Apollo.io explained: 240M contacts, an email finder, a CRM and what a licence costs

Apollo Chrome extension: LinkedIn, Gmail, CRMs and company websites

Installing it costs nothing, and it works on every plan, Free included. Apollo lists it on the Chrome Web Store as “Apollo.io: Free B2B Phone Number & Email Finder” and publishes a version for Microsoft Edge; Safari and Firefox are not supported. Once you sign in with your Apollo account, it matches the page in front of you with Apollo’s data: the person on a LinkedIn profile, the people you write to in Gmail, the guests of a Google Calendar meeting, or a company on its own website, with its headcount, its revenue and the employees Apollo has on file. It also shows up inside Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive and Salesloft. Outlook gets a separate add-in instead, installed from Outlook itself, with no email tracking and no templates.

Revealing an email or a phone number from the extension spends the team’s credits at the app’s rates: 1 for an email, 8 for a phone number. A saved contact can then go into a list, an Apollo sequence or an Outreach or Salesloft one, get an email or a call, or be pushed to your CRM, and the panel suggests colleagues and similar people. In Gmail, the extension adds open and click tracking, templates and snippets, meeting links, follow-up nudges, a deliverability check of the mailbox, and logging to HubSpot or Salesforce.

Sales Navigator and Apollo’s own store listing are where it falls short. On a Sales Navigator search, the extension only suggests leads: Apollo’s help centre says you can neither select them nor run a bulk action from the results page, and some Sales Navigator profiles show no Apollo data until you switch to the standard LinkedIn profile. The listing Apollo wrote for the Chrome Web Store promises end-to-end automation of LinkedIn prospecting, while its help centre says LinkedIn tasks are done by hand; the same listing still advertises unlimited email credits on the free plan, which the pricing page sets at 75 credits a month. EU and UK contacts are not filtered out either: Apollo asks you to check where a prospect is based before reaching out (GDPR).

The store page counted 1,000,000 users and a rating of 4.7/5 from 2,172 ratings on October 12, 2026. On that same Sales Navigator search, Emelia’s Chrome extension adds an Export with Emelia button that sends the search to Emelia, which extracts its leads for a CSV export, an email search paid in credits or a campaign, and the same extension is how you connect your LinkedIn account to Emelia (Sales Navigator export guide).

Searching Apollo’s database: filters, buying intent and lookalikes

Apollo.io is a database first. Its website counts 240M contacts and 30M companies. Basic filters (job title, industry, headcount, location, email status) work on every plan, Free included; from Basic, Apollo adds advanced filters and signals (technologies, job postings, revenue, funding), a Google Maps business search and lookalike people and companies.

Buying intent comes from Bombora: 1 topic on Free, 6 on Basic and Professional, 12 on Organization. The plan also caps how many records you can select in one action: 25, 1,000, 2,500 and 10,000, from Free to Organization. On December 8, 2025, Basic and Professional still selected 10,000 records at a time.

Searching is free; revealing an email or a phone number spends credits from a pot shared by the team (next section). Apollo’s own description on Trustpilot gives other figures (210M contacts, 35M companies): we use the ones on its website.

Apollo email finder: one credit per verified email, refunded when it bounces

Apollo charges 1 credit when it finds a verified email, nothing when it does not, and never more than one credit per contact, even when it holds several addresses. If an email sent from Apollo bounces within 30 days, the credit comes back at the next billing cycle. Apollo claims 98% email accuracy; reviews are less unanimous.

A mobile or direct phone number costs 8 credits and is never refunded; the office number comes with the email. From Basic, a waterfall asks third-party providers when Apollo’s own data comes up empty: Apollo’s calculator counts about 2 credits per email found this way, and providers that return an unverified result still charge.

Emelia’s finder also charges 1 credit for an email found and verified, on the lists you bring (it has no database). Bought on top of a plan, credits cost less there: 1,000 extra Apollo credits cost $25 a month, an Emelia pack of the same size €19. For phone numbers, Apollo is the cheaper one: 8 credits against 50, so 10,000 credits buy 1,250 numbers at Apollo and 200 at Emelia.

Is Apollo a CRM? Deals, sequences, dialer and meetings on one licence

Apollo is not sold as a CRM, but its licence covers much of what a small sales team would use one for, and it syncs both ways with Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho CRM and Microsoft Dynamics when you already have one (one CRM at a time).

Apollo API and MCP server: who gets them, rate limits and credits

The Apollo API covers most of the app: people and company search, enrichment, contacts, accounts and deals, sequences, one-off emails, tasks and analytics. An API key serves your own workspace; OAuth 2.0 is for integrations acting on behalf of other Apollo users, and one that shares or resells Apollo data with people who are not Apollo customers needs a custom contract. Who gets access depends on the Apollo page you read: every plan, Free included, for the help centre and the pricing table; “Custom plans” for the FAQ of that same pricing page. On Free, some search and enrichment endpoints also require an account registered with a work email.

Limits are counted per team and per endpoint, not per key or per user, over a minute, an hour and a day at once. The general ceiling is 50, 200 and 600 requests on Free; 200, 400 and 2,000 on Basic and Professional; 200, 600 and 6,000 on Organization. Paid plans go higher on two families of endpoints: enrichment, at 1,000 requests a minute with no hourly or daily cap, and searches of Apollo’s database, at 6,000 an hour and 50,000 a day.

Credits are charged on top of those limits. Creating, updating or listing records is free; enriching a person costs 1 credit, plus 8 when a mobile number comes back, enriching a company 1, and a company search 1 per page of up to 100 results.

