How to Build a B2B Lead List: Every Filter, Every Credit Cost

To build a B2B lead list, turn your ICP into filters, run the search, save only the rows that fit, then enrich those rows into reachable contact data. In Cleanlist that sequence has a published price at every step. People Search exposes about 24 filter fields and costs 0 credits to run. Saving a lead to a list costs 0.5 credits. A verified email costs 1 credit, a direct-dial phone costs 10, and both together cost 11. A 250-lead list enriched with email is 375 credits, which is $19.75 of a Cleanlist Starter plan at $79 a month.

Last updated: August 10, 2026.

Most guides stop at "define your ICP" and hand you a template. The part that decides whether a list works is narrower: which attributes are indexed fields you can filter on, and what each row costs once you keep it. This page answers both for Cleanlist, filter by filter and credit by credit, at the prices published on August 10, 2026.

A B2B lead list built from People Search filters, with a verified email and phone on each row

What counts as a finished B2B lead list?

A B2B lead list is finished when a rep can act on every row without opening another tool. In practice that means five fields per person: name, job title, company, a verified work email, and ideally a direct-dial phone. Cleanlist treats those last two as the enriched part of the job. The search itself and the profile fields it returns cost 0 credits, and keeping a row costs 0.5 credits before any enrichment runs. The Cleanlist 500-Lead Enrichment Benchmark, run in 2026 on 500 stratified B2B leads, resolved 98% verified email and 85% direct dial across the waterfall. A list without those two columns is a research artifact that still needs a second pass before anyone can send to it.

How do you turn an ICP into filters instead of adjectives?

Write the ICP, then cross out every word that does not map to a field. "Fast-growing mid-market SaaS companies with modern data stacks" contains one filterable idea. In Cleanlist People Search, "mid-market" becomes the headcount bands 201-500 and 501-1,000, "SaaS" becomes the LinkedIn industry Software Development, and "fast-growing" and "modern data stack" become nothing at all, because neither growth rate nor tech stack is an indexed field. That rewrite is the whole exercise. Cleanlist exposes about 24 filter fields, so an ICP that survives the rewrite with four or five live filters is a searchable ICP. One that survives with one is a research project wearing a search's clothes.

Which filters does Cleanlist People Search actually expose?

Cleanlist People Search exposes about 24 distinct filter fields, which the rest of the site rounds to 20+, arranged in seven groups. The full list as of August 10, 2026:

Every one of those is queryable at 0 credits in the Cleanlist app and through POST /search/people on the REST API v2.

What can you not filter on when building a prospect list?

As of August 10, 2026 there are 6 things people plan campaigns around that are not filters in Cleanlist People Search, and saying so before you build is cheaper than finding out after. There is no revenue range and no revenue band. There is no funding-stage or amount-raised filter, so a Series B campaign cannot be targeted by funding. Tech stack and technographics are neither a filter nor a returned field. Cleanlist buys no intent data from any vendor, so there is no surge, topic or website-visitor signal. There is no department or job-function picker; job title is the only proxy. And "recently changed jobs" is a query-time filter rather than an alert, so Cleanlist will not watch a saved list and notify you when someone moves.

Why does search costing 0 credits change how you build the list?

Because it moves the decision point. Cleanlist charges 0 credits per People Search on every plan that includes it, so counting your addressable set, widening the headcount band, adding a country and undoing it again all cost the same as doing nothing. The credit meter starts when you keep a row (0.5 credits) and again when you enrich it (1, 10 or 11 credits). That ordering is the opposite of how most teams behave, which is to lock the ICP in a doc and then spend on the first list that roughly matches. With Cleanlist the sensible pattern is ten free searches and one paid enrichment run, because only the last step has a price.

What does a worked example look like with real filter values?

Here is a real Cleanlist People Search configuration for North American mid-market sales leadership, written exactly as the fields are set:

• Seniority: VP, Director
• Title contains: Sales
• Exclude titles: Sales Development Representative, Account Executive
• Industry: Software Development
• Company headcount: 201-500, 501-1,000
• Country: United States, Canada
• Company HQ country: United States
• Years in role: 1 or more

Eight filter settings drawn from four of the seven groups. Running it in Cleanlist costs 0 credits, so the honest way to size it is to run it and read the count rather than model it. Then narrow: drop 501-1,000, add "Exclude locations" for territories you do not cover, and run again. Still 0 credits in Cleanlist.

