Instantly API and documentation: v2 on the sending plans, webhooks from Hypergrowth
Instantly’s public API is version 2, a REST API documented at [developer.instantly.ai](https://developer.instantly.ai). Keys are created under Settings > Integrations > API Keys, as many as you like, each limited to the scopes you tick, and sent as bearer tokens; Instantly displays a key once and cannot show it again. The routes reach most of the product: mailboxes and their warm-up, campaigns and subsequences, leads and lists, Unibox emails, analytics, inbox placement tests, SuperSearch searches and enrichment, the AI agents, done-for-you mailbox orders and workspace members. Instantly also publishes an official TypeScript SDK, still in beta, and a command-line tool.
Which plans get it depends on the page. The plan comparison in Instantly’s help center gives the API to Growth, Hypergrowth and Light Speed, and its pricing.md file counts "API access" among what every plan includes; the comparison table on instantly.ai/pricing, though, ticks its "API, webhooks, and integrations" row for Hypergrowth only. The free trial gets no API, no Zapier and no integrations, according to the help center table. Webhooks start at Hypergrowth whichever page you read: below that plan, Instantly never notifies your server when a lead replies, opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, changes status or books a meeting, and your code has to ask for those events instead.
Rate limits apply to the whole workspace: 100 requests a second and 6,000 a minute, however many keys the calls are spread over, with v1 traffic counted in the same budget; beyond that, calls are rejected with a 429 error. Version 1 was deprecated on January 19, 2026. Its keys do not open v2, so a script written for the old version needs a new key and new routes, while connectors built on it, Zapier among them, keep working according to the help center.
AI assistants connect through an MCP server hosted by Instantly, which takes the same API keys. The help center lists 31 tools in 5 categories, whereas the developer documentation says each v2 route is exposed as a tool. Emelia puts its API and webhooks on all three plans, at up to 100, 300 or 1,000 requests a minute on Start, Grow and Scale: a lower ceiling than Instantly’s, with webhooks from the entry plan.
Instantly email warmup and "unlimited" inboxes: the caps in the help center
Warm-up is included on every sending plan, through a network Instantly sizes at "1,000,000+" accounts on its warm-up page ("4.2M+" in its llms.txt file). A new mailbox sends 2, 4 and 6 warm-up emails over its first days, then ramps up. "Unlimited mailboxes" holds, within four limits written in the help center:
- 30 campaign emails per mailbox per day is Instantly’s recommendation for Google, Outlook and other SMTP mailboxes, 20 at most for its AirMail mailboxes; with its "Campaign Slow Ramp" option on, campaigns ramp up by 2 emails a day.
- Your plan’s monthly email cap. At 30 a day over 22 working days, Growth’s 5,000 emails keep fewer than 8 mailboxes busy. Past that, you need Hypergrowth, however many mailboxes the plan accepts.
- SMTP mailboxes in the standard warm-up pool: 100 on Growth, 500 on Hypergrowth and 1,000 on Light Speed, plus 500 per Outreach add-on. Above that number, the whole workspace, Google and Outlook mailboxes included, moves to the "Basic" pool, which Instantly ranks below it. A Premium pool costs from $500 a month per workspace, a private pool from $1,000.
- Done-for-you domains stay Instantly’s. For its Google and pre-warmed accounts, it keeps ownership and admin access of the domains it sets up (.com, .org only, 5 accounts per domain at most), and those mailboxes only work inside Instantly.
Instantly AI for LinkedIn: what its own blog and feature board say
Instantly does not automate LinkedIn. Its own blog, in an article on LinkedIn automation tools updated on May 6, 2026, sums Instantly up as "Email + CRM + Calling/SMS". On Instantly’s public feature board, the request for a LinkedIn integration (connection and message steps in sequences) is still open, with 169 votes.
