Apollo.io Review 2026: Data, Pricing, Pros and Cons
Apollo.io is a B2B contact database with a whole sales platform built around it. You search its records for people who match your buyer, reveal their emails and phone numbers with credits, and push them into email sequences, a dialer and a deal pipeline without leaving the app. In 2026 it added an AI Assistant, agents that prospect on their own, and apps inside Claude and ChatGPT.
The short verdict: Apollo is still the best-value way for a startup or small sales team to get prospect data and run basic sequences, and the free plan is genuinely useful for research. The catches are data quality outside US tech, credits that vanish at the end of every billing cycle, a Basic plan stuck at one mailbox and 250 sends a day, and terms that auto-renew with no refunds. Apollo gets you the list. If your bottleneck is what happens after someone replies, Carly runs that part from your team’s own Gmail and Outlook mailboxes.
Apollo.io at a glance
Facts checked on Apollo’s pricing page and the plan data behind both billing toggles, its newsroom, its terms of service and Trustpilot on October 4, 2026.
| Apollo.io | |
|---|---|
| What it is | A B2B contact and company database with sequences, a dialer, meetings, deals and AI agents on top |
| Who makes it | Apollo.io, San Francisco. Matt Curl became CEO in February 2026; co-founder Tim Zheng is chairman. Valued at $1.6B in its 2023 Series D |
| Database | 240M+ contacts and 30M+ companies, per Apollo |
| Price | $49, $79 or $119 per seat a month billed annually; $65 or $99 billed monthly (the $119 plan is annual only, with a 3-seat minimum) |
| Free option | A free plan with 900 credits per seat a year, plus a 14-day trial of Basic or Professional |
| Best for | Startups and SMB sales teams prospecting into North American companies |
| Biggest limitation | Data quality varies by region and industry, and every reveal, call minute and AI action draws on credits that don’t roll over |
| Ratings | 4.7 on G2 from about 9,690 reviews; 3.1 on Trustpilot from 1,346 |
What Apollo actually does
- Prospect data and enrichment. Search contacts and companies by title, industry, size, location, technologies, funding, buying intent and job changes, or enrich records from a CSV, your CRM, the API or a web form. Revealing an email costs 1 credit and a phone number 8. Waterfall enrichment checks partner sources when Apollo’s own record comes up empty.
- Sequences. Multi-step email, call and task cadences, with A/Z testing on Professional and up and a deliverability suite with warmup. You can buy sending domains and mailboxes inside Apollo, paid for in credits.
- Dialer. A US dialer on paid plans at 1 credit per 30 seconds. Parallel and power dialing, international calls and local presence need the Advanced Dialer add-on.
- Meetings and calls. Booking links with round robin, call recording with AI insights, and pre-meeting briefs.
- Deals and pipeline. Lead and deal management, inbound routers, workflows and reports. It’s CRM-lite: teams on Salesforce, HubSpot or Pipedrive usually keep their CRM and sync Apollo into it.
- AI Assistant and agents. Describe a goal and the Assistant builds the list, researches accounts and writes the sequence. On Professional and up, agents find prospects, build campaigns and fix underperforming ones, with you approving each move. AI research costs 1 credit per run.
- Apollo Anywhere. Chrome extensions that put Apollo’s data on LinkedIn, Gmail and Salesforce, an MCP server, and apps inside Claude, ChatGPT and Perplexity (on the free plan, only for teams with a corporate email domain).
What changed in 2026
- February 3: Matt Curl took over as CEO, with co-founder Tim Zheng staying on as chairman.
- February to June: Apollo brought outbound actions into Claude (February 24), launched an app in ChatGPT (April 29) and added workflows to Perplexity Computer (June 3).
- March 4: the AI Assistant left beta, with nearly 20,000 weekly users, per Apollo.
- March 19: Apollo acquired Pocus, a sales-signals startup.
- September 15: Apollo became the flagship data partner for Hunter, Salesforce’s new outbound sales agent.
- September 30: at ApolloNEXT, Apollo launched an Intelligence Layer (a unified profile of every contact and account, plus an engine that decides who to contact next) and announced Builder Studio, for building custom sales tools in plain English, and Messaging OS, which adds marketing email campaigns and Google Ads audiences. Those two are “available soon.”
Apollo.io pricing in 2026
From Apollo’s pricing page and the plan data behind its annual and monthly toggles on October 4, 2026. USD per seat per month. Our Apollo pricing guide has the full plan-by-plan breakdown.
| Plan | Billed annually | Billed monthly | Credits per seat | Mailboxes and sending |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 900 a year, 75 a month | 1 Gmail mailbox, 250 emails a day, 2 sequences |
| Basic | $49 | $65 | 30,000 a year (2,500 a month on monthly billing) | 1 mailbox, 250 emails a day |
| Professional | $79 | $99 | 48,000 a year (4,000 a month) | Unlimited Google and Microsoft mailboxes + 5 SMTP, no daily cap |
| Organization | $119, 3-seat minimum | Annual only | 72,000 a year | Unlimited Google and Microsoft + 15 SMTP |
Every seat on an account has to be on the same plan, so one rep who needs Professional puts the whole team on it. Credits are pooled across the team and granted upfront each billing cycle (the whole year on annual plans, a month on monthly ones), and unused credits expire when the cycle ends, add-on credits included.
