Ask what a B2B lead costs and you get a range so wide it is useless: ten cents to a dollar a record, depending on who is answering and what they are excluding.
The range exists because “lead” is not a unit. A company record is not a person. A person with a LinkedIn URL is not a person you can email. A person you can email is not a person you can call. Most vendors price the cheapest of those and charge separately for the rest, which is how a $0.10 record becomes $0.60 by the time it is usable.
So here are the actual unit prices, and then the honest arithmetic on what a working list costs.
The four unit prices
| What you get | Cost | Why that number |
|---|---|---|
| Lead with a verified email | 1 credit | The standard unit. Verified at the point of delivery, not months ago |
| LinkedIn data, no email | 0.5 credit | Half price because it is half a lead. Fine if LinkedIn is your channel |
| Mobile number | 10 credits | Harder to source, verify and maintain, and worth roughly that much more when it connects |
| Company follower | 1 credit | A person who follows a chosen company page, same unit as any other person |
| Company record | Free | Firmographics are not the scarce part |
| All 50+ filters | Free | Searching, filtering and counting cost nothing |
The last two lines are the ones that change behaviour. If filtering is free, you can build, count and refine a segment to exhaustion before spending anything. Nearly every per-record vendor charges you to find out whether a segment is worth having.
What 12,000 credits actually buys
Same balance, three different mixes. This is the part worth internalising, because the mix matters far more than the headline credit count.
| Mix | What it buys | Effective cost per usable contact |
|---|---|---|
| Email-led outbound | 12,000 leads with verified emails | 1 credit |
| LinkedIn-led | 24,000 LinkedIn records with no email | 0.5 credit |
| Phone-led | 1,200 mobile numbers | 10 credits |
| Blended, the realistic one | 8,000 verified emails, 2,000 LinkedIn-only, 300 mobiles | About 1.2 credits average |
The blended row is what a real quarter looks like, and it shows where the money leaks. Three hundred mobile numbers is 3,000 credits, a quarter of the balance, for 3% of the contacts. That is either the best spend on the list or the worst, and the deciding factor is whether those 300 were chosen or whether someone bulk-revealed a segment.
The rule that follows: reveal emails at the list level, reveal mobiles at the account level. Emails are cheap enough to buy in bulk and get wrong occasionally. Mobiles are not.
The parts of the bill nobody quotes
Data is the visible cost. Three more sit on the same balance, and they are usually charged separately elsewhere.
AI actions: 1 credit each, flat. An ice-breaker is one action. A generated first email is another. So a 500-lead campaign with both is 1,000 credits, on top of the 500 for the leads themselves. Worth planning for, and worth knowing it is not metered per token, which makes it predictable.
Calling: 1 credit = $0.02. US outbound runs about $0.04 a minute, inbound about $0.03, recording 0.5 credit a minute and transcription 1. A hundred dials at a 31% connect rate and 90 seconds average talk time is under $2 of call time, which is why cost per meeting on the phone is decided by rep hours, not telephony.
Signals: an allowance, not a per-record fee. Watches and signal leads at $19, $49 or $129 a month, with job-change monitoring on your existing lists free on every plan. The reason that matters is comparative: per-engager pricing elsewhere turns one popular post into a four-figure bill.
Comparing against per-record vendors honestly
A credit model is not automatically cheaper. It is more predictable, and it is cheaper for the mixes most outbound teams actually run. Where per-record wins is a one-off, single-purpose list where you want no subscription at all.
Three questions that make any quote comparable:
- Does the price include the email, or the record? A cheap record with a $0.20 email append is not a cheap record.
- What is the verification policy at delivery? Unverified data is priced like data and behaves like a bounce list, and bounces cost you sender reputation as well as credits.
- Do filters, counts and company records cost anything? If exploring is metered, you will under-explore, and the segment you settle on will be worse.
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.
Frequently asked questions
What does a B2B lead cost?
It depends entirely on what a lead means in the contract. Per-record vendors quote $0.10 to $1 a contact and then charge again for phone data. On a credit model the unit prices are explicit: 1 credit for a lead with a verified email, 0.5 for LinkedIn data without an email, 10 for a mobile number, 1 for a company follower, and nothing for company records or filters.
Why does a phone number cost ten times an email?
Because mobile numbers are harder to source and verify, and because the value is roughly proportional: a connect on a direct mobile is worth many email sends. The 10-credit price is also a deliberate brake, so nobody reveals mobiles across a whole list before qualifying it.
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.