Inside the product, LinkedIn shows up only as data: a LinkedIn field on each lead, LinkedIn profile URLs in SuperSearch, and in the CRM (a separate subscription) a "Connect" button that opens the contact’s LinkedIn profile, where you act by hand: the only LinkedIn feature its help center documents. Sending on LinkedIn goes through other tools: Instantly’s automations push leads to Aimfox, Expandi, HeyReach, Valley and La Growth Machine. HeyReach, billed per LinkedIn account ($79 per LinkedIn account a month, $59 from 10 accounts), names Instantly among the email tools it works with. Each is a second subscription, with a second inbox to watch.
Emelia runs LinkedIn steps in the same sequence as your emails, with a built-in proxy: 1 LinkedIn account on Start, 3 on Grow, 10 on Scale, then €29 a month per extra account.
Instantly CRM: unlimited seats, US calling, a bill of its own
Instantly’s CRM is sold apart from sending: Growth CRM at $47 a month and Hyper CRM at $97, according to the help center’s plans overview (its CRM article speaks of a flat $97 a month). It left the pricing page between January 18, 2026 and April 3, 2026.
It brings unlimited seats, which is the other way to work as a team without Hypergrowth (the first sending plan that accepts team members), along with opportunities, tasks and reporting. Calls and text messages run on American numbers (on Hyper CRM, according to Instantly’s llms.txt file and its former pricing page): call credit is bought on top at Twilio rates, and texting US numbers requires A2P 10DLC registration. The CRM has its own 14-day trial; cancelling it ends it at once if another Instantly subscription stays active.
Emelia has no CRM of its own: it connects to yours, one CRM on Start and Grow, several on Scale. Instantly connects natively to HubSpot, Pipedrive and HighLevel; Salesforce goes through its partner OutboundSync.
Instantly vs Clay: a sender and a list builder that plug into each other
Clay is a data workbench before it is a sender. You search its 900M people and 70M companies, then enrich each row from data providers and AI research, paying in two counters, actions and data credits: a free plan, then Launch from $185 a month. Its own Sequencer sends cold email only, runs on Smartlead and holds 4 emails per sequence at most. Instantly works the other way round: sending from many mailboxes comes first, and its data, SuperSearch, is a separate credits plan from $9 a month.
The link between them lives in Clay, which offers these Instantly actions: "Find leads", "Verify Email" and "Add Lead to Campaign". They look up a lead already in Instantly from its email, check whether an address is a valid inbox and whether its domain accepts everything (catch-all), and push a row into a campaign, optionally skipping anyone already in the workspace. Each one runs on an Instantly API key (v2), which a paid sending plan provides and the trial does not.
Instantly’s own setup guide, dated March 12, 2026, still asks for a Clay account on the "Explorer Tier or higher". Explorer belongs to Clay’s former price grid, replaced in March 2026 by Free, Launch, Growth and Enterprise; the current pricing page lists sending "via Clay or integrations" from Launch. That guide describes the split Instantly expects: the list researched and personalised in Clay, the emails sent by an Instantly campaign. Each tool then bills you on its own, in dollars.
Instantly.ai explained: cold email billed by emails sent and contacts loaded
Instantly.ai is an American cold email platform. You connect as many Gmail, Outlook or SMTP mailboxes as you like; Instantly warms them up, rotates them across your campaigns and gathers the replies in its Unibox. What you pay depends on your Outreach plan, which sets two limits: the emails you can send each month and the contacts you can load.
The first is easy to read: 5,000 emails a month on Growth, 125,000 emails a month (100,000 on the yearly price card and in the comparison table of the same page) on Hypergrowth, 500,000 on Light Speed. The second is the one people miss. It counts every contact present in your campaigns, whether active, paused, draft or finished, duplicates included, and it never resets: 1,000 on Growth, 25,000 on Hypergrowth, 100,000 on Light Speed. The help center’s only way to free space is to delete leads.
Instantly is the trading name of Foo Monk LLC, a company registered in Wyoming, and its terms are governed by Wyoming law. It says it was founded in 2021 and launched on AppSumo; Raul Kaevand and Nils Schneider are its co-CEOs. Its careers page counts "40,000+ Clients" and its CRM page 40,000+ teams; other pages say 35,000+, 50,000+ sales teams or 3M+ users.
