Lusha Alternatives by Job for Phones, Emails and Credits

The right Lusha alternative depends on what you were paying Lusha for. If most of your reveals were phone numbers, look at Kaspr's paid plans, RocketReach Pro, Lead411 or a quoted ZoomInfo contract. If you only need work emails, Hunter, UpLead or Kaspr's email credits cover it. If you reveal a handful of contacts a month, a free tier is enough.

Whatever you pick, work out the price per usable contact. On Lusha's own published plans one phone number costs between $0.44 and $0.62, five times the price of an email, and the headline plan price hides that.

A disclosure before the tables. I don't sell any of these tools, and my team uses several of these databases when it builds lists for clients. The only phone work we add is an optional warm call to someone on a client's list who has already replied, engaged or opted in.

Everything below about phones comes from vendor pages and regulators, not from phone results of ours. I don't rank them, and I ran no head-to-head accuracy test. Every price comes from the vendor's own pricing page; read at the time of writing.

Which Lusha alternative fits the job you used Lusha for?

Open your last three months in Lusha before you open any comparison page. Were most reveals phones or emails? Did one person use the account, or a team? Was the browser extension the reason you logged in at all? Each answer points to a different tool.

A few cells need their source. ZoomInfo lists mobile numbers, business email and a Chrome extension in its Professional package (ZoomInfo). Kaspr lists its LinkedIn Chrome extension on every tier, including Free, and keeps phone credits separate from B2B email credits (Kaspr).

UpLead's trial lasts 7 days with 5 credits (UpLead), enough for a spot check of a few contacts. The same page says one credit pays for one contact and gives you its email and mobile direct dial. It does not say whether trial credits or the extension work the same way. Test that on day 1.

Lead411 offers a 7-day trial with 50 exports and lists direct phone numbers on every plan (Lead411). Apollo pools credits across the whole team (Apollo), and Hunter puts unlimited team members on one shared pool (Hunter).

If you sell into Europe, no pricing page tells you how many of your buyers in Poland or Ireland a database holds. Only a test on your own list shows that.

What does one phone number really cost on Lusha?

Lusha's extension page prices an email reveal at 1 credit and a phone reveal at 5, with 40 free credits a month (Lusha). The extension itself is free to install. The reveals inside it are what you pay for.

So the 40 free credits buy 8 phone numbers, or 40 emails, or a mix in between. A contact where you take both the email and the phone costs 6 credits.

The math is short:

• Cost per credit = what you pay for the period divided by the credits you get in that period
• Cost per email = cost per credit
• Cost per phone = cost per credit times 5

Here it is on Lusha's paid plans at the time of writing (Lusha pricing):

If you were on a discount or an older plan, put your own invoice figures into the same formula.

On the same plan, a team that mostly calls burns credits five times faster than a team that mostly emails, so 400 Starter credits cover 400 emails or only 80 phones.

Check the scale too. Our campaigns need to reach at least 10,000 people a month to book 30-35 sales calls. Lusha's self-serve monthly plans give 400 to 600 credits. A reveal tool is for research on a shortlist, not for feeding a full outbound program. Quality alone is not enough, you need quantity as well.

What do the main Lusha alternatives cost per phone and per email?

Here are the published prices at the time of writing, with monthly and annual billing kept apart. The last column names the unit you pay for, because vendors count differently: Kaspr sells phone credits, UpLead sells contacts, RocketReach and Lead411 sell exports, and Hunter sells emails found. That column assumes you use every credit. Leave credits unused and your real cost goes up.

Sources for the table: Kaspr, UpLead, RocketReach, Lead411, Hunter, ZoomInfo, and Cognism, all at the time of writing.

Apollo has no row because its pricing page, at the time of writing, names its Free, Basic, Professional and Custom plans but gives no credit count per plan or credit cost per phone in its text. Apollo's pricing page does say credits are granted upfront at the start of each billing cycle, so the full allotment is there from day 1.

What a phone credit buys is clearer. Apollo's help article on credit usage says a phone number charge means Apollo revealed a mobile number for a contact. It still gives no numeric cost per reveal. Get those numbers from the plan overview in an Apollo account before you compare it with the rows above, and see alternatives to Apollo.io for that side of the choice.

Three things the headline numbers leave out, at the time of writing:

1. Kaspr shows two prices per plan. Its page does not say which one is the discounted rate, so the table gives both ends. Phone credits are the same 100 or 200 a month either way, so your per-phone cost lands between the two figures.
2. "Unlimited" has edges. Kaspr's unlimited B2B emails sit under a fair use policy. RocketReach lists unlimited lookups on annual plans, but exports are capped.
3. Failed lookups. RocketReach refunds a lookup when it cannot find and verify an email or phone. Hunter charges nothing when it finds no email. That matters most on niche lists, where many searches come back empty.

For a phone-heavy team, compare Kaspr's per-phone figures with Lusha's directly. UpLead is priced per contact, and Lead411 and RocketReach per export, so those figures are not a like-for-like price per phone. Run the test further down, because a low price per export only helps when the export is right.

Can you legally call the numbers these tools give you?

