B2B Data Providers per Credit: Lusha Prices a Phone at 5x the Email

Lusha charges 1 credit to reveal an email and 5 credits to reveal a phone number. On its Pro annual plan that puts an email at about $0.09 and a full contact at about $0.52. UpLead charges 1 credit for email and mobile together, about $0.37 on its Plus annual plan. Among B2B data providers, the credit rule moves the real price more than the sticker does, and two of the four vendors here publish no price at all.

Short answer. On published list prices, an email-only contact costs $0.09 to $0.12 on Lusha, and a contact with email and mobile costs $0.37 to $0.58 on UpLead. Lusha charges 5 credits per phone number, which lifts its full contact to $0.52 to $0.75. Cognism and Seamless.AI only quote privately, so ask for cost per revealed contact in writing.

Why B2B data providers moved from seats to credits

Contact data used to be sold by the seat, with a soft cap on how much each rep could pull. That model is fading. Every vendor in this comparison now meters some or all of its product in credits, and each one defines a credit differently.

The shift suits vendors for a plain reason. A seat price caps revenue per user, while a credit price scales with how hard your team prospects. It also lets a vendor charge different amounts for different fields, which is exactly what Lusha does with phone numbers. The same logic is spreading across software, and it is covered in the breakdown of why credits and tokens confuse buyers.

For a buyer, the consequence is that a headline such as "600 credits a month" means nothing until you know three things. What one credit buys, what you pay again for, and what happens to credits you do not use. This post answers those three questions for Lusha, Cognism, Seamless.AI and UpLead, using only what each vendor publishes.

My position up front: the per-field credit is the most important number on any of these pricing pages, and vendors put it in the least visible place. Lusha's 5-credit phone rule sits in its documentation and FAQ, not in the plan cards that carry the credit totals.

Cost per contact from the published pricing pages

Only two of the four vendors publish prices, so the table below covers Lusha and UpLead in full and records what the other two disclose. Every price was read from the vendor's own page on 7 November 2026. Cost per credit is our division of the plan price by its credit allowance.

Lusha prices are the figures in its pricing page's structured data, which does not state whether they are per user; teams above 5 users are sent to sales. Lusha email plus phone is 6 credits. UpLead plans are single-user accounts and one credit covers email and mobile direct dial. Figures are list prices before any negotiated discount.

Lusha: cheap emails, expensive phones

Lusha's documentation lists an email reveal at 1 credit and a phone reveal at 5 credits, with both together at "up to 6 credits". So the same plan prices a full contact at 6 times an email-only contact. On the Pro annual plan, 7,200 credits buy 7,200 emails, or 1,200 contacts with a phone.

The per-credit price falls from $0.125 to about $0.087 as you move from Starter monthly to Pro annual. That 30% saving is real, and it is smaller than the 5x swing created by the phone rule. Plan choice matters less than field choice.

UpLead: one flat credit for email and mobile

UpLead's pricing page says "One credit = one contact," and that a credit gives access to the contact's "email and mobile direct dial". There is no separate phone charge. The Plus annual plan works out to $0.37 per contact, and Essentials monthly to $0.58.

The flat credit is simpler to budget, and it penalises teams that only want emails. Those teams pay for a phone field they never dial. Extra credits cost $0.60 on Essentials and $0.50 on Plus, both above the bundled annual rate.

The phone share decides which B2B data provider is cheaper

Because Lusha prices fields and UpLead prices contacts, neither is cheaper in general. The answer depends on one number from your own workflow: the share of contacts for which you reveal a phone.

The arithmetic is short. On Lusha Pro annual, cost per contact equals $0.087 multiplied by 1 plus 5 times your phone share. On UpLead Plus annual it is a flat $0.37. The two meet when the phone share reaches about 65%.

Monthly plans push the crossover higher

Run the same sum on monthly plans and the line moves. Lusha Starter monthly at $0.125 per credit meets UpLead Essentials monthly at $0.58 when the phone share reaches about 73%. Across the plan pairs we tested, the crossover sits between 65% and 73%.

That range is the most useful number in this post. If your outbound motion is email first, Lusha is the cheaper source on list price by a wide margin. If your reps call most of the people they research, UpLead's flat credit wins. I would not choose either vendor before pulling 90 days of your own export history and counting phone reveals.

There is a related trap for email-heavy teams. Cheap email credits encourage large sends, and volume is not free downstream. The bounce and reputation costs are covered in the analysis of AI SDR tools and cold email deliverability.

Re-exports, CRM pushes and job changes: the second meter

Revealing a contact is the first charge. What you pay to use that contact again is the second, and the rules differ more than the reveal prices do. This is where the real price changes by multiples for teams that move data between tools.

Lusha charges the export, not the view

Lusha does not charge to look at a contact twice. Its guide says that re-viewing a revealed contact "does not use additional credits", even across sessions. Moving that contact out of Lusha is a different matter.

The usage documentation lists CSV export at 1 credit per 25 rows, and says this applies even to a table you have already revealed. On 1,000 rows that is 40 credits, about $3.50 on Pro annual. It is a small charge, and it is a recurring one.

The CRM rule is heavier. Lusha lists a push to Salesforce or HubSpot at 1 credit per changed row, with rows that already match the CRM left uncharged. A full contact pushed through that path costs 7 credits, about $0.61 on Pro annual. Lusha's waterfall enrichment is pricier again: 2 credits for a confirmed work email and 8 for a confirmed phone.

Cognism charges once per person, then once per job

Cognism's pricing page is the most generous on re-use of any vendor here. It states "1 credit = 1 revealed contact" and "No charge for viewing previously revealed contacts". Its FAQ adds that once a contact is redeemed, "your team can continue using that record throughout the contract".