What Instantly does, product by product, and which ones are billed apart
Each product below is its own subscription, billed, renewed and cancelled on its own tab, and you need one set per workspace: an agency that keeps three clients in three workspaces pays three times. Sending runs on the Outreach plan: without it, a credits plan only lets you put 250 leads in campaigns.
Outreach: sending
Campaigns, sequences, A/Z tests, mailbox rotation, warm-up and the Unibox, with unlimited mailboxes. Growth cannot invite team members, reply from the Unibox or send webhooks: all three start on Hypergrowth. Light Speed adds dedicated sending servers (SISR).
From $47/monthCredits: SuperSearch, enrichment, AI agents
The lead database ("450M+" contacts according to the pricing page, "610M+" according to the help center), enrichment, verification, AI agents and website visitor identification (US traffic only) all draw on one credit balance: 1 credit per email found in Instantly’s data, 2 when a partner provider finds it, 0.25 to verify an address you already have, 5 per reply drafted by the AI Reply Agent.
From $9/month (150 credits)CRM
Pipeline, tasks and a master inbox with unlimited seats, plus calls and text messages from US numbers (on the higher tier, according to Instantly’s llms.txt file and its former pricing page).
From $47/monthInbox Placement
Deliverability tests on Gmail and Microsoft inboxes, with 94 blacklists monitored; recurring automated tests on the higher tier.
From $47/monthDone-for-you mailboxes and domains
Google accounts at $5, pre-warmed accounts at $10 and AirMail, Instantly’s own SMTP mailboxes, at $4, each per month; domains at $15 a year. For Google and pre-warmed accounts, Instantly keeps ownership of the domains.
From $4/mailbox/monthVIP: outbound run for you
A managed service. The pricing page only says "book a call"; Instantly’s referral page quotes tiers from $2,000 to $10,000 a month.
On quoteSame outreach, two bills: Instantly’s add-on subscriptions against one Emelia plan
Take a team that sends from 10 mailboxes (about 6,600 emails a month at 30 a day), answers its prospects from the unified inbox and finds 1,000 new emails a month. At Instantly, the volume and the replies both call for Hypergrowth, and the emails need a credits plan: Growth, 1,500 credits, covers 1,000 emails at the 1.5 credits Instantly gives as its average. At Emelia, Grow covers the mailboxes, and 1,000 credits cost €19 a month on top: the credits included with a plan are given once, at signup.
Grow also includes 3 LinkedIn accounts, which Instantly cannot run at any price; they are not counted here.
10 mailboxes, replies from the unified inbox, 1,000 emails found a month
$144/month- Outreach Hypergrowth · $97
- Credits Growth · $47
$116/month- Grow plan · $97
- 1,000-credit pack · $19
Sending only: which plan each tool needs, mailbox range by mailbox range
Sending only, no data, no LinkedIn, at Instantly’s recommended 30 emails per mailbox per day over 22 working days, with Hypergrowth counted at 125,000 emails (its yearly card says 100,000, which would end its range sooner). Billed monthly, Instantly costs less for 4 to 7 and 51 to 189 mailboxes, Emelia for up to 3 and 190 to 757, and both cost the same for 8 to 50. Above 757 mailboxes, Instantly quotes Enterprise. Instantly invoices in US dollars and nothing else, while an Emelia price is the same number in euros or dollars: each tick therefore names the cheaper side for someone paying in dollars, with no exchange rate applied.
Billed monthly
up to 3 mailboxes
4 to 7 mailboxes
8 to 50 mailboxes
51 to 189 mailboxes
190 to 757 mailboxes
Paid yearly, cost per month
up to 3 mailboxes
4 to 7 mailboxes
8 to 50 mailboxes
51 to 189 mailboxes
190 to 757 mailboxes
Beyond the monthly price
Replying from the unified inbox
Contacts
LinkedIn accounts
White label for agencies
Free trial
The Growth rows assume you also stay under 1,000 contacts loaded and never reply from the Unibox, which is read-only on Growth. Every scenario, with yearly totals and data costs, is on the pricing page. Excluding tax, checked on October 6, 2026.