Credits pay for more than data: 1 per email, 8 per phone number, 1 to 8 to enrich a record, 1 per AI research run, 1 per 30 seconds on the US dialer, plus mailboxes, domains and warmup bought through Apollo. Extra credits cost 2.5 cents each at small volumes, falling to 1.5 cents, and renew every cycle until you remove them. The Inbound and Advanced Dialer add-ons are $119 per team a month billed annually ($149 billed monthly).
What it costs in practice: Emily runs a three-rep startup on Professional. That’s $2,844 a year billed annually ($297 a month billed monthly) for a shared pool of 144,000 credits. If her reps reveal 1,000 mobile numbers a month for cold calls, that’s 96,000 credits a year, two-thirds of the pool, before a single email reveal or dialer minute.
Renewals and refunds
Apollo’s terms say a subscription renews automatically for the same length of term unless you give written notice of non-renewal at least 30 days before it ends, and that fees are non-cancelable and non-refundable. A downgrade cuts your access right away, but the lower price only starts at the next term, and an annual plan can’t switch to monthly until the year runs out. The terms also let Apollo close a self-serve account with no refund if it decides you opened extra accounts to get around credit limits.
What users praise
Apollo holds 4.7 out of 5 from roughly 9,690 reviews on G2, and even critical reviewers tend to concede the same strengths:
- A lot of data for the money. Few tools put this many contacts, filters and intent signals behind a $49 seat, and the free plan lets you test the data on your own market first.
- One tool instead of four. Search, enrichment, sequences, a dialer and a pipeline in one place, and reviewers say a first campaign is quick to get running.
- The Chrome extension. Reps like pulling contact details while browsing LinkedIn and company sites.
- The AI Assistant. Customers quoted in Apollo’s launch announcement say it cleans lists and drafts sequences in minutes.
What users complain about
Apollo’s Trustpilot score is 3.1 from 1,346 reviews, and the recent one-star reviews repeat a handful of themes:
- Data accuracy outside US tech. Apollo puts its email accuracy at 98%. Reviewers describe high bounce rates on exports, phone numbers attached to the wrong business, and records that need a second, paid enrichment pass. The pattern in reviews and in cold-email discussions on Reddit is consistent: the data is strongest for North American tech and SaaS companies and weaker in Europe, Asia-Pacific and traditional industries. The standard advice is to run Apollo exports through a separate email verifier before you send.
- Credits that go faster than expected. Phone numbers cost 8 credits, AI actions and dialer minutes draw on the same pool, and nothing rolls over. One August reviewer says the AI Assistant quoted one credit cost, then ran up a separate charge for “power-up” credits without asking.
- Sending limits and deliverability setup. Free and Basic allow one mailbox per user and 250 emails a day, so real volume means Professional. Paying reviewers describe needing several support agents to get mailboxes linked and warmed, and one bought a domain through Apollo that then couldn’t be verified in Google Workspace.
- Support. The most common complaint: bot replies, different answers from different agents (one reviewer counted 24 messages over a single data question), and long waits.
- Account lockouts. Several reviewers were locked out or banned after Apollo’s systems flagged their accounts, one with paid credits set to expire before the block was due to lift.
- Billing. Auto-renewal with a 30-day notice window and no refunds. One August reviewer says clicking purchase to preview the cost of an extra seat charged the card on the spot.
- A busy interface. Cluttered screens and slow pages come up often, as do sequences that misbehave, like one that enrolled 700 contacts when the user picked 25.
Some one-star reviews come from people who got a cold call after finding their details in Apollo’s database, a reminder of the reputation risk in outreach from bought data.
Apollo vs Carly
Apollo answers “who should we contact, and what’s their email?” Carly answers “what happens after they write back?”
| Apollo.io | Carly | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Finding prospects and starting conversations | Everything after the reply, from your team’s real inboxes |
| Lead data | 240M+ contacts, paid in credits | Bring leads from Apollo, a CSV, your forms or your CRM; enriches from Apollo, Hunter or Lusha |
| Sends from | One mailbox per user on Free and Basic; more on Professional | Every rep’s own Gmail and Outlook mailboxes |
| Sequences | Multi-step email, call and task steps; A/Z testing on Professional | Multi-step sequences whose follow-ups land in the same thread and stop when the person replies or books |
| Replies | Unified inbox, replies grouped by sentiment | One shared inbox for the team’s email, calls and texts; every reply drafted and labeled by intent |
| New inbound leads | Form enrichment and routers; Inbound add-on from $119 per team | Routed to an owner, then emailed, texted or called within minutes (Carly Phone) |
| Booking | Meeting events, 1 to unlimited by plan | The right rep’s calendar across all Google and Microsoft calendars; booking pages |
| CRM | Deals and pipeline, or sync to Salesforce, HubSpot or Pipedrive | Built-in CRM, or keeps HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Close or Attio current |
| Price | $49 to $119 per seat a month billed annually, plus add-ons and credits | Free Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month |
Carly works where your reps already work. Every rep’s Gmail and Outlook mailboxes, plus the team’s calls and texts, land in one shared inbox where conversations get assigned, with notes and reminders. Carly drafts the reply to each prospect and labels it interested, not interested or out of office, so reps work the hot ones first. The team reviews and sends, or lets the agent send on its own.