How do you save a search to a list without paying for the whole result set?

Select, then save. In Cleanlist you tick the rows worth keeping and save them to a named lead list at 0.5 credits per newly added lead, so a 250-row list costs 125 credits to assemble before any enrichment happens. Rows you leave unticked cost nothing, which is why select-all is the expensive habit. A Cleanlist Free account holds 100 leads per list, Starter and Pro hold 2,500, and Scale is unlimited, so size the first list to what one rep can work in two weeks. If your source is a CSV or a Sales Navigator export rather than a search, the importer at app.cleanlist.ai/lists takes the file directly and the same enrichment run applies.

What does bulk enrichment cost per lead in Cleanlist?

Three modes, three prices, one bulk job. Cleanlist charges 1 credit for partial enrichment (verified email plus LinkedIn, title and company), 10 credits for phone_only, and 11 credits for full, which returns email and phone together. Company enrichment from a domain is 1 credit. For a 250-row list that is 250 credits for email, 2,500 for phone alone, or 2,750 for both. The job is asynchronous, so you dispatch it and collect results rather than watching rows resolve. Single-contact enrichment typically completes in under 3 seconds, and the API accepts up to 250 contacts per bulk request. Pick email-only for a first send and add phone to the segment that replies.

What happens to rows the waterfall cannot resolve?

You are not charged for them. Cleanlist enrichment is pay-for-results: the credits shown when a job is dispatched are a maximum reservation, and the actual charge can be lower or zero when nothing new comes back. A row that the 15+ provider waterfall cannot resolve stays in your list with the profile fields the search already returned, so it is still workable for a LinkedIn touch or for account mapping. From there you have three moves: try a phone number instead at 10 credits, run an AI research column against that row, or delete it. Nothing is silently billed for a blank, which is the difference that matters when you are budgeting a list rather than a seat.

How do you verify emails before you send to the list?

In Cleanlist, verification happens inside the enrichment run rather than as a separate step you buy. Every address returned goes through RFC 5322 syntax checking, a DNS and MX record lookup, and an SMTP handshake, with catch-all domain, disposable, role-based and spam-trap detection layered on top. That is the process behind the 98% verified-email figure Cleanlist states as a product spec. If you are checking a handful of addresses you already have rather than enriching a list, the free Cleanlist email verifier runs 25 checks a day with no signup. For a list you inherited, run it through bulk email verification before the first send rather than after the first bounce report.

How do you export the list or push it into a CRM?

Two paths, and only one of them costs credits. Cleanlist exports any list to CSV or JSON for free, so the cost of an exported list is exactly the enrichment you already paid for. Native sync to HubSpot, Salesforce and Outreach, and to Lemlist on the sequencer side, costs 0.2 credits per lead, which is 50 credits for a 250-row list. The same sync endpoints exist on the REST API v2, so a nightly job can search, enrich and push without anyone opening the app. Cleanlist does not send email, hold an inbox or dial numbers, so the CRM or the sequencer stays the system of record for outreach.

Is a B2B prospecting tool cheaper than LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

They price different things. LinkedIn's own plan comparison, fetched August 10, 2026, lists Sales Navigator Core at US$119.99 per month, Advanced at US$159.99 per month, and Advanced Plus at custom pricing, with 50+ advanced search filters and 50 InMail credits a month on every tier. That page does not list verified work email addresses or direct-dial phone numbers among its features. Cleanlist Starter is $79 a month with 1,500 credits, search costs 0 credits, and the deliverable is an email address or a phone number. Cleanlist also imports an existing Sales Navigator list, so in most teams the two run together rather than one replacing the other.

What does Cleanlist cost per 1,000 verified emails against the market?

The Cleanlist B2B Contact Data Pricing Index, published August 7, 2026, surveyed 16 contact data vendors against a single unit, dollars per 1,000 verified emails, and found only 8 of the 16 could be normalised from published information at all. Cleanlist Starter came out at $52.67 per 1,000 on monthly billing and $39.33 on annual. Cleanlist is not the cheapest row in that table: Apollo Basic on annual billing computes to $19.60 at Apollo's published 1-credit reveal rate, or $39.20 at the 2-credit bulk-enrichment rate the same page publishes, and Snov.io Starter computes to $29.25. What the Cleanlist row does show is that the arithmetic can be done at all, which was true of only 8 of the 16 vendors surveyed. The full table and the method are in the B2B contact data pricing index.

