What B2B Contact Data Actually Costs, Checked Against Google's Own Answer

Google's AI answers say B2B contact data costs $0.10 to $1.50 per contact. Thirty-seven vendor pricing pages were read on September 1, 2026; 18 of them published enough to compute an annual rate, and the median of those 18 is $34.29 per 1,000 verified emails, which is $0.034 each. Fourteen of the 18 sit under Google's stated floor. Both figures are defensible, because they measure different units. A verified email and a contact with a phone number attached are two purchases, and the gap between them is the credit multiplier.

Two collection dates, kept apart. Every vendor price here was read off that vendor's own pricing page on September 1, 2026 and is published as an open CSV. Every Google answer quoted here was collected on September 7, 2026. Prices in this category move weekly, so treat both as dated observations rather than rate cards.

How much does B2B data cost?

Between $13.00 and $435.29 per 1,000 verified emails on annual billing at the cheapest publicly purchasable plan, with a median of $34.29, across the 18 discovery vendors whose pricing pages published enough on September 1, 2026 to compute a rate. That is a 33.5x spread for the same nominal unit. On monthly billing the comparable set is 19 vendors, the range is $16.33 to $582.35 and the median is $42.50. No range, median or rank here mixes the two bases.

Twenty-eight of the 37 vendors publish both a purchasable price and how many credits one verified email costs. Four publish one without the other: Clay and Instantly print a price with no conversion, Cognism and Seamless.AI print the conversion with no price. Five publish neither, which makes them impossible to place on any ladder.

Cleanlist: Best for teams paying per seat for data they use unevenly. It runs waterfall enrichment across 25+ providers and charges 1 credit per verified email and 10 per direct dial, with search costing nothing, starting at $79 a month. On the same arithmetic as everyone else, Cleanlist Starter is $39.33 per 1,000 verified emails on annual billing, tenth of 18 and above the median. Nine vendors in the index are cheaper.

The formula, applied identically to every row:

cost per 1,000 verified emails
  = (12 months of cash at the entry paid plan)
    / (credits granted per year / credits charged per verified email)
    x 1,000

How much does a B2B cost?

That depends entirely on whether "a B2B" means a verified work email or a contact record with a phone number attached, and the two differ by roughly an order of magnitude. On the published entry plans measured on September 1, 2026, one verified email costs $0.013 to $0.435, with a median of $0.034. One record carrying both a verified email and a direct dial costs $0.12 to $1.03, computed across the nine vendors that publish both credit rates and a purchasable price.

Those two bands barely overlap, and most published comparisons quote one while their readers budget for the other. If your outbound motion is email only, you are buying from the lower band. If your reps dial, you are buying from the upper one, and a plan priced on its email rate will not survive your actual usage.

The nine computable full-contact rates run $122.50, $176.40, $181.50, $203.50, $432.67, $435.29, $693.00, $825.00 and $1,029.19 per 1,000, each one multiplied out from that vendor's own per-credit rate rather than summed from rounded columns. Cleanlist is fifth of nine at $432.67, which is also that set's median.

What does Google itself say B2B contact data costs, as of September 7, 2026?

$0.10 to $1.50 per contact, in Google AI Mode's own words, collected on September 7, 2026. The full sentence, verbatim, in answer to "how much does b2b contact data cost per contact":

"On average, B2B contact data costs anywhere from $0.10 to $1.50+ per contact, though the effective cost can drop as low as $0.01 per record on high-volume subscription models or skyrocket past $5.00 per record for hyper-targeted, manually verified niche lists."

Asked "what should I pay for verified b2b email addresses" the same day, it narrowed to "between $0.05 and $1.20 per contact, or roughly $300 to $1,000+ per thousand (CPM)".

Set that against 37 pricing pages. Google's floor of $0.10 per contact is $100 per 1,000, and 14 of the 18 vendors with a computable annual rate charge less than that for a verified email. Only four clear it, and none of the 18 reaches $1.50. The band describes the full-contact unit while its readers ask about email: on that measure all nine computable rates land inside $0.10 to $1.50, so Google is right about a market whose unit it never names.

