Hunter.io Pricing: Free, Starter, Growth and Scale
Compare Hunter.io Free, Starter, Growth and Scale costs, annual credits, email verification, sender limits, sequences and optional add-ons.

Hunter.io is free to try, and its paid All-in-One Outreach subscription starts at $49 per month for Starter. The same Starter tier is $34 per month equivalent when billed annually, meaning $408 upfront for twelve months. Growth costs $149 monthly or $104 annually equivalent, while Scale costs $299 monthly or $209 annually equivalent. Those public US dollar rates were checked on November 5, 2026. The biggest pricing consideration is not only the subscription fee: Hunter charges credits for email research and verification, limits connected email accounts and caps the recipients inside each sequence. Optional sending infrastructure adds more costs.
Quick verdict
Key takeaways
- Free is nonexpiring with 50 credits monthly and one connected mailbox
- Starter costs $49 monthly or $34 annual-equivalent ($408 upfront)
- Growth is $149 monthly or $104 annual-equivalent
- Scale is $299 monthly or $209 annual-equivalent
- Email finding generally costs one credit and verification half a credit
- Annual credits arrive as one 12-month pool
- Monthly unused credits generally do not roll over
- All-in-One plans include unlimited users but limited sender connections
Find verified business email addresses and run targeted cold-email outreach from one lead platform.
Best for: B2B SDRs, recruiters, agencies, consultants and small growth teams finding business emails and starting personal outreach without a large sales-intelligence stack.
- AI writing assistance on paid plans
- Connected Gmail, Outlook and SMTP senders
- Email Finder for named prospects
- Unlimited Hunter users on current plans
- Domain Search and company email pattern discovery
- Finds professional email patterns by domain and offers per-contact lookup and verification to reduce manual prospecting.
- Free recurring monthly credits allow a small trial of real lead-search and verification tasks without a paid subscription.
- Starter, Growth and Scale combine contact credits with outreach sequences and three, ten or twenty sender connections.
- Customer G2 reports indicate that some contacts are outdated, undeliverable or missing for particular companies.
- Free has only 50 monthly credits; paid search/verify volume requires a realistic credit forecast.
What do Hunter plans cover?
Hunter is a B2B prospecting platform centered on professional email discovery. It offers Domain Search, Email Finder, Email Verifier, Discover company targeting, saved lead management and Sequences for automated cold-email follow-up. Hunter also provides browser extensions, integrations and API endpoints. The Toollers Hunter.io profile classifies it as lead generation software, with a sales outreach use case. Teams that have a target-company list but struggle to find appropriate business contacts are its most natural buyers.
Hunter has two purchasing models. All-in-One Outreach bundles email research with sequences and uses a unified credit balance, shared by teammates. Data Platform is mainly for APIs and bulk data buyers who want separate Search and Verification credit quantities and do not need sequences. Confusing these products leads to inaccurate comparisons. An annual Data Platform sample calculator is not the monthly price of Hunter Starter, and the credit accounting in that API route differs from the combined outreach plans.
Hunter.io plans and pricing table
| Plan | Monthly price USD | Annual monthly equivalent | Year upfront | Credits monthly plan / yearly plan | Connected sender accounts | Recipients per sequence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | $0 | 50/month | 1 | 500 |
| Starter | $49 | $34 | $408 | 2,000/month or 24,000/year | 3 | 2,500 |
| Growth | $149 | $104 | $1,248 | 10,000/month or 120,000/year | 10 | 5,000 |
| Scale | $299 | $209 | $2,508 | 25,000/month or 300,000/year | 20 | 15,000 |
| Enterprise | Quote | Quote | Quote | Contract-specific | Custom | Custom |
| Data Platform | Calculator | Volume pricing | Custom | Separate Search and Verification credits | No Sequences | Not applicable |
Yearly rates are displayed as monthly equivalents but billed in one annual payment. For example, Starter's annual amount is 12 × $34 = $408, not twelve cancellable $34 monthly invoices. Growth is 12 × $104 = $1,248 and Scale 12 × $209 = $2,508. All prices are before applicable taxes, mailbox infrastructure, paid extra connections, managed sending accounts, Inbox Protection or additional credit packs. Hunter supports different billing currencies; this article uses publicly displayed US dollar rates to keep comparisons consistent.