Instantly’s price range, from Growth to Light Speed
The three self-serve sending plans, billed monthly in US dollars, with 20% off when paid yearly. Credits, CRM and the rest come on top; the Instantly pricing page details every tier, the bundles and a simulator.
Growth
$47/month
$37.60/month billed yearly
- 5,000 emails a month
- 1,000 contacts loaded
- Unlimited mailboxes and warm-up
- No team members, Unibox read-only
Hypergrowth
$97/month
$77.60/month billed yearly
- 125,000 emails a month
- 25,000 contacts loaded
- Team members, Unibox replies, webhooks
- White label for agencies
Light Speed
$358/month
$286.30/month billed yearly
- 500,000 emails a month
- 100,000 contacts loaded
- Dedicated sending servers (SISR)
- Lead priority control
Hypergrowth’s volume differs within the same pricing page: 125,000 emails a month (100,000 on the yearly price card and in the comparison table of the same page). Enterprise, above 500,000 emails, is on quote. Bundles of sending and credits run from $94 to $555 a month.
Instantly ratings: a G2 score we can’t verify, none on Capterra, hidden on Trustpilot
Trustpilot hides Instantly’s score, citing "a breach of our guidelines", and says it removed fake reviews; 1,171 reviews remain, 25% of them one star.
G2 turns automated checks away, so Instantly’s score there is not one we could read ourselves: search engines display 4.8/5 and Instantly’s pages cite 4.8/5, and we present neither as verified. Capterra lists Instantly with 0 reviews.
What the remaining reviews say, praise and complaints, is on our Instantly review page.
Instantly vs Reply.io, Apollo, Smartlead and lemlist
The four tools people compare Instantly with most, each in its own detailed comparison.
- 1
Reply.io
Best for: Per-user billing, LinkedIn on its Multichannel planReply.io bills per user and by active contacts; its Multichannel plan adds LinkedIn steps, which Instantly does not have.
from $59/month per userInstantly vs Reply.io - 2
Apollo.io
Best for: Starting from a contact databaseApollo.io is built around its contact database (240M contacts according to its site) and sends from it, billed per licence with credits included; Instantly is built around sending and sells its data as credits.
free plan, then from $65/month per licenceInstantly vs Apollo - 3
Smartlead
Best for: The same volume-based modelA price set by emails sent, like Instantly, with mailboxes sold as unlimited (its fair use policy still lists caps); its entry plan sends 6,000 emails a month for $39.
from $39/monthSmartlead vs Instantly - 4
lemlist
Best for: Email, LinkedIn and callsAn email plan billed by volume, plus a per-user plan that adds LinkedIn and calls.
Signing in, the API, Clay and the free version: quick answers on Instantly
At app.instantly.ai, the address behind the "Log in" link of instantly.ai. One login covers everything: each subscription (Outreach, Credits, CRM and Inbox Placement) has its own tab in the same account’s settings.
Yes, on paid sending plans: from Growth according to the help centre, from Hypergrowth according to the pricing table. Reference pages and guides for v2, plus the SDK, are at developer.instantly.ai.
Not for sending alone, since Clay has its own sequencer from Launch. They pair up when Clay prepares the leads and Instantly’s mailboxes send them: two subscriptions, two invoices.
No free plan, only a 14-day trial without a card: 2 mailboxes, 250 contacts, 1,000 emails and 100 credits. When it ends, an account that has not subscribed is deleted, and data cannot be exported without subscribing.
Smartlead: its Base plan sends 6,000 emails for $39, Instantly Growth 5,000 for $47, though Base has no API. Higher up it depends on your volume; the Smartlead vs Instantly comparison works it out.
Emelia is an Instantly competitor. We have tried to stay fair: every figure about Instantly comes from its own website or public review sites.
