B2B Data Providers by the Credit: $0.37 to $0.75 for an Email and a Phone

A contact with a verified email and a phone number costs $0.37 on UpLead's annual Plus plan and between $0.52 and $0.75 on Lusha's published plans. B2B data providers stopped selling seats and started selling credits, and each one decides differently what a credit buys. Lusha charges 5 credits for a phone and 1 for an email. UpLead charges 1 credit for both. Cognism and Seam­less.AI publish the rules but not the price.

B2B data providers now sell credits, not seats

Contact data used to be bought by the seat. All four vendors in this comparison now meter the moment a rep reveals, exports or enriches a contact.

The unit is called a credit everywhere, and that shared word hides the real difference. A Lusha credit is a fraction of a contact. An UpLead credit is a whole contact. A Cognism credit is a whole contact that stays yours until the person changes jobs. A Seam­less.AI credit is a whole contact profile, with refunds only when the email bounces hard.

So the list price per credit means little until you know what a credit returns, what re-touching a contact costs, and what an empty result costs. This post converts each vendor's published plans into cost per exported contact, then footnotes the rules that change it.

My position, stated up front: credit metering is a fair model for buyers who know their workload, and an expensive one for buyers who do not. The confusion between credits, tokens and seats in AI billing follows the same pattern. The vendor sets the exchange rate, and the exchange rate is where the margin lives.

Cost per contact from the published B2B data provider plans

Only Lusha and UpLead publish both a price and a credit allowance. The table below divides each plan price by its credit allowance, then applies each vendor's credit charge per field. All prices are US dollar list prices retrieved on 7 November 2026.

Lusha credit costs from its pricing page FAQ: 1 credit per email, 5 per phone, up to 6 for both. Lusha plan figures come from the structured pricing data on its page, last modified 11 October 2026. UpLead annual totals are its monthly-equivalent price times 12. Lusha Scale, UpLead Professional, every Cognism plan and every Seam­less.AI plan are quote-only and cannot appear here.

Lusha pricing per email and per phone

Lusha's spread runs from $0.09 for an email on any annual plan to $0.62 for a phone on monthly Starter. That is a 7 times range inside one vendor, and the plan you pick explains less of it than the field you reveal. Annual billing takes about 25% off the per-credit price. Revealing a phone instead of an email multiplies the cost by 5.

Lusha's higher tiers do not buy cheaper credits. Annual Pro works out at $0.087 per credit and annual Premium at $0.088, so Premium costs fractionally more per credit than Pro. What Premium buys is volume and features, not a better rate. If your team needs 7,000 credits a year, the arithmetic favours Pro.

UpLead pricing per contact

UpLead's pricing page defines one credit as one contact, giving access to the email and the mobile direct dial together. There is no phone surcharge. That makes UpLead's per-contact price easy to read: $0.37 on annual Plus, rising to $0.58 on monthly Essentials. Extra credits cost $0.60 on Essentials and $0.50 on Plus, which is above the annual plan rate on both tiers.

The trade-off is the opposite of Lusha's: you pay for the phone on every contact, called or not.

Lusha pricing: a phone number costs 5 times an email

Lusha's documentation on how credits are counted lists 1 credit for an email reveal, 5 for a phone reveal and up to 6 for both. Searching, filtering and viewing company data cost nothing. Viewing a contact you already revealed costs nothing either, even in a later session.

Lusha suits large email lists with phones revealed selectively. A rep who reveals emails for 500 prospects and phones only for the 40 who opened twice spends 700 credits. The same rep revealing everything spends 3,000. Same plan, different behaviour, and a bill more than 4 times larger.

On a monthly plan, unused credits roll over and accumulate up to twice the plan limit. On an annual plan, every credit arrives up front and any balance resets at the end of the year. Annual is cheaper per credit but carries the risk of unspent credits.

Two of Lusha's rules work against you. Its documentation states that bulk reveals charge for every contact in the selection, including those where only partial data came back. It also states that credits are not refunded for reveals already made. An API request that returns no results still costs a minimum of 1 credit. CSV enrichment is the friendlier path, because unmatched rows there cost nothing.

Several third-party pricing summaries published in 2026 claim Lusha raised the phone reveal to 10 credits. Lusha's own pricing page and its documentation both said 5 when I checked them on 7 November 2026. I have used the vendor's figure. If you see 10 in your account, the table above understates your phone cost by almost half.

Seam­less.AI pricing: credit counts with no published price

Seam­less.AI does publish its credit rules, in a customer education article on credit and licence types. A Free licence gets 50 credits that never replenish. A Basic licence gets 250 credits a month. A Pro licence gets 10,000 credits a month. Both paid allowances refresh on the contract date each month.

What a credit buys is generous. Clicking Find on a contact uses 1 credit and returns the whole profile, including titles, emails and phone numbers. There is no separate phone charge, which puts it closer to UpLead's model than Lusha's. Enrichment costs 1 credit per row. AI-written messages cost 0.2 credits each, so the credit is becoming a product-wide currency.

Accounts created before 1 April 2026 may still hold a legacy Pro licence with 1,000 credits a day, refreshed at midnight UTC. The article says that licence is no longer sold. If you are renewing one, check whether the renewal quote moves you onto 10,000 a month.

The break-even price for a Seam­less.AI licence

No dollar price appears on the vendor's own pages. The pricing link leads to an inquiry form. Third-party roundups quote Basic figures that trace to no vendor document, so I calculate break-even prices instead.

Break-even assumes every credit is spent on a contact lookup and that the allowance is fully used each month. Licences are per user. Prices are what you would need to be quoted to match, not what Seam­less.AI charges.