Free: 50 credits and one sender
Hunter's Free plan does not have an expiration deadline. Its included fifty monthly credits can be used for modest research, and it supports one connected sender account with sequences limited to 500 recipients each. The official help center also lists thirty monthly AI Discover searches, limited Signals and Hunter Leads organization. Free users can search and verify emails and examine basic campaign setup before a purchase. The credits are enough for a realistic mini-pilot, not a substantial prospecting operation; finding fifty addresses can exhaust the allowance before separate verification tasks.
Starter: $49 monthly or $34 with annual billing
Starter offers 2,000 credits on a monthly subscription, or 24,000 credits for a full annual contract. It connects three sending email accounts and permits up to 2,500 recipients in one sequence. It adds advanced Discover filtering, lead enrichment, automatic lead verification, an AI writing assistant, A/B testing and other paid functions. This fits a founder or small sales team with recurring research and several carefully managed outbound inboxes. Unlimited team members share the same credit pool, so adding researchers can drain the allowance faster without increasing the purchased subscription.
Growth: $149 monthly or $104 annual-equivalent
Growth increases monthly credits to 10,000, or 120,000 available across an annual term. It supports ten connected sending accounts and up to 5,000 recipients per sequence, plus higher Discover limits, more Signals and a custom tracking domain. A midsize SDR operation can use its expanded room to run several segmented campaigns without packing an oversized audience into one sequence. The important question is whether that organization has ten approved mailboxes, a process for keeping prospect data current and capacity to respond to interested leads. More inbox connections do not establish a healthy daily sending volume.
Scale: $299 monthly or $209 annual-equivalent
Scale provides 25,000 credits monthly or 300,000 across a yearly subscription, twenty sending account connections and a 15,000-recipient limit per sequence. The plan also raises Discover and Signals capacity and includes a dedicated account-management support level. It is intended for established outbound teams whose regular data needs are demonstrable. A higher sequence recipient limit is not a recommendation to launch fifteen thousand emails at once. Segmentation, opt-out handling, domain reputation, mailbox-provider limits and qualification standards still determine whether outreach is useful.
Enterprise: negotiated volume and support
Hunter lists Enterprise with custom credits, sender-account counts and assistance. Organizations that need more than 25,000 credits a month or unusually complex account structures should request an actual quote. Ask whether the offer includes the number of inboxes and user permissions required, any service commitments, credit rollover, administration controls and data export rights. Avoid publishing an invented Enterprise starting price or assuming that every add-on is included. Procurement should record the contract's support and cancellation terms before comparing it with a public tier.
How Hunter credits are actually charged
One email found usually costs one credit
Hunter's All-in-One credit guide says a found email through Email Finder or Domain Search generally costs one credit. Email Finder searches a person name and company domain, while Domain Search discovers addresses connected to a business domain. Hunter says unavailable results do not draw the ordinary find credit. It also has a Bulk Domain Search operation that can charge one credit for up to ten addresses from one company domain, a different unit from ten separate person lookups. A team should estimate its mix of operations rather than multiply the count of companies by one simple credit factor.
Email verification typically costs half a credit
Hunter's normal Email Verifier and Bulk Email Verifier use 0.5 credit for a completed verification on All-in-One plans. That means 1,000 successful checks may require roughly 500 credits, subject to exact billing rules. The credit guide describes verification being included in an email found via Email Finder, so a user should not automatically charge an extra 0.5 for every result already verified by that action. Repeated checks within a billing period can also receive special treatment. Bulk uploads have different deduplication accounting from repeated individual queries, which matters for teams uploading the same list twice.
A practical budget should distinguish three sets: contacts the company already knows, prospects that need a new address, and domains where a bulk search might produce multiple candidates. If the workflow verifies 600 existing addresses and finds 400 new contacts, an illustrative cost is 600 × 0.5 + 400 × 1 = 700 credits, before unusual tools, manual duplicates or enrichment. The actual ledger is authoritative. The 2,000-credit Starter allowance is not equivalent to a guaranteed 2,000 valid people or 2,000 meetings. Some records will be unsuitable, stale, duplicated or insufficiently verified.
