“How much does a lead cost” has no single answer, because a lead is not one thing.
A name and a company is nearly free. The same person with a verified work email costs something. With a verified mobile, considerably more. The spread between the cheapest and most expensive version of the same contact is roughly twentyfold, and most teams pay the expensive rate for records where they only needed the cheap one.
Here is the actual arithmetic.
What each piece costs
On credit-based pricing, where one credit is roughly a cent at typical volumes:
| What you get | Credits | Rough cost |
|---|---|---|
| Company record and firmographics | 0 | Free |
| Filtering and search | 0 | Free |
| Person with LinkedIn data, no email | 0.5 | ~$0.006 |
| Person with a verified email | 1 | ~$0.012 |
| Verified mobile number | 10 | ~$0.12 |
| Company follower record | 1 | ~$0.012 |
The mobile is the outlier and the reason it matters. A mobile costs around ten times a verified email because it is genuinely harder to source and verify, not because of margin. It also connects at several times the rate of a switchboard number, which makes it good value when you are going to call and pure waste when you are not.
What a realistic month looks like
Take a 12,000-credit allowance at $149, which is roughly $0.0124 a credit.
Email-led outbound, broad:
12,000 leads with verified emails. Cost per contactable lead: $0.0124.
Multichannel, no calling:
- 6,000 leads with verified emails, 6,000 credits
- 6,000 LinkedIn-only records for connection requests, 3,000 credits
- Remaining 3,000 credits spare
12,000 contactable people for $149, with LinkedIn coverage on half.
Calling included, targeted:
- 8,000 leads with verified emails, 8,000 credits
- 400 mobile numbers for the highest-scoring accounts, 4,000 credits
8,000 email contacts plus 400 callable ones. The 400 mobiles consumed a third of the budget, which is correct if those 400 are worth calling and badly wrong if they were chosen at random.
Competitor audience play:
- 4,000 company follower records, 4,000 credits
- 8,000 verified emails from search, 8,000 credits
The comparison worth noticing: the same $149 produces 12,000 email contacts, or 8,000 plus 400 callable ones. Neither is better in the abstract. It depends entirely on whether you are going to call.
The rule that saves the most money
Score before you reveal.
The common pattern is to build a list, reveal everything, then filter. That spends credits on records you then discard.
The better order:
- Search and filter, free
- Look at the company-level results, free
- Score against your ICP on the attributes you already have
- Reveal contact details only for what clears the threshold
- Reveal mobiles only for the subset you will actually call
Applied properly this typically cuts data spend by 30 to 50% with no reduction in pipeline, because the records you skipped were never going to be contacted anyway.
Reveal at the step, not at list build
The second big saving, and the one almost nobody does.
If your sequence calls people on day nine, and only if they engaged with an earlier touch, you do not need a mobile number for everyone on day one. You need it for the subset who reach the call step, which might be 15% of the list.
Revealing 1,000 mobiles up front costs 10,000 credits. Revealing 150 at the point the call step fires costs 1,500. Same pipeline, one-sixth the cost.
This applies to any expensive data type gated behind a conditional step.
Comparing against per-record pricing
Most providers price per record revealed, and the comparison is harder than it looks.
Things to establish before comparing a rate:
Do you pay for misses? Some providers charge for a lookup that returns nothing. At a 60% match rate that inflates your real cost by roughly two-thirds.
Is verification separate? A revealed but unverified email is not usable. If verification is a separate charge, add it.
Do filters or company records consume credits? If searching costs you, exploratory work becomes expensive and you will do less of it, which is a real cost even though it never appears on an invoice.
Do credits expire? Monthly expiry means you either over-buy or lose the balance. Rollover is worth a meaningful premium.
Are different data types priced separately? A flat per-record rate that includes mobile numbers sounds generous and usually means either the mobile coverage is thin or the flat rate is set at mobile prices.
The number to compare is cost per correct, usable record in your segment, calculated from a test rather than from a pricing page. The method is in the data provider guide.