Sequences go out from those same mailboxes, not from a secondary domain. Follow-ups arrive as replies in the original thread, and a sequence stops by itself when the person replies in any thread or books. Per-mailbox daily caps, sending windows and unsubscribe headers are built in, and an Awaiting reply view shows who’s gone quiet. In Woodpecker’s data, 42% of replies come from follow-ups (sales follow-up statistics).
When a new lead arrives from a form, an email, a call or a text, routing rules assign an owner, and Carly emails, texts or calls them within minutes from your own address and business number, with their form answers in hand. It books the meeting on the right rep’s calendar, then turns call notes from Gong, Fathom or Fireflies into the follow-up email and an updated deal. Repeatable jobs, like “enrich new form leads and email me,” run as a Carly workflow.
Keep Apollo, add Carly
You don’t have to pick one. Keep Apollo for the list. Carly connects to thousands of apps, including Apollo, HubSpot, Salesforce, Slack and Gong, so it can enrich a new form lead from Apollo’s data and research the company before it writes. When a prospect replies “talk to Michael, he owns this,” Carly looks Michael up and drafts the intro. Our guide to AI automation tools for Apollo covers the setup.
Carly for teams is set up with you on a short call. Book a call with the Carly team, and if you run a high-volume cold program across many domains, the team scopes that with you on the same call.
Is Apollo.io worth it? Our verdict
Apollo fits if you:
- Need a large prospect list on a startup budget and sell mostly to North American companies
- Want data, sequences and a dialer in one login for a small sales team
- Can commit to Professional, since Basic’s one mailbox and 250 sends a day cap outbound volume
Look elsewhere if you:
- Prospect mainly in Europe, Asia-Pacific or non-tech industries, where reviewers report the weakest data
- Already have leads, and the real job is replying, following up and booking. That’s what Carly is built for
- Need inbound leads answered by email, text and phone within minutes
- Mainly want cold email at volume across many inboxes: see Instantly vs Apollo and our Instantly review
Our Apollo alternatives roundup compares the rest of the field, and best AI SDR tools covers the agents that prospect for you. New to the category? Start with what an AI SDR is.
FAQ
Is Apollo.io worth it?
For a startup or small team selling to North American tech companies, usually yes: few tools put this much prospect data, sequencing and dialing behind a $49 seat. It’s less worth it if your market is outside the US or your problem is answering and booking rather than finding people. Carly handles that part from your own Gmail and Outlook.
Is Apollo.io data accurate?
It depends on who you sell to. Apollo claims 98% email accuracy, but reviewers report high bounce rates and wrong phone numbers, especially outside North America and in traditional industries. Test it on the free plan against your own market, and run exports through an email verifier before sending.
How much does Apollo.io cost?
As of October 4, 2026, Basic is $49 and Professional $79 per seat a month billed annually, or $65 and $99 billed monthly. Organization is $119 per seat a month, annual only, with a 3-seat minimum. Add-ons are $119 per team a month billed annually, and extra credits cost 1.5 to 2.5 cents each. Our Apollo pricing guide has the details.
Is Apollo.io free?
Yes. The free plan has no time limit and includes 900 credits per seat a year (75 a month), two sequences, one Gmail mailbox and 250 emails a day. It’s enough to test the data, not to run outbound. Carly offers free Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month.
What is the best Apollo.io alternative?
For prospect data and cold outreach, see our Apollo alternatives roundup. For teams whose bottleneck is replies, follow-up and booking, Carly runs sequences from your own mailboxes, drafts every reply in one shared inbox, calls and texts new leads, and keeps your CRM current.
Ready to automate your busywork?
Carly schedules, researches, and briefs you—so you can focus on what matters.
See what people say
"Before Carly, I relied on a Calendly link, but the whole process felt impersonal and not very professional. Carly changed that by handling all the back-and-forth, so I'm no longer stuck in endless email threads trying to line up schedules.
Now Carly reaches out to candidates, shares my real-time availability, lets them pick a slot, then sends a Zoom link and drops it straight into my calendar. She sends reminders to both of us before each call, which has significantly reduced no-shows and last-minute confusion.
On top of scheduling, Carly acts like a full executive assistant, sending me my schedule the night before so I can prepare for each call. It reminds me of the old x.ai assistant, but Carly is noticeably smarter, faster, and better suited to my healthcare recruitment business."