The MCP server, listed as “LLM integrations” in the pricing table, is on every plan as well. It plugs Apollo into ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Replit and Cursor as ready-made connectors, and into any other client that accepts a remote MCP server, within your Apollo permissions, plan limits and credits. On Free, it searches the contacts you have already saved and enriches people one at a time, and the ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity connectors need a team with a company domain; prospecting in Apollo’s database, bulk enrichment and company search start on Basic. It cannot bulk-delete records or run unrestricted bulk updates, and Apollo asks you to switch off model training in your AI tool before connecting it.

What Apollo leaves to you: every LinkedIn step is manual

An Apollo sequence can include LinkedIn steps (connection request, profile visit, post interaction, message), but they are tasks: Apollo reminds the person assigned, who then does them by hand on LinkedIn. Its help centre is explicit: it “doesn’t automatically complete LinkedIn tasks for you”.

On LinkedIn itself, the Apollo Chrome extension saves the profile you are viewing and reveals its email and phone number, for credits. Apollo’s terms also forbid using its API together with LinkedIn automation tools.

Emelia runs LinkedIn steps automatically, in the same sequence as the emails, with unlimited actions: 1 account on Start, 3 on Grow, 10 on Scale, then €29 per extra account per month. There is no price line for LinkedIn below: Apollo does not offer it.

Database first, or LinkedIn and email first: Apollo against Emelia

Each price line answers the same need with both tools. Apollo prices are per licence; one Professional licence connects unlimited Google and Microsoft mailboxes.

Cold email only, by number of mailboxes

1 mailbox, small volume

Apollo.ioFree: $0, 250 emails a day, 2 sequences, 75 credits a month

EmeliaNo free plan; 7-day trial, then Start €37/month

1 mailbox, paid plan, billed monthly

Apollo.ioBasic: $65

EmeliaStart: €37

3 mailboxes, billed monthly

Apollo.ioProfessional, 1 licence: $99

EmeliaStart: €37

3 mailboxes, billed yearly (per month)

Apollo.io$79

Emelia€30.83

50 mailboxes, billed monthly

Apollo.ioProfessional, 1 licence: $99

EmeliaGrow: €97

50 mailboxes, billed yearly (per month)

Apollo.io$79

Emelia€80.83

100 mailboxes, monthly / yearly

Apollo.io$99 / $79

Emelia€297 / €247.50

Credits

1,000 emails found a month, bought on top of the plan

Apollo.io$25

Emelia€19

Phone numbers for 10,000 credits

Apollo.io1,250 numbers for $180 to $195 (8 credits each)

Emelia200 numbers for €99 (50 credits each)

Credits included with the plan

Apollo.io2,500 to 6,000 per licence, every month

Emelia500 to 5,000, once at signup

Features

Built-in B2B database

Apollo.io240M contacts, 30M companies

EmeliaNone: finder and verifier on your lists

LinkedIn automation

Apollo.ioManual tasks only

Emelia1 to 10 accounts, unlimited actions

Mailbox warm-up

Apollo.io1 mailbox per licence, then 200 credits per mailbox a month

EmeliaIncluded on Start, unlimited on Grow and Scale

A/B tests in sequences

Apollo.ioFrom Professional

EmeliaEvery plan

Dialer and call recording

Apollo.ioYes (US dialer in credits)

EmeliaNot in Emelia’s plans

Free trial

Apollo.io14 days, no card (pricing page)

Emelia7 days, no card

Apollo’s prices exist only in US dollars, while Emelia’s figure is the same in euros and in dollars, so the advantage shown on each price line holds for a team paying in dollars; nothing is converted. The mailbox lines leave warm-up aside because Apollo describes it two ways: “included” on its plan cards, limited to 1 mailbox per licence by its help centre, which then charges 200 credits a month for each further mailbox.

What an Apollo licence costs, from Free to Organization

Prices per licence per month, in US dollars, excluding taxes; every licence on an account is on the same plan. Credits, extra credits and the cost of warm-up are detailed on the Apollo.io pricing page.

Team add-ons on paid plans: Inbound Essentials from $119 a month billed yearly ($149 monthly), Advanced Dialer $119 ($149). Apollo calls the Inbound prices introductory. On Professional and Organization, the “unlimited” daily sending comes with a Fair Use Policy that Apollo invokes but that its terms do not contain.

Why Apollo’s ratings split between Capterra and Trustpilot

Capterra gives Apollo 4.5/5. Trustpilot gives 3.1/5, with few middle grades: 46% of five-star reviews and 36% of one-star. Apollo shows 4.7/5 on G2 on its own site; G2 blocks automated checks, so we could not verify it.

ZenLeads, Inc.: the company behind Apollo.io

Apollo.io is the trading name of ZenLeads, Inc., based in San Francisco. Apollo dates its founding to 2015, its first product to 2016 and its free plan to 2018. Co-founder Tim Zheng ran the company until February 3, 2026, when Matt Curl, until then its COO, became CEO and Tim Zheng chairman.

Its Series D, of $100 million in 2023, was led by Bain Capital Ventures at a valuation of $1.6 billion. When the new CEO was announced, Apollo said its annual recurring revenue was approaching $200 million, with nearly 100,000 paying customers.

Comparing Apollo with ZoomInfo, Clay and Instantly

1. 1

   ZoomInfo

   Best for: Another large B2B database

   Two databases with their own dialer and sequences, billed in very different ways.

   Apollo vs ZoomInfo
2. 2

   Clay

   Best for: Enrichment from many providers

   A data workflow tool that can use Apollo as one of its sources.

   Apollo vs Clay
3. 3

   Instantly

   Best for: Sending cold email at volume

   A volume sender with its own lead finder, set against Apollo’s database and sequences.

Apollo.io in practice: what it does, its free plan, signing in, the extension and the API