What the market roughly charges
Indicative ranges at the time of writing, for a verified work email in a well-covered segment:
| Model | Typical cost per verified email |
|---|---|
| Credit-based, rollover | $0.01–$0.02 |
| Per-record, pay for misses | $0.03–$0.08 effective |
| Enterprise annual contract | $0.05–$0.15 effective at typical usage |
| Waterfall across providers | $0.04–$0.12, higher match rate |
| Free methods and manual | Near zero in cash, expensive in time |
Enterprise contracts often look poor on this metric and are bought for other reasons, data depth, firmographic richness, integrations, compliance posture. That can be a reasonable trade, but it should be a deliberate one.
A worked example, end to end
A 3,000-lead campaign for a mid-market SaaS product, run properly:
| Step | Credits |
|---|---|
| Build and refine the segment across 50+ filters | 0 |
| 3,000 leads with verified emails | 3,000 |
| Ice-breaker plus first email generated per lead | 6,000 |
| Mobiles on the top 150 accounts only | 1,500 |
| 200 dials into those accounts | About 90 |
| Total | About 10,600 |
Two thirds of that is data and AI on a list you will work for a month. The phone layer, which is where the meetings actually get booked, is 15%. Most teams have the ratio inverted in their heads and under-invest in the cheap part of the stack.
Next: what the sending infrastructure costs at 10, 100 and 500 mailboxes, or cost per meeting on the phone.
Four mixes of the same 12,000 credits
| Motion | Mix | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Email-only outbound | 12,000 emails | 12,000 verified-email leads. Roughly 4,000 prospects a month through a 3-step sequence |
| Email + LinkedIn | 8,000 emails, 8,000 LinkedIn-only | 8,000 dual-channel prospects, at 1.5 credits each |
| Calling-led | 500 mobiles, 7,000 emails | 500 dialable prospects plus an email base. The mobiles are 42% of the balance |
| Competitor audience | 10,000 followers, 2,000 emails | A competitor’s full follower base, with emails on the best-fit 2,000 |
The calling row is the useful one to sit with. Five hundred mobile numbers consumes nearly half the balance, which is the correct signal: phone is a channel for accounts worth a rep’s time, not for volume. Buy mobiles for a scored shortlist, not for a segment.
To size your own mix, run your numbers through the free Lead Credit Calculator.
The short version
A lead is not one price. A LinkedIn-only record, a verified email and a verified mobile differ by roughly twentyfold, and the mobile is worth its premium only when someone is actually going to dial it.
Score before revealing, and reveal expensive data at the sequence step that needs it rather than at list build. Those two habits typically cut data spend by a third to a half without touching pipeline.
And when comparing providers, calculate cost per correct record in your own segment including misses, because the advertised rate and the real rate are routinely two to three times apart.
Next: how to compare data providers, or finding phone numbers for B2B.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a B2B lead cost?
On credit-based pricing, roughly $0.012 for a contact with a verified email, about half that for LinkedIn data without an email, and around $0.12 for a verified mobile. Company records and filtering are frequently free.
Why do mobile numbers cost more than email addresses?
They are harder to source and verify. The premium is typically tenfold, and it is justified when you are going to call, mobiles connect at several times the rate of switchboard numbers, and wasted when you are not.
How do I reduce data costs in outbound?
Score leads against your ICP before revealing contact details, and reveal expensive data like mobile numbers at the sequence step that needs them rather than at list build. Together these commonly cut spend by 30 to 50%.
Is credit-based or per-record data pricing better?
Credit-based with rollover is usually cheaper per usable record, particularly if the provider does not charge for lookups that return nothing. Compare on cost per correct record in your segment, not on the advertised rate.
What is free on the credit model?
Company records and all 50+ search filters. That means list building, filtering and counting cost nothing, and you spend only at the point of revealing contact data. It is why exploring a segment before committing is free.
How do AI credits work?
One credit per AI action, flat. A 500-lead campaign with an ice-breaker and a first email generated per lead is 1,000 credits, and there is no separate per-token or per-seat AI charge.
Do unused credits expire?
Plan credits renew with the billing period. Top-ups do not expire, so buying a buffer for a spike is not a use-it-or-lose-it decision.
How do I compare this to per-record pricing?
Normalise two things: whether phone numbers are included or sold separately at a multiple, and whether search and exports consume allowance. Both usually make per-record pricing more expensive than the headline rate.