Do you pay to look at leads or to export them?

Both models exist and they behave differently under iteration. Apollo's pricing page, fetched August 10, 2026, states that export credits are consumed "whenever you export a contact outside of Apollo. For example, when you use CSV, CRM, or Person API enrichment and sync the data to any system outside Apollo", and it applies a fair-use ceiling of 10,000 credits per account per month to non-paying accounts on an Unlimited Plan. Cleanlist meters at two points instead: 0.5 credits when a lead enters a list and 1 to 11 credits when it is enriched, with export to CSV or JSON free. Under either model the searching is what is free, so the discipline is the same: iterate before you keep.

Can you build the same list from an API or from Claude?

Yes, with one limit worth stating up front. POST /search/people on the Cleanlist REST API v2 takes the same structured filter fields as the app and costs 0 credits, and GET /search/people/filters returns the current allowlist so you never guess a key name. The API has no natural-language endpoint. Rate limits are 60 requests per minute per organisation, 30 per minute per API key, and 60 People Searches per UTC day per key, with API access starting on the Pro plan at $229 a month. Through the Cleanlist MCP server at mcp.cleanlist.ai, Claude reads your request in prose and calls the structured search tool for you, and estimate_cost returns a signed quote before any spend.

How often should you rebuild a B2B lead list?

Treat any Cleanlist list older than a quarter as a source of names rather than a source of contacts. Cognism, citing HubSpot, puts B2B data decay at 22.5% a year on a page updated May 20, 2026, which is roughly one row in eighteen going stale every quarter. The cheap maintenance move is to re-run the enrichment rather than rebuild the search, because Cleanlist verifies at enrichment time rather than at collection time, so a re-enrichment at 1 credit per row refreshes the email against today's state of the mailbox. You can also filter on "recently changed jobs" to find the movers, though Cleanlist will not alert you when someone in a saved list moves.

What does the first list cost end to end on the free plan?

Thirty credits, which is what every new Cleanlist account gets each month with no card required. That budget covers one complete run: 20 leads saved to a list at 0.5 credits each (10 credits) and the same 20 enriched with a verified email at 1 credit each (20 credits). Total 30, and you finish with 20 rows a rep can send to today. Scaled up, a 250-row list with email is 125 credits to save plus 250 to enrich, which is 375 credits, or $19.75 at the Starter rate of $79 for 1,500 credits. The same list with email and phone is 2,875 credits, which sits inside Pro at $229 for 5,000.

What makes a B2B lead list unusable?

Four failure modes, in the order they show up. Filtering on an attribute that is not indexed, so the list looks targeted and is not; in Cleanlist that means revenue, funding, tech stack and intent. Saving everything because search was free, which converts 0-credit exploration into a real bill at 0.5 credits per row. Enriching before narrowing, which spends 11 credits on rows you would have cut. And sending to addresses collected months ago rather than verified at export, which is the one that costs a domain rather than credits. Cleanlist re-verifies every email at enrichment time through the 15+ provider waterfall, so the fix for the fourth one is sequencing rather than a separate tool.

Build the list, then run the bulk enrich

A search on its own has not bought you anything. The run worth doing on day one is the bulk enrichment: save 20 rows, enrich all 20 with a verified email, and see what the waterfall returns on your ICP before you commit a budget. That is exactly 30 credits, which is what a free Cleanlist account carries every month.

Prefer to see the filters first? The Cleanlist People Search page lists all seven filter groups and the six things they deliberately do not cover. If your list already exists and only needs contact data, start at waterfall enrichment instead. Or sign up directly at app.cleanlist.ai/auth/register and import a CSV.

Related reading

• How to Build a B2B Lead List From Scratch, the framework version with the legal and buying-signal sections
• Describe Your ICP, Get a Lead List
• How to Enrich a Lead List
• The Best B2B People Search Tools in 2026
• How to Build an Ideal Customer Profile
• Cleanlist pricing, outbound use case