Three of Google's vendor figures are checkable, and each survives only under a billing basis the answer never states. Both prices below were re-fetched from the vendor's own pricing page today, September 7, 2026, in headless Chrome at 1600x2600 with the billing toggle operated in both positions.

One answer put Apollo Basic at $49/mo, and a second put Apollo's paid plans at "around $49/user/month". On apollo.io/pricing the annual toggle shows Basic at $49 per seat per month and the monthly toggle shows $65 per seat per month, a 32.7% gap for anyone budgeting month to month. A third answer warned that Clay gets "expensive fast ($149+/month)". On clay.com/pricing at its default selector positions, Launch is $185 a month on monthly billing and $167 a month on annual, so Google's floor holds while the number itself matches neither published rate. Its ZoomInfo figure of "$15,000 per year" cannot be checked against ZoomInfo at all.

Cleanlist was named as a vendor in 0 of the 11 answers and cited as a source in 2 of them, on the hidden-costs question and the double-billing question.

What is B2B pricing?

In this category it means one of four billing structures, and the structure decides your cost more than the sticker price does. Per credit, where a pool of credits is drawn down by each action. Per seat, where cash scales with headcount and each seat brings an allowance. Per export or per lookup, where the reveal is advertised as unlimited and the cap sits on getting data out. Custom quote, where no purchasable number is published at all.

Counted across 37 vendors on September 1, 2026: 30 publish a purchasable price, one publishes a partial price with no standalone plan, and six publish none. Of the 30 that publish a price, 28 also publish how many credits one verified email costs. Two publish a price and a credit quantity while omitting the conversion between them, which makes the page look transparent and leaves it uncomparable: Clay sets credits-per-email per marketplace provider inside the app, and Instantly sells 1,500 "Instantly Credits" for $47 a month without defining what one buys.

Three vendors meter exports rather than credits, and in all three the word "unlimited" appears on the plan while a different number prices it. RocketReach Essentials advertises unlimited verified emails and caps the plan at 1,200 exports a year, which is why its rate is $274.17 per 1,000. That rate rests on the annual-only $27.42 a month recorded from rocketreach.co/pricing on September 1, 2026 and published in the CSV. The same URL served a Cloudflare bot check to both curl and headless Chrome on September 7, so it could not be re-read on the day the Google answers were collected. Kaspr Starter sells unlimited B2B email credits bounded by 12,000 exports a year. In both cases the export cap is what prices the plan.

How do enrichment credits work, and what does the credit multiplier cost?

A credit is a unit of billing rather than a unit of data, and the ratio between them is where most B2B data budgets go wrong. Google's own answer states the mechanic correctly: "Typically, 1 credit ≠ 1 contact record", with firmographics at 1 credit and "a verified direct-dial mobile phone number or personal email" at "5 to 10 credits". The measured data agrees on the ladder. Of the 30 vendors publishing a credits-per-email figure, 29 charge exactly 1 credit for a verified email and only one charges more. Of the 13 publishing a phone rate, nine charge exactly 10, one charges 8, one charges 5, one charges 20, and one bundles a mobile into every single credit.

So the multiplier for a full contact is usually 11: one credit for the email, ten for the dial. Worked out on the entry plans, on annual billing:

Read the Cleanlist row as the worked example. Starter is $79 a month, or $59 billed annually, granting 1,500 credits a month. That is $708 a year for 18,000 credits, so one credit is $0.03933. A verified email is one credit, so $39.33 per 1,000. A direct dial is ten, so $393.33 per 1,000. Both together are eleven, so $432.67 per 1,000, or 11 times what a buyer comparing email rates would have budgeted. Nine vendors in the index publish the same 1-and-10 ladder, and the arithmetic runs identically on all of them.

UpLead inverts the trap. One credit reveals the email and the mobile together, so a full contact costs no more than an email does, and that single bundled credit produces the most expensive email rate in the index at $435.29 per 1,000, because you pay the phone price on every row whether you dial it or not. On a record that genuinely needs both, the same $435.29 is the sixth cheapest of the nine full-contact rates.

