits = 1.96 cents a credit. Professional buys more features per seat, not cheaper credits. The page shows no month-to-month prices, only a "Save 24%" label for annual billing, and credits you never use push your real cost per credit up.

What one lookup costs, at the time of writing:

Bulk enrichment takes up to 10 people per request, and each person follows the same rules. On the API, a phone number only comes back when you ask for it, and that request needs a valid webhook URL.

Here is a worked example for 1,000 lookups on Basic. The hit rates are planning assumptions, because Apollo's docs publish no match rates.

Leave phone reveals off unless someone will actually call those people.

The same pricing page says credits are pooled across the team, admins can cap them per user, and usage shows under Settings > Credit usage by date, credit type and user. Set those caps before you hand the extension to a whole sales team.

What are Apollo's API rate limits for finding emails?

Rate limits apply to the whole team, whatever the API key or user, and child workspaces share their parent's limits (Apollo rate limits). Finding emails runs on the enrichment endpoints; building the list of people runs on search.

On Free, the whole team shares one daily enrichment cap, so 1,000 single API lookups take two days.

Hit a limit and Apollo returns a 429 with a retry-after header: wait that long, then retry. A 429 caused by platform load has no header, so wait 60 seconds. Windows start at your first request, not on the hour. On paid plans your credit balance, not the rate limit, is what stops you.

Is Apollo enough on its own, or does the list need more sources?

For a list that will get thousands of emails, Apollo alone is not enough, and every gap in it costs you sends. For where to source the people Apollo does not cover, see how to find contacts for cold email. If you are weighing other databases instead, Apollo alternatives compares them.

My team builds every list from several databases at once, such as Sales Navigator, Apollo, UpLead, ZoomInfo or RocketReach, a method I call waterfall enrichment. That beats anything scraped. For a financial advisory firm in Canada, we built the lists from Sales Navigator plus Apollo, and the campaign booked 421 sales calls in 12 months.

Cheap freelancer lists give themselves away fast: low opens, high bounces. Generic titles like Assistant, Associate and Manager leave the search before I spend one credit.

Even a good export goes out of date. Before you reuse an old one, check how fast B2B contact data decays.

Your monthly calls target decides how big the list has to be. My working rule: 30 to 35 booked sales meetings a month take 10,000 or more people contacted each month. A few hundred clean names will not get you there. Size and fit have to arrive together.

What should you check before emailing an address Apollo found?

Whatever label Apollo shows, every address we plan to email goes through a separate verifier, NeverBounce or DeBounce. The check costs under 1 cent, less than the reveal.

At the time of writing, NeverBounce charges $8 for every 1,000 addresses checked without a subscription (0.8 cents each), and those credits expire after 12 months. DeBounce advertises a starting rate of $0.00045 per check, with 100 free credits that never expire.

I treat a 0.5% bounce rate as a hard ceiling for any send. If a verified batch still comes back above it, the list is not ready, and no copy will fix that.

If your prospects use Gmail, Google's sender rules apply after the lookup (Google sender guidelines):

• Every sender needs SPF or DKIM on the sending domain.
• Above 5,000 messages a day to Gmail, SPF, DKIM and DMARC are all required, and marketing mail must offer one-click unsubscribe.
• Reported spam rate stays under 0.10% and never touches 0.30%.

Google also tells senders not to buy email addresses from other companies, which is one more reason to verify a database export.

Go through this checklist ahead of the first send:

1. Apply the match_confidence rules above to every record.
2. Verify every address with a separate tool, and send only to the ones it passes.
3. Remove anyone already in your CRM or on your opt-out list.
4. Check that each domain you send from passes SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
5. Watch spam rates in Postmaster Tools from the very first send.
6. Add one-click unsubscribe wherever the message counts as marketing.
7. Tag UK sole traders and partnerships so the consent rule below catches them.

No subject line rescues a list that bounces. Fix the list first. Then write the copy.

Is it legal to email people you found through Apollo?

UK. The ICO's B2B marketing guidance sets the rules under PECR:

• You can email any corporate body without consent, if you say who you are and give a working opt-out address.
• A sole trader, and some partnerships, is an individual subscriber: email them only with consent or under the soft opt-in.
• An address that names a person is personal data under the UK GDPR, while a generic role mailbox like info@ is not.
• Public data does not mean the person agreed to marketing, and data from a third party means privacy information must reach the person within one month.
• An objection to marketing ends it, with no exceptions.

The ICO says this page may change because of the Data (Use and Access) Act.

US. The FTC's CAN-SPAM guidance covers commercial email sent to businesses as well as to consumers. Penalties reach $53,088 per violating email.

• Honor each unsubscribe within 10 business days and keep the link working for at least 30 days.
• Use accurate headers and an honest subject line.
• Include a valid postal address.
• Hiring someone else to send does not move the liability.

The market matters too. Our own campaigns run mostly in the US, the UK and Europe. Germany sits outside our specialty, so it gets stricter rules of our own, and for Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic we switch to LinkedIn unless a compliant basis for email exists.

This is not legal advice.

Not sure whether Apollo alone covers your list, or where the gaps will cost you sends? Bring a sample to a call with me and we will check it together.