Often yes, but only after you screen them, and the rules differ by country. A data tool sells you the number. The liability for dialing it stays with you, and the ICO says paying someone else to run your marketing does not move that responsibility off you (ICO guide to PECR).

In the UK, the ICO says B2B callers must check numbers with the TPS, the CTPS and their own do-not-call list (ICO telephone marketing guidance). Sole traders and some partnerships register on the TPS. The CTPS is where companies, government bodies and some partnerships register. A registered number cannot get a live marketing call unless that person specifically agreed to your calls.

An unregistered business number can be called only if its owner has not objected before and your calls are not selling claims management. On the call itself, the ICO expects you to say who is calling and to give an address or freephone number if asked. It marks this guidance as under review because of the Data (Use and Access) Act.

The law underneath is PECR regulation 21. It requires you to show your caller ID or a number where you can be reached. It bars calls to anyone who told you not to call. There is a grace window: a number registered within the previous 28 days does not count against you.

In the US, the FTC says the Telemarketing Sales Rule leaves out most telemarketer calls to a business (FTC). One kind of business call stays covered: calls pushing retail sales of office or cleaning supplies that get used up, such as paper, toner or ink. The FTC puts the civil penalty at $53,088 for each violation.

Federal law is only one layer. The same FTC page notes that many states have their own telemarketing laws, and that the FCC enforces a separate law, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. If US phones are central to your plan, check the state rules for the places you call.

Where the data came from is a separate GDPR question, covered in how each data provider handles GDPR. This is not legal advice.

How do you leave Lusha without wasting paid credits?

Leaving badly costs more than the next plan. Run this in your last paid cycle:

1. Find your renewal date and note whether you are billed monthly or annually.
2. Check what happens to your balance. Lusha's pricing page says unused credits on monthly plans roll over and build up to twice the plan's limit, while annual plans get all credits up front and reset them at the end of the year (Lusha pricing). On an annual plan, anything left at renewal is gone.
3. Spend leftover credits on the Lusha half of the 50-contact test below instead of random lookups.
4. Export every contact you revealed, then open your CRM and check that phones and emails came across in the right fields.
5. Start the replacement's trial or first month while Lusha is still paid, so both tools run on the same companies.
6. Cancel before the renewal date, and turn off auto-renew if your account has it.

Then buy the replacement for one cycle of real use, because unused credits rarely survive.

Apollo's plan credits and purchased add-on credits do not roll over, and add-on credits are charged at once and recur until you set the slider back to zero. Hunter's credits reset every month on monthly billing. Lead411's pricing page says exports roll over on all subscriptions. Check the rollover rule of any other tool before you buy, because not every page above states it.

Why does the tool matter less than the list it builds?

When replies dry up, the first thing to get blamed is the email, because it is the one part everybody sees. A database switch is the same reflex. The tool bills you every month, so it looks guilty.

Every database goes stale, because people change roles and companies. The type of source matters far more than loyalty to one brand, and how prospecting databases differ covers how the categories differ.

Lists my team builds come from Sales Navigator, Apollo, UpLead, ZoomInfo or RocketReach, and any of those beats a scraped list. Cheap lists bought from freelancers tend to bring weak opens and many bounces.

If your campaign is failing right now, check the targeting before you blame Lusha. Copy has the same limit. No rewrite rescues a list aimed at the wrong people or a sender with a poor reputation, and a new database does not either. Fix the list first. Then change the tool.

How do you test a replacement on 50 contacts before you switch?

Fifty contacts is a rough check rather than a statistical sample, but it exposes a large gap in cost per usable contact between two tools and is small enough to finish quickly. The test follows the order my team uses for every list: past clients first, real titles, verification before anything goes out.

1. Pick 10 of your past or current clients and find 5 similar companies for each, for 50 in total.
2. Choose one decision-maker per company, by the title your niche really uses. For IT buyers that means titles like CTO, Head of IT, VP of IT Strategy or Director of IT. Leave out generic titles like Assistant, Associate and a bare Manager; we exclude them from every list. Then audit the lead list by hand for wrong companies and wrong seniority.
3. Pull the same 50 people in Lusha and in the candidate. Record emails found, phones found and credits spent in each.
4. Run every email from both tools through a verifier. We verify every address with NeverBounce or DeBounce and keep bounces under 0.5%. On 50 contacts a single bounce already crosses that line, so only verified addresses count as usable.
5. Divide the money each tool spent by its usable contacts. That number decides, and the plan price does not.

Fill in this scorecard as you go:

An example with made-up results, priced at Lusha's monthly Starter rate: 50 email-plus-phone reveals take 300 credits. At about $0.12 a credit that is $37, and if 20 contacts are usable, each cost about $1.87. A candidate that spends $15 of its plan on the same 50 and returns 40 usable contacts comes out at about $0.38 each.

If you buy lists from a person instead of a tool, demand the same proof. Ask for a sample list first, before anyone shows you a line of copy.

Run the test inside your last Lusha month, so that by renewal day you have a cost per usable contact for each tool.

Leaving Lusha and unsure how many phone credits you will really use? Book a call and send me last quarter's reveals. I will say which tool I would test first.