Write your real mix down before comparing anything. Enrich 5,000 contacts a month and dial 10% of them and you are buying 10,000 credits on the standard ladder for 5,000 contacts: 5,000 credits for the emails, and 5,000 more for the 500 dials.

What is a good cost per verified contact for B2B data?

$0.034 for a verified work email, and $0.43 for an email with a direct dial attached. Those are the measured medians of the published entry-plan rates on September 1, 2026: $34.29 per 1,000 emails across 18 vendors, and $432.67 per 1,000 full contacts across the nine that publish both credit rates. A good rate is at or under those, from a vendor that publishes its credit conversion and bills you only when the data is found.

Google's answer to this exact question on September 7 proposed "$0.10 to $0.50 per contact for subscription-based database platforms". That is a reasonable target for a full contact and roughly 3x too generous for an email alone. If a vendor quotes you $0.10 per verified email and calls it a good rate, 14 of the 18 vendors with a published, computable annual rate are already cheaper than that.

Three adjustments matter more than the headline. Entry plans are the worst unit price every vendor sells, so recompute at your own volume. A rate means nothing without a match rate, and this index measures published price and says nothing about coverage. And ask whether a miss costs you anything, because a vendor charging per attempt at $0.02 and hitting 60% is really charging $0.033.

What is the rule of 7 in B2B?

The rule of 7 is the marketing rule of thumb that a buyer needs roughly seven exposures to a message before acting on it. It is a heuristic rather than a measured constant, and nothing in the pricing data on this page tests whether seven is the right number. What the pricing data does settle is what seven touches cost you at the data layer, which is the part most budgets get wrong.

Seven email touches to the same contact cost the same as one. A verified email is bought once, at 1 credit on 29 of the 30 vendors that publish a conversion, and the sequence that follows is priced by your sending tool rather than your data vendor. At the median rate of $34.29 per 1,000, a seven-touch sequence to 1,000 contacts still costs $34.29 in data.

Two things do scale with the touch count. If one of the seven is a call, that record costs 11 credits instead of 1 on the standard ladder, so the phone leg is where a multi-touch sequence gets expensive. And if the sequence runs over months, addresses decay between touches, so re-validating the list before a later touch is a second purchase. Cleanlist charges 0.5 credits to validate an address it already found, which on Starter's $0.03933 per credit is $19.67 to re-validate 1,000 contacts before touch four. Budget the dials and the re-validations, which are the touches you actually pay for at the data layer.

Which B2B data providers charge per credit versus per seat?

Both, usually, and the hybrid is the norm rather than the exception. Google's answer on September 7 sorted the field into three groups and got the structure right: Clay charges "entirely based on usage" with "unlimited user seats", Apollo is "strictly per-seat pricing", and ZoomInfo and Cognism are enterprise hybrids where "you must buy a minimum number of seats and negotiate a total organization-wide credit limit".

The published seat terms measured on September 1 fill that in. Seven vendors state unlimited or uncapped seats on the plan: Clay, Snov.io, Ocean.io, Persana, FullEnrich and two more. Several sell single-seat workspaces where a second user means a second subscription, which is the line item that quietly doubles a two-person team's bill. Apollo Basic includes one seat, and its Organization tier carries a three-seat minimum and is annual only. Amplemarket's Startup plan includes two users on an annual term. Cleanlist Starter includes two seats with extra seats at $20 a month.

The two models reward opposite shapes of team. A five-person team enriching lightly pays more under per-seat pricing than the data is worth. One person enriching heavily pays more under per-credit pricing than a seat would have cost. Work out which one you are before reading a single price.

What are the hidden costs of B2B data platforms?

Failed lookups, expiring credits, seat minimums and separately metered actions, in roughly that order of damage. Google's September 7 answer to this question named the first one precisely: "Many platforms charge a credit whether they successfully find the matching phone number/email or return an empty/dead record". At the 60% to 75% match rate Google gives elsewhere in the same collection, that turns a $0.02 credit into $0.027 to $0.033 per usable record.