The only re-charge Cognism names is a job change: "A credit is only used again if that contact changes jobs". Credits are also shared across the prospecting platform, its Enrich product and the API without extra cost. For a team that exports the same accounts to several tools, that rule is worth more than any per-credit discount. The catch is that you cannot see the price of the credit until a salesperson quotes it.

Cognism and Seamless.AI pricing: what the pages say without a price

Search for Cognism pricing or Seamless.AI pricing and you will find dozens of third-party guides quoting confident figures. Most are written by competitors. None of those figures appears on either vendor's own page, so none of them appears in this post's cost table.

Cognism: credits per seat, quote per team

Cognism sells two packages, Standard and Pro, and each lists "5 seats included". The page says pricing "is tailored based on the product you need, your team setup and how you plan to use the platform". Each seat "includes an allocation of credits," and more can be bought at any point. The allocation per seat is not stated.

Two details are worth knowing before a call. First, many third-party guides still describe Cognism as unlimited, with a separate platform fee. The current page makes neither claim, so treat those guides as describing an older model. Second, phone-verified mobile numbers and on-demand verification are positioned as Pro features, with verification called "a premium feature". Pro also bundles intent data from Bombora, which raises its own disclosure questions covered in the comparison of what intent data vendors disclose.

Seamless.AI: a pooled credit and an annual contract

The Seamless.AI pricing link resolves to an inquiry form promising "special pricing for unlimited users, bulk credits" and other add-ons. Its Bulk Credits page says credits "unify all Seamless usage into one flexible pool" across Search, Enrich, AI Assistant, Autopilot and API workflows. It does not say how many credits a contact, an email or a phone costs.

It does carry the most buyer-friendly accuracy rule in this group: "Credits automatically return for invalid emails or bad data." The contract terms run the other way. The terms of use say every subscription is annual, renews for 12 months unless cancelled 60 days before renewal, and that all sales are final. They also reserve the right to change Service Limits "at any time in our sole discretion". The renewal pattern that follows is the subject of the piece on why renewal prices rise after the first term.

Credit-rule footnotes for each B2B data provider

These are the rules that sit under the headline credit count. Each line is taken from the vendor's own pricing page, documentation or terms. Where a vendor is silent, the table says so rather than filling the gap.

Lusha rules from its user guide pages on how credits work and how they are counted. UpLead's invalid-email rule is from its support centre: emails are verified in real time at download, and choosing "All Available Emails" consumes credits for invalid addresses too. "Not stated" means we found no published rule, not that no rule exists.

Read the table by column and a pattern shows. The two vendors that publish prices also publish the most restrictive rules, because a public price forces the fine print into the open. The two that quote privately publish the friendliest rules and leave the price to the call. I would rather buy from a vendor that shows both, which neither group fully does.

Where this comparison is weakest

A cost-per-contact table built from pricing pages has three gaps, and each one could reverse a conclusion above.

Fill rate is the missing denominator

Every figure here is cost per credit spent, not cost per working phone number delivered. UpLead charges one credit per contact whether or not a mobile exists. If, purely for illustration, half your UpLead contacts came back without a mobile, your cost per delivered mobile on Plus annual would double to about $0.75. No vendor here publishes a mobile fill rate for a defined sample, and I could not test one.

Accuracy claims carry the same problem. UpLead states a 95% email accuracy rate, Seamless.AI claims 414 million verified mobile numbers, and Cognism markets phone-verified mobiles. All three are vendor statements without a published sample, period or method, so they guide research and prove nothing. Lusha's documentation also does not say plainly whether a single platform reveal that finds no phone still costs credits, though its bulk reveals do charge for partial matches.

The other two gaps are timing and scope. Pricing pages change quietly, and some 2026 third-party guides already quote a different Lusha phone rate from the one in its current documentation. List prices also ignore negotiation, which matters most at Premium and Scale volumes. Lusha's CRM push charge may apply only to some sync paths, and its documentation does not settle that. The strongest counter-case is simple: for a team buying fewer than 100 contacts a month, the gap between these vendors is tens of dollars, and data quality matters far more than credit rules.

How to buy contact data on credits without overpaying

The same discipline that applies to any metered software applies here. Price the unit you consume, not the bundle the vendor sells. That argument runs through the analysis of how seat compression is reshaping SaaS pricing, and contact data is a clean example of it.

Start with your phone share, because it picks the pricing model before it picks the vendor. Then convert every quote into dollars per revealed contact with a phone and dollars per contact without one. A vendor that will not give you both numbers in writing is asking you to buy credits blind.

Next, price the second use. If your team pushes contacts into a CRM, a sequencer and a dialler, Cognism's re-use rule or a flat export policy may be worth more than a lower reveal price. Ask each vendor what happens when you export the same 1,000 contacts a second time.

Finally, check the contract before the credit. An annual term with a 60-day cancellation window and final sales turns a credit pool into a 12-month commitment. For a sister comparison covering Clay, Apollo and ZoomInfo, see the cost per verified contact across those three platforms.

Frequently asked questions

Where to start this week

Pull the last 90 days of exports from whatever data tool you use now. Count the contacts where someone revealed or dialled a phone, and divide by the total. If the share is below about 60%, field-priced credits like Lusha's will usually cost you less. If it is above about 75%, a flat contact credit will.

Then send one email to every vendor on your shortlist asking for three numbers in writing. You want dollars per contact with a phone and dollars per contact without one. You also want the credit cost of exporting the same contact a second time. The vendors who answer quickly have priced their own product. The ones who answer with a demo invitation have not.

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