Lusha Pricing 2026: Plans, Credits and Real Cost Per Contact

If you have tried to budget for Lusha this year, you already know the problem: the number on the pricing page and the number on your invoice are rarely the same. Lusha reshuffled its tiers in 2026. A new entry-level plan appeared, the top self-serve tier jumped by roughly six times, and billing is still calculated per seat rather than per workspace.

This breakdown covers the grid as observed in August 2026, how the credit system actually drains your balance, what a single email and a single phone number really cost, and what a team of three, five or ten reps ends up paying. It also flags the places where Lusha's own materials contradict each other, because those gaps hit your consumption directly.

One framing point before the numbers: Lusha is a contact database, not a prospecting platform. It hands you the email and the phone number, it does not send anything. This article therefore compares on two distinct bases and never mixes them. First the real cost of a contact obtained, which is the only ground where both tools do the same job. Then the cost of the whole chain from raw data to booked meeting, once you add the sending tool, the LinkedIn automation and the address verification.

Lusha runs five tiers: a free plan, three self-serve plans and a quote-only Scale plan. The figures below are in US dollars, on monthly billing, with the credit slider set to 2,000 per month.

The first thing to understand changes everything: on Lusha, the price is attached to a credit volume, not to a user. The pricing page runs a slider from 40 to over 10,000 credits a month, and every plan recalculates its price as you move it. The figures above correspond to the slider set at 2,000 monthly credits. Each plan also ships with a fixed number of seats, one on Free and Starter, two on Pro, five on Premium, with extra seats available at additional cost.

Free gives you 40 credits a month on one seat with no card required. That is enough to sanity-check data quality in your territory and nothing more. Forty credits buys forty email addresses, or four phone numbers at the published ten-credit rate. A rep working a real list burns through that in a single session, and unused free credits do not carry over.

Starter did not exist in the previous grid. At $49.90 a month it opens 400 monthly credits on a single seat, with no rollover from one month to the next. It suits the independent rep or the founder still doing their own prospecting. Its constraint is less about volume than features: the API, webhooks and buying signals stay locked behind higher tiers.

Pro is the pivot of the range. It starts at $69.90 a month for 600 credits and two seats, and climbs to $227.40 a month once the slider is set to 2,000 monthly credits. It is the first tier to unlock the API, CSV enrichment, buying signals and webhooks, and the first where unused credits roll over up to twice the allowance. Since its price tracks the slider directly, there is no single Pro price, there is a Pro price curve.

Premium lands at $399.90 a month for 3,400 credits and five seats, and Lusha flags it as its most popular tier. The jump from Pro looks dramatic until you convert it into credits: 1,400 more credits for $172.50 more. You are not buying a better rate, you are buying more volume at the same rate, with three extra seats along the way.

Past five users, Lusha moves accounts onto Scale, which publishes no pricing at all. Aggregated contract data from software negotiation platforms puts the median somewhere around $15,000 to $16,000 a year, with observed deals ranging from roughly $6,000 to nearly $69,000. A spread that wide tells you the price is negotiable and driven mainly by credit volume and contract length.

Under the previous grid, Pro sat at around $29.90 for 250 monthly credits and three seats, while Premium was around $69.90 for 600 credits and five seats. The price per credit already worked out near $0.12, almost exactly where it sits today. What actually changed is not the unit rate but the entry ticket: the five seats that used to cost $69.90 a month now live on a Premium plan listed at $399.90.

You are not buying contacts on Lusha, you are buying credits, and not every action costs the same. This is where the real price hides.

Revealing an email address costs one credit. For a phone number, Lusha's pricing page states ten credits, as recorded in August 2026, while several older vendor pages still mention five. The difference is not a detail: depending on which value applies to your account, the cost of your most strategic data doubles. Ask for written confirmation before you commit, especially if your prospecting relies on calling.

Revealing both the email and the phone number for the same contact costs up to six credits on the lower reading. Viewing data you have already revealed costs nothing, which is a genuine plus: you never pay twice for the same contact.

Several peripheral actions quietly draw down the same credit balance:

• CSV export: 1 credit per 25 rows exported

• AI-powered enrichment: 1 credit per enriched cell

• AI assistant prompts: 1 credit per 5 prompts

• Detected intent signal: 1 credit per signal

• API call returning no result: still billed 1 credit

• Full company profile via API: 1 credit

That second-to-last line deserves attention from any team running automation. An API request that finds nothing is still charged a minimum of one credit. Across a pipeline of several thousand calls, the share of budget spent on empty responses stops being trivial.

The rules diverge sharply by billing cycle. On monthly billing, unused credits roll into the following month up to a ceiling of twice your allowance. On annual billing, the entire pool lands upfront and does not reset monthly, but whatever remains when the contract ends simply disappears, with no rollover and no refund.

The consequence is direct: on monthly billing, a slow month is not lost, since the balance carries into the next one up to twice the allowance. That is a real safety net for uneven prospecting. An annual commitment, by contrast, forces you to burn the pool before the term ends, or whatever remains simply disappears with no refund and no rollover.

Converting plan prices into unit costs is the only way to compare Lusha against anything else. The table below uses monthly billing, the slider set to 2,000 credits and the published ten-credit rate for phone numbers.

The result is striking, and it runs against every pricing instinct.

Not only does the price per credit fail to drop as you move up the range, it climbs back. A credit costs $0.114 on Pro and $0.118 on Premium: past the entry tier, the most expensive plan is also the one where each credit costs the most. There is simply no economy of scale in the self-serve range. Lusha effectively concedes the point, since the only discount on credit price, advertised at more than 50 percent, is reserved for the Scale plan, which means a sales call.

Translated into prospecting volume, the credit allocations read very differently.