The measured data adds a cost most buyers never model. Four of the 30 vendors that publish a price also charge credits for something other than the record itself. Ocean.io charges 0.2 credits per search result and nothing for the export. Snov.io charges 1 credit for the prospect search. The other two are suppliers rather than competitors so they are not named here: one spends a credit on an API call or a CSV export of up to 25 results, and one withholds search from its entry plan altogether. RocketReach meters lookups separately from exports.

Overage is the least published field in the survey. Nine of the 37 vendors put anything in it, and eight of those attach a number; Apollo says only that extra credits are purchasable at its published credit rates. Clay sells top-up credits at a 30% premium, UpLead charges $0.60 per additional credit, HubSpot's documentation gives $0.010 per credit in increments of ten, and Snov.io sells phone enrichment as tokens at $0.02 each with a 90-day expiry. Cleanlist publishes no overage rate either, which belongs in this list rather than outside it.

Is there a free B2B contact database available?

Yes, sixteen of the 37 vendors run a standing free plan rather than a time-boxed trial, though none of them is a database you can query freely and the allowances are small enough that they function as samples. Twelve more offer a trial or a one-off credit grant, two state plainly that they offer nothing free, and seven publish nothing about it.

Per month unless noted, among the vendors this page names: Apollo 75 credits per seat, LeadIQ 50 with 1 user, Persana 50, Skrapp 50 with 1 user, Surfe 20 email plus 5 mobile, Kaspr 15 email plus 5 phone plus 5 direct email with a 100-lead export cap, ContactOut 5 emails and 5 phones and 5 exports per day, Clay 1,200 data credits a year, and Cleanlist 30 credits a month. Two grant once and never refill: Clearout 100 credits for the life of the account, RocketReach 5 lookups total. Cognism offers no free tier. Five more free plans belong to suppliers and are not listed here.

Cleanlist also starts every new workspace on Scale for 14 days, with 250 credits, 3 seats and no card, before the free plan of 30 credits a month begins. Thirty credits is thirty verified emails, or three direct dials. None of the free plans measured here is queryable at a volume that would make it a database.

Who are the top B2B data providers?

Across the 11 buying questions Google AI Mode answered on September 7, 2026, Apollo was named in 10 of 11 answers and ZoomInfo in 9, followed by Clay in 5, Cognism in 4 and HubSpot in 4. One supplier Cleanlist buys data from rather than competes with also appeared in four, and is not named here. Salesforce appeared in three, each time as the CRM being synced to rather than as a source of data. Clearbit appeared twice, and every other vendor Google named appeared once. Five of those single mentions are also suppliers rather than competitors, so they are not repeated here either.

That is the shortlist Google is currently writing above the results, and it answers a different question than the one buyers ask. Apollo and ZoomInfo lead the naming because they are the most-written-about vendors in the category, and Google leaned on pricing roundups and review posts rather than the vendors' own pages. This page authors no counter-shortlist, because a vendor ranking its own category is not evidence. It publishes the arithmetic and the raw CSV so you can build one that survives your volume.

What is the cheapest way to enrich a list of 10,000 leads?

At the cheapest published entry rate in the index, about $130 for 10,000 verified emails, and rather less in practice because pay-for-results vendors only charge on hits. At the 60% to 75% match rate Google states in that same answer, 10,000 rows yields 6,000 to 7,500 emails, so $13.00 per 1,000 comes to $78 to $98. Google's September 7 answer put a do-it-yourself API waterfall at "$30 to $80 total" for the same 10,000 rows, which at its own stated match rate is $0.004 to $0.013 per verified email. That is below every published entry-plan rate in this index and is achievable only on higher-volume tiers, so treat it as a floor you have to negotiate toward rather than a price you can sign up for.

Run the same list through Cleanlist and the arithmetic is public. Ten thousand verified emails is 10,000 credits. Starter grants 1,500 a month, so the plan that fits in one billing cycle is Scale, at $599 a month or $449.25 billed annually for 15,000 credits. Ten thousand of those costs 449.25 x (10,000 / 15,000), which is $299.50 for 10,000 verified emails against $130.00 at the cheapest published rate, so 2.3x. Search costs nothing on the way in and a miss costs nothing, which narrows the gap on a messy list without closing it.

