Free ZoomInfo alternatives: six free tiers compared by credit limit

The short version

If you need a free ZoomInfo alternative today, Apollo is the default answer: its free plan is permanent, includes unlimited email addresses on the free tier per its pricing FAQ, and bundles sequencing so you can actually send from it [1]. Hunter and Snov.io are the right free picks if your job is finding and verifying business emails rather than dialing phones [5][6]. Lusha and Kaspr are LinkedIn-extension tools whose free tiers are small but include a handful of phone numbers [2][3]. LeadIQ's free plan is one seat and 50 credits, useful mostly to test its CRM capture flow [4].

None of them is ZoomInfo. ZoomInfo sells an annual seat-plus-credit contract with no published price, and its Sales product holds a 4.5/5 on G2 on one of the largest review counts in the category [7]. The free tiers here exist to get you into a paid plan that starts between $29 and $49 per user per month. Treat them as an evaluation budget, not a permanent replacement, unless you are a one-person shop. For that case see ZoomInfo alternatives for SMB.

Free ZoomInfo alternatives compared: credits, phone access and export caps

Two things stand out in the table. First, the raw credit counts (15 to 50 per month) converge, so the vendor you pick should come down to what a credit buys and what you are locked out of. Second, phone numbers are scarce everywhere on free. Lusha and LeadIQ both price a phone reveal at 10 credits, which turns a 40- or 50-credit plan into four or five dials a month [2][4]. If direct dials are why you had ZoomInfo in the first place, no free tier replaces that.

Each free tier, in detail

Apollo.io: the broadest free plan, with a fair-use ceiling

Apollo's free plan is the only one here that behaves like a full prospecting stack. Its pricing page states that trial plans include 50 credits and 5 mobile credits with almost all features of the selected plan, and that after the trial you can downgrade to the Starter plan, "which is free forever" [1]. The same FAQ says email campaigns are included on every account and that unlimited plans carry a fair-use ceiling of 10,000 credits per account per month for non-paying accounts [1]. In practice that ceiling only matters if you are using a corporate email domain and doing bulk pulls.

The catch is export credits. Apollo consumes an export credit whenever a contact leaves Apollo, including CSV, CRM sync or API enrichment [1]. So the free plan is generous for working inside Apollo and stingy the moment you try to push data into Salesforce or Outreach. Apollo's own page cites a 4.7/5 rating on 9,690 reviews [1]; the independent listing is on G2's Apollo page [8]. Reviewers rate its direct-dial accuracy below ZoomInfo's, which we cover in ZoomInfo vs Apollo.

Lusha: 40 credits, priced so phones cost ten times an email

Lusha's Free plan "provides you with up to 40 credits per month" plus basic prospecting features, the browser extension and CRM integrations to get started [2]. The credit math is explicit on the pricing page: a verified email costs 1 credit and a phone number costs 10 [2]. That gives a free user 40 emails, or 4 phones, or a mix. Lusha cites a 4.3/5 rating on its own pricing page [2]; the G2 listing is the neutral reference [9].

Lusha's paid plans renew automatically, and on monthly plans unused credits roll over up to twice the plan's credit limit [2]. That rollover is worth knowing before you upgrade: a $29-per-user plan that banks unused credits behaves very differently from Apollo's use-it-or-lose-it export credits. Full review: Lusha as a ZoomInfo alternative.

Kaspr: smallest credit count, but three credit types and a real phone allotment

Kaspr splits credits by data type. The Free plan lists 15 B2B email credits, 5 phone credits and 5 direct email credits per user per month, and an export limit of 100 leads [3]. That is the smallest raw allotment on this page, but it is the only free tier that gives you a guaranteed 5 phone numbers without spending your whole budget to get them. Kaspr is a LinkedIn Chrome extension first; Sales Navigator and Recruiter Lite support start on paid plans [3].