AI Discover searches and Signals are their own limits
Hunter Discover helps identify companies using filters and AI-assisted research; browsing and saving companies does not itself spend the normal contact-finding credits. The pricing documentation separately lists AI Discover searches: 30 per month on Free, 150 Starter, 450 Growth and 900 Scale. Hunter Signals monitors company-related signals and has a different plan ladder: ten on Free, twenty Starter, two hundred Growth and unlimited on Scale. Revealing an email discovered through a signal still uses normal contact credits. Sales teams should therefore track AI queries, saved Signals and email credits independently.
Monthly versus annual credit expiry
On a month-to-month All-in-One plan, Hunter says unused subscription credits reset at the end of that billing cycle and do not routinely carry into the next month. An annual subscription supplies the entire year's credit allocation upfront, available until the end of the twelve-month term. A yearly Starter customer has twenty-four thousand credits for that contract, not an obligatory two-thousand-credit cap every calendar month. A seasonal business can use more in a launch quarter and fewer later, as long as it remains within the full annual credit balance and other product limits.
Unused yearly subscription credits expire at the annual renewal. Buying a credit pack is a different transaction: current help materials describe extra packs with a three-month validity period. Moving between paid subscriptions can also trigger special rollover credits, but that should not be treated as permanent balance preservation. A buyer planning an annual commitment should forecast total likely lookups for the year and consider whether the organization will actually use the allocation. The cheapest cost per annual credit can be poor value when a large balance expires at renewal.
Sender accounts and Sequences are separate limits
Sender connections are capped by tier: one Free, three Starter, ten Growth and twenty Scale, before optional extra slots. Sequences have their own maximum number of recipients per individual sequence: 500, 2,500, 5,000 and 15,000 respectively. Those recipient limits should not be confused with Hunter's credit pool or with the daily email send limit of an actual Gmail, Microsoft or SMTP mailbox. Sending through Sequences does not consume search credits, but the number of contacts you can load into one sequence and the capacity of connected mailboxes still shape the operation.
The sequences system supports follow-ups, scheduling, personalization, analytics and reply handling. The help center currently allows up to five automated follow-up emails when a recipient does not reply, and describes automatic stopping on replies, unsubscribes or bounces. Paid plans add A/B testing, rotations and further reporting. Teams should create smaller relevance-based segments even when a plan permits thousands of recipients. A very large generic sequence may fit a technical plan limit while generating poor deliverability, irritated recipients and little useful sales activity.
Optional charges: mailboxes, Inbox Protection and credits
The pricing page offers paid additional email-account slots, managed email accounts and Inbox Protection on eligible paid plans. The public feature grid shows extra email connections starting from $10 a month and managed domain/email configurations from roughly $6 per month, but exact purchases depend on selected assets, region and subscription options. Inbox Protection is separately billed per eligible mailbox. Hunter's managed email accounts are offered as sending infrastructure, not automatically included in every subscribed plan. Do not assume the three Starter connections include three newly purchased domains or hosted mailboxes.
Extra credit packs are available to qualifying accounts. Hunter's guidance describes small fixed-price packs with credit quantities depending on plan and three-month expiration. An annual customer who runs out early can purchase a pack or upgrade; Data Platform customers operate under different rules. Because add-on bundles and invoice prices can change, a public pricing article should show the official minimum and instruct buyers to confirm the package at checkout. Your exact paid-month cost could exceed $49 even without increasing the core plan.
Hunter Data Platform is not the same subscription
Hunter Data Platform serves buyers who primarily need API access to email research and verification data. It uses separately purchased Search and Verification credits and a calculator based on expected consumption. The current public calculator displays example bulk amounts, but these are not a universal fixed monthly fee. For Data Platform, one Search credit can cover up to ten emails from a domain in some modes, while one verification uses one Verification credit. All-in-One plans instead use the unified credit system, with standard verifications charged at half a credit. The two currencies should never be combined in the same cost-per-email calculation.
Data Platform does not include Hunter Sequences. An engineering team with its own outbound infrastructure may prefer a specialized API purchase and send elsewhere, but then it owns contact permission handling, deduplication, mail server health and data retention. A small sales team without developers will usually find an All-in-One tier easier to operate. Compare API rate limits, integration development cost, unused credit expiry and operational ownership before buying purely on a large-volume search calculator output.