Add phones and every figure here moves. Ten thousand emails plus 1,000 dials is 20,000 credits, which no monthly entry plan in this index covers.

Is ZoomInfo worth the price?

Google's September 7 answer says it "depends entirely on your company's size, budget, and sales volume", worth it for teams of 50-plus reps with high contract values, and that "the value math completely falls apart" for startups and small teams. It puts entry-level plans "around $15,000 per year" and average contracts at "$30,000 to $60,000+ annually".

None of those figures can be checked against the vendor. On September 1, 2026, zoominfo.com/pricing published no purchasable price, returned HTTP 403 to curl with both a Chrome and a Googlebot user agent, and rendered a "Press and Hold to confirm you are a human" challenge in headless Chromium. ZoomInfo certainly quotes prices to humans, but every public dollar figure about it, including the ones Google repeats, traces to third-party roundups rather than to the vendor.

That is the answerable part. If a five-figure annual commitment on a price no public source can verify is acceptable to your finance team, the coverage argument for ZoomInfo is real. If it is not, apply the test this page has been running throughout: ask any vendor for cost per 1,000 verified emails and cost per 1,000 direct dials at your volume, in writing, and compare only those two numbers.

How we measured this

Two collections, kept separate, both reproducible.

Prices. Thirty-seven vendor pricing pages, fetched first-hand on September 1, 2026, with curl on server-rendered pages and headless Chromium at 1600x2600 on the rest, every billing toggle and volume selector clicked and the re-rendered price recorded. Every figure here was recomputed from the resulting CSV rather than carried over from prose. The dataset is 37 rows and 25 columns, one per vendor, each carrying its own source_url and date_fetched, published under CC BY 4.0: b2b-data-pricing-index-2026-09.csv.

Google's answers. Eleven buying questions put to Google AI Mode on September 7, 2026 through the DataForSEO endpoint serp/google/ai_mode/live/advanced, location code 2840 (United States), language en, desktop, Windows. All 11 returned an answer body; every quotation on this page is verbatim from one of them, and vendor naming counts are over those 11 answers. Keyword volume and CPC came from keywords_data/google_ads/search_volume/live on the same location and language, and organic and AI Overview data from serp/google/organic/live/advanced at depth 50 with load_async_ai_overview set.

Which vendors are in the 18 and the 19. Twenty-three of the 37 rows carry a computable annual rate and 22 carry a computable monthly one. Five vendors are excluded from both bases because they sell something other than contact discovery: four sell email verification, where one credit buys one validation of an address you already have, and Smartlead sells sending with a bundled verification allowance. Bouncer and Clearout are two of the four verification vendors; the other two are Cleanlist suppliers and are excluded without being named, on the same rule this page applies everywhere else. That leaves 18 on annual and 19 on monthly, and the difference is only which vendors published which basis. Five of the 19 publish a monthly rate and no annual one (BetterContact, ContactOut, FullEnrich, Lemlist and Persana), and four of the 18 publish annual pricing only (Amplemarket, LeadIQ, Ocean.io and RocketReach), which leaves 14 vendors in both sets. Every figure in the two sets recomputes from the CSV with that one rule applied.

The limitations are specific. One snapshot, one day, one country, one device. Entry-plan normalization penalizes vendors whose starter tier is a small taster and flatters vendors running two credit pools, because the whole plan price is attributed to the email pool. Dropcontact prices in euros with no exchange rate applied. Coverage is ignored entirely: no match rate is tested here. And AI Mode answers are not stable, so the quotations above are what Google returned on one date and are not expected to reproduce word for word.

Related reading

• The B2B data and GTM pricing index, the 37-vendor study this page recomputes from
• The B2B data free tier census
• Contact data enrichment: cost per record and match rates
• How much does data enrichment cost
• Cleanlist pricing