Cost = max(plan minimum, volume × per-result rate). At low volume you pay the plan floor — so a cheaper-per-result tool only wins once you clear its minimum. Slide the volume and the ranking reshuffles.

Why “cost per credit” lies

Tools advertise a price per credit, then quietly charge different credit amounts per action. On Apollo a work email is 1 credit but a mobile is 8. On Lusha a mobile is 10× an email. So two tools at “$0.02 a credit” can be 10× apart on the data you actually need. The only honest comparison is cost per result — per email, per mobile, per verification — which is what the tool above computes.

The hidden line: do you pay on a miss?

Some tools charge a credit on every attempt; others only when they return valid data. A 3-provider waterfall that finds nothing can still bill you three times. We flag each tool as pays per hit (charged on success) or pays per attempt — because at a 60% hit rate, “pays per attempt” quietly inflates your real cost by ~40%.

How we built this

For each tool we took the entry paid tier, the credits it includes, and how many credits each action costs, then derived the effective dollar cost per result. Figures were captured from official pricing pages and recent breakdowns on 2026-06-16. Credit pricing changes often — treat these as a sharp directional read, not a contract. New tools without a full review yet show their collected per-result cost and link out once their review ships.

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