A rep running a multichannel motion needs the email and the phone number on the same record. On Pro that works out to roughly 333 complete contacts a month, about fifteen per working day, shared across the two included seats. On Premium, the 566 complete contacts spread across five seats, which brings each rep back to around 113 contacts a month. That is where the budget is actually decided, far more than the headline price.

Credit-volume billing changes how you have to reason about team cost. You do not multiply a rate by headcount: you pick a plan whose included seats cover your team, then check that the credit allowance keeps up. The table below uses monthly billing with the slider at 2,000 credits.

Two observations. First, the constraint is almost never the seat count but the credit volume: five reps on Premium get 680 credits each, roughly 113 complete contacts per person per month, which is thin for sustained prospecting. Second, once that ceiling bites, you have exactly two options, push the credit slider up and pay the same unit rate, or move to a Scale quote where pricing becomes negotiable and opaque again.

Beyond the sticker price, several contract terms shape what you actually spend:

• Automatic renewal: cancellation has to land before the period closes, otherwise the contract rolls into a full new cycle.

• Mid-cycle additions: adding a seat or a credit pack outside renewal triggers an immediate prorated charge.

• Forfeited annual credits: any balance left when the contract ends is written off, with no rollover and no credit note.

• Two-way CRM sync: mid-tier plans often stop at export, with full bidirectional sync reserved for the top tier.

• The credit slider: Pro and Premium let you raise your allocation, which raises the price above the advertised base rate.

One more line item escapes most spreadsheets: the cost of data that turns out to be wrong. No B2B database is accurate everywhere, and every bounced email or disconnected number was still paid for in credits. If your bounce rate sits in the double digits, your effective cost per usable contact is meaningfully higher than the unit prices calculated above, and no pricing page will tell you that.

Lusha remains genuinely good at what it does. The browser extension is fast, European mobile number coverage is solid, and GDPR compliance is a real argument for European teams operating in a market dominated by US-based databases.

The limits are equally clear. It is a database, not a prospecting platform: Lusha hands you the contact but does not reach out to it. You still need a sequencing tool, a LinkedIn automation tool and usually an email verifier, each with its own subscription. Add the flat per-credit pricing and the total opacity beyond five seats, and building a multi-year budget becomes guesswork.

Lusha pays off if European mobile numbers are your priority, your team is under five people, and you already run a sending stack you have no intention of replacing. In that setup, Pro strikes a reasonable balance between coverage and cost.

It gets hard to justify once your volume passes a few hundred complete contacts a month, once your team grows past five reps, or once you are already paying separately for cold email, LinkedIn automation and verification. In that last case, the combined subscriptions routinely exceed what a single platform covering both data and outreach would cost.

Emelia approaches the problem from the opposite end. Instead of selling data you then export into other tools, it bundles email finding, verification, cold email, LinkedIn automation and inbox warmup into a single subscription. Email sending is unlimited and warmup runs on every connected mailbox, two line items you pay for separately in any stack built around Lusha.

This is the most structural difference between the two tools. Lusha works contact by contact: you open a profile, you reveal, you spend credits, you repeat. Emelia starts from the list. Its LinkedIn Sales Navigator scraper takes an entire search, with its job title, industry, headcount and geography filters, and pulls every matching profile in a single run before chaining into email lookup and verification. Measured against the volumes discussed earlier, the gap becomes very concrete: where Lusha's 2,000 Pro credits amount to 333 complete contacts shared between the two included seats, one exported Sales Navigator search feeds an entire campaign without a single manual reveal.

In practice the whole operation fits in two fields: a name for the extraction and the URL of your Sales Navigator search. Emelia then pulls the full list, shows how many profiles came back, and runs email lookup across the batch in one click.

Emelia also bills per seat, with a credit system covering enrichment and AI features. The plan breakdown is shown below.

Email finder and phone lookup credits can be topped up independently of the subscription, so a one-off spike in volume does not force you up an entire tier.

In practice the range breaks down into three tiers at $37, $97 and $297 per month, separated by the number of connected mailboxes, the volume of enrichment credits and access to team features. Email sending stays unlimited across the whole range and warmup runs from the entry tier upward, which shifts the comparison against a standalone database: where Lusha leaves you with a file to export, the entry plan already covers the full chain through to sending.

One decisive point against a database: the LinkedIn Sales Navigator scraper is included in all three plans, with no cap, and consumes no credits. That is how a team builds its lists without buying access to a stock of records: you run a Sales Navigator search with its filters and it feeds a campaign directly. Credits are only used for the email finder, the phone lookup, AI actions and address verification.

A note on method before reading this table: the point is not to pit two equivalent products against each other, but to show what each one actually covers. A feature-by-feature comparison would be meaningless, since the two tools do not sit at the same place in the chain. What can be compared is the scope covered for the same outcome.

The maths is straightforward: add your Lusha subscription, your sequencing tool, your LinkedIn tool and your verifier, then compare that total against a single platform. For a team of three to five reps, the separate-tools stack rarely wins.

Work through it in three steps rather than comparing headline prices. Start by estimating your monthly volume in complete contacts, not in credits, because that is what determines your tier. Then multiply the rate by your exact headcount, since billing is per seat. Finally, choose between monthly and annual based on your forecast consumption rate, remembering that unused annual credits are gone for good.

Three points belong in writing before you sign: how many credits a phone number costs on your account, how many seats your plan genuinely includes, and whether API access is part of it. Those are exactly the three questions Lusha's own public materials currently answer inconsistently.

The question worth asking in 2026 is no longer what a Lusha seat costs, but what the whole chain from raw data to booked meeting costs. Once you add the database, the sending tool, the LinkedIn automation and the verification layer, cost per meeting booked becomes a far more honest metric than the monthly figure printed on a pricing page.