If your Basic quote comes in above $131 a month per user, you are paying more per full contact than Lusha's annual Pro list price. If a Pro quote is well under $3,725 a month and your team will genuinely spend 10,000 credits, it beats everything else on this page. Most teams will not spend 10,000 credits per user, and that is the catch.

Credit Back covers emails, not phones

Seam­less.AI runs a Credit Back Protection policy. When an email it supplied hard bounces because the address does not exist, is disabled or cannot receive mail, the credit returns automatically. It is the only automatic data refund among the four vendors.

Soft bounces, role addresses such as info@ and addresses that went stale after verification are excluded. Phone numbers and company data are excluded entirely. If your team buys Seam­less.AI mainly for direct dials, the refund does not cover what you are paying for.

Cognism pricing: the friendliest re-export rule and no list price

Cognism's pricing page offers sales prospecting in Standard and Pro packages, each with 5 seats included, and asks you to request a personalised quote. Each seat carries a credit allocation of unpublished size.

The credit itself is simple: 1 credit equals 1 revealed contact. Viewing a previously revealed contact is free. The same credits work across the prospecting platform, CSV enrichment and the API, so there are no separate pools per channel.

The Pro package adds a premium mobile filter and mobile verification on demand. Cognism does not say whether either feature draws extra credits. Mobile quality is the line between its two packages, which signals where Cognism thinks its pricing power sits.

A credit is spent again only when the contact changes jobs

Cognism's FAQ states that once a contact is redeemed, your team can keep using that record for the whole contract. A credit is used again only if that contact changes jobs. CRM enrichment follows the same rule, with ongoing maintenance included.

This is the most buyer-friendly re-use rule here. On a fixed account list, the effective cost per contact falls with every touch. It cannot be calculated from outside, because seat price and credit allocation sit in the quote. Ask for both in writing.

The credit rules that change the real price by multiples

Your real cost depends on four rules that sit in help articles rather than on pricing pages. The matrix below records what each vendor's own documentation says, and marks where it says nothing.

"Not stated" means the rule did not appear on the vendor pages and help articles opened for this post. It does not mean the vendor has no rule. Ask for it in writing.

In Lusha's Workspace tables, pushing a changed row to your CRM costs 1 credit. For an email-only contact that cost 1 credit to reveal, the sync doubles the cost per contact. For a full contact at 6 credits, it adds about 17%. A nightly CRM sync on a large table can quietly cost more than the reveals, a dynamic similar to the concessions buyers should demand under usage-based pricing.

Match rate decides whether a bundled phone is cheap

UpLead and Seam­less.AI charge one credit for the whole contact. Lusha charges for the phone only when it reveals one. So the real comparison is cost per contact that comes back with a phone.

The chart below divides UpLead's annual Plus price of $0.37 by the share of contacts carrying a mobile. Against Lusha's annual Pro full reveal at $0.52, the lines cross at a 71% mobile match rate. Below 71%, Lusha's pay-per-phone rule is cheaper for phone-led outreach.

This chart is a model, not a measurement. It assumes UpLead consumes a credit even when the mobile field is empty, which UpLead does not state either way. It also assumes Lusha charges only for phones it returns, which its "up to 6 credits" wording implies. Your match rate decides the answer, and it varies by country, seniority and industry.

Where this comparison is weakest

A cost-per-contact table looks more precise than this one is.

List price is not the price most teams pay

Every figure above is a self-serve list price. Larger teams negotiate, and two vendors here exist only in negotiated territory. A Cognism or Seam­less.AI buyer who negotiates well may beat every row in the first table. The comparison is fair for a team of 1 to 5 buying online. It is weak for a team of 30 with a procurement function.

Cost per contact ignores whether the contact is right

This post does not measure accuracy, coverage or bounce rates. UpLead claims a 95% email accuracy rate on its pricing page, and that is a vendor claim with no published method, so I have not used it. A $0.37 email that bounces costs more than a $0.52 email that lands, because the bounce also damages your sending domain. The relationship between data quality and inbox placement is covered in the analysis of AI SDR tools and cold email deliverability.

The honest version of this comparison would run the same 500 target accounts through all four vendors and count verified, deliverable contacts. This post did not, and research found no independent public test with a stated method. Until someone publishes one, treat any claim that a vendor has better data as marketing.

Finally, rules change. Third-party summaries already disagree about whether a Lusha phone costs 5 credits or 10. Credit tables are easier to change than seat prices, because the change hides in a help article. Every figure here carries a retrieval date for that reason.

Which B2B data provider fits which workload

The cheapest vendor depends on what your team does after the reveal:

Email-only outbound at volume. Lusha on an annual plan. At about $0.09 per email it is roughly 4 times cheaper than UpLead's best bundled rate. Avoid Workspace CRM syncs, which double the price of an email-only contact.

Phone-led outbound to a market with good mobile coverage. UpLead annual Plus, if your test sample shows a mobile match above 71%. Below that, Lusha's pay-per-phone model costs less per number you can actually dial.

A fixed account list worked over a full year. Cognism's rule that a credit is only spent again after a job change is worth more here than any list price difference.

Very high volume per rep. A Seam­less.AI Pro licence at 10,000 credits a month is the only allowance in this comparison built for it. Use the break-even table as your price ceiling.

For platforms that bundle enrichment with workflow, the comparison of Clay, Apollo and ZoomInfo cost per contact covers the other end of this market. For intent signals sold alongside contact data, see the intent data vendor disclosure matrix.

Frequently asked questions

Where to start

Take your last month of outbound and count two numbers: contacts where your team used only the email, and contacts where someone dialled a phone. That ratio decides which credit model is cheaper for you.

Then run a 100-contact test from your real target list through the trial or free tier of the two vendors that fit your ratio. Count the mobiles returned and the emails that verify, then apply the 71% test above before renewal.

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