Hunter.io Pricing 2026: Plans, Credits and Cost Per Search

Hunter.io pricing starts at $49 a month for Starter, dropping to $34 a month if you pay for the year, with Growth at $149 ($104 annual) and Scale at $299 ($209 annual). There is a genuine permanent free plan at $0 with 50 credits a month. Every figure here was pulled from hunter.io on August 30, 2026.

The number that actually matters is not the plan price, it is what a credit costs and what a credit buys. On the all-in-one plans, finding an email address and verifying one draw from the same pool. So the Starter plan's 2,000 credits are not 2,000 searches if you also verify what you find, and a lot of cost-per-lead math you will read online quietly assumes they are.

Hunter.io pricing plans in 2026

Plan	Annual (per month)	Billed monthly	Credits / mo	Credits / yr	Email accounts
Free	$0	$0	50	600	1
Starter	$34	$49	2,000	24,000	3
Growth	$104	$149	10,000	120,000	10
Scale	$209	$299	25,000	300,000	20
Enterprise	Custom credits, custom email accounts, account manager

Paying yearly saves 30%. In annual totals that is $408 for Starter, $1,248 for Growth and $2,508 for Scale. The free plan also caps sequences at 500 recipients and gives you the basic Discover filters rather than the advanced ones, so it is a real evaluation tier rather than a workable production tier.

What a Hunter.io credit actually costs

Because credits are the meter, cost per credit is the honest way to rank the tiers. It falls by nearly three times between the cheapest and most expensive path, which is the opposite of how most people assume volume pricing works when they pick the entry plan to be careful with money.

Plan and billing	Price / mo	Credits / mo	Cost per credit
Starter, monthly	$49	2,000	$0.0245
Starter, yearly	$34	2,000	$0.0170
Growth, monthly	$149	10,000	$0.0149
Growth, yearly	$104	10,000	$0.0104
Scale, monthly	$299	25,000	$0.0120
Scale, yearly	$209	25,000	$0.0084

Starter on monthly billing is the most expensive credit you can buy at Hunter, at almost three cents. Scale on yearly billing is the cheapest at just under a cent. One detail worth noticing: Scale billed monthly ($0.0120) is cheaper per credit than Growth billed monthly ($0.0149), so the ladder is not strictly ordered. If you are near the top of Growth and paying monthly, moving up can lower your unit cost, not just your headroom.

How do Hunter.io credits work?

Credits pay for finding and verifying email addresses, and on the all-in-one plans both actions draw from one shared pool. There are no separate search and verification quotas to balance, which is simpler than it sounds but means a verification-heavy month eats the same budget as a research-heavy one. Sending sequence emails does not consume credits.

That shared pool is the single most useful thing to understand before choosing a tier. If your workflow is find-then-verify on every contact, plan for roughly double the credits your list size suggests. A team building a 1,000-contact list that way is looking at about 2,000 credits, which is the entire Starter monthly allowance.

Do Hunter.io credits roll over?

No. Unused credits from a billing period do not carry into the next one. What changes between plans is when the reset happens: monthly plans reset at the start of each month, while yearly plans grant the full year's allocation upfront and only reset after twelve months.

That upfront grant is a real advantage for lumpy outbound work and it is easy to miss. On a yearly Starter plan you get all 24,000 credits on day one, so a heavy list-building month in February can borrow against a quiet April without any penalty. On monthly billing that same February simply runs out. If your prospecting comes in campaign bursts rather than a steady trickle, the annual plan buys flexibility on top of the 30% discount.

If you do exhaust an allocation, Hunter sells extra credit packs on the paid all-in-one plans, valid for three months, or you can move up a tier.

Is Hunter.io free?

Yes, there is a permanent free plan, not just a trial. It gives you 50 credits a month, one connected email account, sequences capped at 500 recipients, the basic Discover filters and access to the AI assistant. That is enough to test accuracy on your own domains and decide whether the data is good for your market.

What it is not is a way to run outbound for free. Fifty credits is roughly 25 contacts if you find and verify each one, and a single connected mailbox with a 500-recipient ceiling will not support real campaign volume safely. Treat it as an evaluation tier.

How much does the Hunter.io API cost?

The API sits on a separate product called the Data Platform, and it is priced differently from the all-in-one plans in two ways that matter. Search credits and verification credits are separate quotas rather than one shared pool, and the credits stay valid for twelve months from purchase instead of expiring on a billing cycle.