Starter is $49 per user per month on annual billing ($65 monthly) with unlimited B2B email credits, 100 phone credits a month and a 12,000-lead annual export cap [3]. Kaspr also publishes add-on credit pricing, with phone credits running from roughly $0.36 down to $0.21 each in volume packs [3]. Kaspr is owned by Cognism, which we review separately at Cognism and ZoomInfo vs Cognism. Independent reviews: Kaspr on G2 [10].

LeadIQ: one seat, 50 universal credits

LeadIQ's Free plan is listed as $0 for 1 user with 50 credits, with setup "in less than 5 minutes" [4]. LeadIQ moved to what it calls Universal Credits, one pool spent across its workflows: email is 1 credit, a phone number is 10, email plus phone is 11, account enrichment is 3 [4]. Fifty credits therefore buys 50 emails or about 4 full email-plus-phone records.

Where LeadIQ differs from the others is what sits above the free tier. The Pro plan is priced as a $200 per month credit pool rather than per seat, with annual billing at 25% off, and includes CRM enrichment, job-change tracking and its AI message writer [4]. That makes LeadIQ's free plan a test drive of the capture-to-CRM workflow, not a long-term free database. See our LeadIQ review.

Hunter.io: 50 credits for email finding and verification

Hunter's Free plan is $0 with 50 credits per month, which the pricing page defines as usage across Email Finder, Email Verifier and Domain Search, with verification costing 0.5 credit [5]. The free tier also allows 100,000 saved leads, unlimited team members, one connected email account and sequences to up to 500 recipients [5]. Hunter has no phone data at all, so it competes with ZoomInfo only on the email half of the job.

Paid plans are Starter at $49 per month (or $34 per month billed yearly) for 2,000 credits, Growth at $149 for 10,000 and Scale at $299 for 25,000, with a 30% discount for annual payment [5]. Hunter's Discover B2B database is available on Free with basic filters and 10 AI searches per month [5]. For a small marketing team that only needs domain-level email patterns, this is the cheapest path off ZoomInfo on this page.

Snov.io: a renewing trial that never expires

Snov.io does not call its free tier "free"; it calls it Trial, and its FAQ says "you can use your Trial plan for as long as you like. Your free credits and recipients renew every 30 days" [6]. The Trial includes 50 credits, 100 recipients and 1 email warm-up slot; a credit is one email search or one verification [6]. Premium features, including integrations, bulk search, bulk verification, teamwork, API and export, are not available on Trial [6].

That last clause is the catch: you can find and verify emails and send campaigns, but you cannot export what you found. Starter is $39 per month for 1,000 credits and 5,000 recipients with unlimited team seats, and Pro starts at $99 per month, with 25% off on annual billing [6]. Snov.io's LinkedIn automation is a separate add-on at $69 per month per slot [6].

How to use a free tier to test a ZoomInfo replacement

Free tiers are best used as an accuracy test, not as a database. Pull the same 40 contacts from your CRM that you know are correct, run them through two or three of these tools, and count fill rate and bounces. Our buyer's guide has the full 40-call method. A few specifics for free plans:

• Spend phone credits on known-good numbers. With 4 or 5 phone reveals a month, use them on contacts whose real number you already have so you can measure accuracy rather than luck.
• Watch the export wall. Apollo meters exports, Kaspr caps them at 100 on Free, and Snov.io blocks them on Trial [1][3][6]. If your test requires data in your CRM, Lusha and Hunter are the free tiers that let it out most easily [2][5].
• Check which email domain you sign up with. Apollo's fair-use limits differ for corporate versus non-corporate domains [1], and several vendors restrict free accounts to business emails.
• Note the seat model before upgrading. Snov.io and Hunter include unlimited team members on free or entry plans; Apollo, Lusha and Kaspr price per user; LeadIQ Pro prices a shared credit pool [1-6]. This changes total cost more than the headline price does.

If you leave ZoomInfo for one of these tools, the budget comparison is on our ZoomInfo pricing page. If you run paid media against the accounts you find, note that a contact database is a different product from an ad-activation platform; ZoomInfo vs Metadata (disclosed sponsor) covers that split, and bestintentdataproviders.com covers the intent side.

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