Worked Hunter.io cost examples
Solo researcher with a three-month project
Three Starter monthly payments would be 3 × $49 = $147 before tax and extras. Annual Starter would be $408 paid upfront, with substantially greater time flexibility for its credit pool but a full-year commitment. For a short market-research sprint, monthly billing costs less cash. If the researcher mainly verifies 800 existing addresses in a month, a simplified estimate is 800 × 0.5 = 400 credits; a 2,000-credit Starter month has room left. The buyer should still confirm actual outcomes and whether those records were already checked in the period.
Team of four using three outbound mailboxes
Hunter does not charge a separate standard seat fee for four teammates on one All-in-One subscription. Starter still has three included sender connections, so a fourth team member cannot automatically attach a fourth mailbox without an extra connection or a larger plan. The month's base subscription remains $49 if the team stays within its quotas; the team may divide research, verification, sequence writing and reply handling across people. For an annual team budget, Starter's core payment is $408, plus any separately purchased sender infrastructure and taxes.
Agency comparing Growth against multiple Starter subscriptions
One Growth subscription costs $149 for a month and supports ten sending connections and 10,000 monthly credits. Three separate Starter subscriptions cost 3 × $49 = $147 monthly, but their combined 6,000 credits and nine mailboxes would remain separated across three accounts. Growth costs $2 more in this illustration and provides a larger shared resource pool, advanced reporting functions and a custom tracking domain. Some agencies still need client isolation, so consolidation is not automatically the right answer. Account access and contact-data separation should be specified.
One-year Scale comparison
Scale bought month to month for twelve consecutive cycles is 12 × $299 = $3,588. The displayed annual term is $209 × 12 = $2,508 upfront, a nominal $1,080 reduction before taxes and add-ons. The annual credit allocation is 300,000 available across the year. For a seasonal team with high quarterly volume, that pool can be useful. For a company unsure whether the channel will operate after two months, buying annual Scale creates an expensive unused commitment. Confirm purchasing authority and the plan's cancellation conditions before paying.
Cancellation and buying checklist
Hunter says a subscription can be changed or cancelled from the account dashboard, with paid features normally remaining available until the end of the cycle. Refund eligibility is subject to the vendor's current terms, so do not assume unused annual months will be returned. Extra email-account services can have their own renewal rules. Before canceling, export permitted leads, sequence reports and suppression information. An operational mistake is to discover that account features or automated sending have ended before the team has retained records needed for follow-up.
Before upgrading, identify how many email addresses need finding, how many need verification and what fraction can be searched in bulk. Count connected sending mailboxes separately from researchers. Write down the maximum recipients needed in one sequence, and whether Discover, Signals, API, Inbox Protection and managed email accounts will be used. Compare a monthly pilot with the full annual cash commitment, not just annual equivalent badges. Test the target industries and countries with a sample, then look at role relevance and bounce outcomes before assuming coverage.
Feature Breakdown
discover professional contacts using search credits
check addresses using 0.5 credit per ordinary verification
research companies and target profiles with separate AI search limits
watch company events within per-plan Signal caps
send scheduled follow-ups through connected inboxes
organize contacts and outreach context
integrate or purchase research credits by volume
optional paid sender-reputation service
Who should use this
- Free: occasional contact lookups and sequence evaluation
- Starter: founders and small SDR groups using three email connections
- Growth: larger outbound teams needing ten senders and more data credits
- Scale: established operations with predictable higher volume and account management needs
- Data Platform: engineering and data teams needing bulk API access but not Sequences
Who should avoid this
- Buyers expecting a credit to equal a qualified lead
- Organizations that only need lifecycle newsletters to known subscribers
- Teams that need twenty sender mailboxes but expect Starter to provide them
- Companies that cannot manage sender reputation and outreach permissions
- Annual subscribers unsure they can use the prepaid credit balance
Pros
- Nonexpiring Free plan with monthly credit renewal
- Straightforward published paid tier prices
- Unlimited team members on All-in-One plans
- Flexible yearly credit pool
- Search, verify and sequences in one platform
Cons
- Monthly unused subscription credits expire
- Different credit rules for Data Platform
- Sending accounts and sequence recipients are capped
- Extra inbox services can raise total cost
- Contact accuracy and deliverability need real-world checks