Pricing is a flexible credit purchase rather than a fixed ladder. As a reference point Hunter publishes an example bundle of 1,000 search credits plus 200,000 verification credits at $6,500. The shape of that example tells you who the Data Platform is for: verification at very high volume, with comparatively little discovery. If you are enriching an existing database rather than prospecting, that ratio will look familiar.

It is worth pricing this against building the pipeline yourself. If the underlying need is company and contact information that already sits on public websites, a tool that pulls structured data from a list of company sites can cover a chunk of the same ground without a per-credit meter, and you keep the raw output. Where Hunter is hard to replace is verification, because deciding whether a mailbox will accept mail is a live network check, not a scraping problem.

Does Hunter.io charge in dollars or euros?

Hunter supports USD, EUR and GBP, and the currency is chosen from the billing address you enter at checkout. USD is the default for most countries, so a US buyer is billed $49 for Starter, not a converted euro amount.

This trips people up because Hunter is a French company and its pricing page will show euros to a visitor browsing from Europe. The numbers are the same in each currency rather than converted, so €49 and $49 are both the Starter price in their own market. For a US team the practical upshot is simple: the dollar figures in the tables above are what your card is charged, with no foreign transaction fee and no exchange rate to model. Sales tax is added separately where applicable.

Is Hunter.io worth it?

Hunter is worth paying for when your bottleneck is finding and verifying addresses, and it is poor value when your bottleneck is anything else. It has one of the more trusted verification engines in the category and a clean API, and the free plan lets you prove the accuracy on your own market before spending.

Where it stops short is the sending side. The email accounts are capped by tier, at three on Starter and ten on Growth, and the sequencing tools are deliberately lighter than what a dedicated outbound platform ships. If you plan to rotate a dozen mailboxes and run multi-step campaigns at volume, you will end up pairing Hunter with a sending tool rather than replacing one with it. That is a normal, sensible stack, but budget for both rather than assuming one subscription covers the whole motion.

Hunter.io pricing compared to the alternatives

Against the tools it is usually shortlisted with, Hunter is mid-priced and narrow by design. Snov.io Starter is $29.25 a month on annual billing and adds unlimited team seats and unlimited sending accounts, which makes it the cheaper pick for a team that needs to send as well as find. Apollo starts at $49 per seat per month on annual billing with 30,000 credits per seat per year, so it is more expensive per head but ships a much larger database and a built-in dialer.

Tool	Entry price (annual)	Billing axis	Best at
Hunter	$34/mo Starter	Per plan, credits shared across find and verify	Verification accuracy and a clean API
Snov.io	$29.25/mo Starter	Per plan, unlimited seats, credits and recipients metered separately	Finding and sending on one cheap subscription
Apollo	$49/seat/mo Basic	Per seat plus consumption credits	Database size and a built-in dialer

The comparison that decides most of these is not feature by feature, it is which meter your work actually runs on. If you already have a verified list, paying any of them for credits is paying for a problem you do not have. We wrote up the full cold email software pricing comparison across the category, and there are head-to-head breakdowns of Snov.io vs Hunter.io and Apollo vs Snov.io if you are down to two.

How much is Hunter.io per month?

On monthly billing Hunter costs $49 for Starter, $149 for Growth and $299 for Scale. On yearly billing the effective monthly cost is $34, $104 and $209, a 30% saving, though the year is paid upfront at $408, $1,248 and $2,508.

One add-on to factor in if deliverability matters: mailbox warm-up is priced separately, from about $6.45 per account per month on monthly billing or $5.16 on yearly. On a five-mailbox setup that is roughly another $32 a month, which is enough to change how the tiers compare against tools that bundle warm-up.

Choosing a tier without overbuying

Work backwards from credits, not from features. Estimate how many contacts you need each month, double it if you verify everything you find, and pick the smallest plan that covers that number with some headroom. Then check the cost-per-credit table above, because the tier that looks careful can be the one with the worst unit economics.

Two rules of thumb hold up well. If you can predict a year of volume at all, pay annually, both for the 30% discount and for the upfront credit grant that lets busy months borrow from quiet ones. And if you are consistently near the ceiling of Growth on monthly billing, price Scale before buying credit packs, since the larger plan is cheaper per credit than the one below it.

Whatever you land on, remember what the credits do not cover. Hunter gets you a verified address. Turning that into a booked meeting is a separate job, and it is the one that usually decides whether the data spend paid for itself.