Apollo credits explained: what a credit costs, when it expires and what Apollo refunds

Apollo credits in short: cost, expiry and seats

Apollo credits are the shared allowance your team spends on Apollo data and actions: 1 credit reveals a verified email, 8 reveal a phone number, and unused credits expire at the end of each billing cycle.

Credits come with a per-seat plan, so Apollo pricing has two meters: seats and credits. The credits decide how far a seat price goes.

This guide uses Apollo's pricing page, help center, API docs and terms, all read on October 17, 2026. Figures from anywhere else are labeled as third-party. Apollo marks its pricing as introductory and subject to change, so confirm every number in the app before you buy. For the wider pattern, see our checklist of credit pricing traps.

What one Apollo credit buys

Apollo's pricing page lists the unit costs. Its API docs add the combined cost and the waterfall ranges.

Email, phone, enrichment, AI research and dialer costs come from Apollo's pricing page. The 9-credit total and the waterfall ranges come from its API docs, and the free office phone from its help center. If you connect a validator to waterfall enrichment, it charges separately each time it checks a result.

Three rules from Apollo's help center:

• You pay for net-new contacts only, once per contact.
• Re-enriching an existing contact with a new email or phone costs credits. Refreshing company or demographic data does not.
• Dialer minutes, domains, purchased mailboxes and warmup beyond the first mailbox also spend credits, from the same pool as data.

Do Apollo credits expire?

Yes. Apollo credits expire at the end of each billing cycle and do not roll over. That covers plan credits and purchased add-on credits. Apollo's pricing page, help center and terms of service (last updated August 10, 2026) all say so, and the help center adds that unused credits are not refundable.

Annual billing changes the shape of this, not the rule. The year's credits sit in one balance, so a busy month can draw on a quiet one, but whatever remains at the end of the year is gone. On monthly billing, a quiet month wastes that month's allowance.

Apollo's terms also say it can update its credit conversion policies at any time, so what a credit buys can change. Check the credit page in your account before a large purchase.

How Apollo.io credits are granted and what a credit costs in dollars

Per Apollo's pricing page, credits are pooled across your entire team and granted upfront at the start of each billing cycle. Each seat adds its own allowance to the shared balance.

Prices and credits are from Apollo's pricing page, read on October 17, 2026 with both billing toggles. Prices exclude tax.

Divide an annual seat price by its credits and one credit comes to about 2 cents. Basic is $588 a year for 30,000 credits, or $0.0196 each, and Professional and Organization work out to about the same. On monthly billing it is about 2.5 to 2.6 cents: $65 for 2,500 credits on Basic, $99 for 4,000 on Professional.

That is the price if you use every credit. Credits you do not use cost the same and expire, so the price per credit actually used is higher. The worked example below shows by how much.

Apollo pricing per seat: one plan for everyone, three seats for Organization

Apollo charges per seat. Every user needs a seat, and Apollo's pricing page says all seats must be on the same plan. One rep who needs Professional puts everyone on Professional.

Organization requires at least three seats, which is $4,284 a year at the $119 annual price. Apollo's help center says upgrades to Organization go through Talk to Sales, even though the plan card also shows a Buy now button.

Plan changes work like this, per Apollo's pricing FAQ and help center:

• Upgrades to a plan or seat count take effect immediately.
• Downgrades also take effect immediately, with no refund for unused time. The lower price starts with the next term.
• An annual plan cannot switch to monthly billing until the annual term ends.
• A cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing cycle.

Apollo's terms add three points. A subscription term renews automatically for an equal period unless either party gives written notice of non-renewal at least 30 days before it ends. Fees are non-cancelable and non-refundable, except as an order form provides. And the number of seats cannot be decreased during a term.

Put the renewal date and the 30-day notice date in your calendar. This is a plain-language summary of published terms, not legal advice. Read the current terms and your order form before you buy.

Add-on credits: how they renew and what they cost

You buy extra credits under Manage Subscription, and Apollo shows a cost preview first. The charge is immediate and not prorated, so buying mid-cycle costs the full amount for the whole add-on balance. Add-ons then renew every cycle until you reduce them to zero, and reductions apply from the next cycle.

Apollo's pricing page does not list a price per add-on credit. Third-party reports disagree:

• Carly (October 4, 2026), a vendor of inbox software: 2.5 cents each at small volumes, falling to 1.5 cents.
• Salesforge (September 26, 2026), a competing vendor: 20 cents each with a 250-credit minimum. UpLead, also a competitor, reports the same 20 cents with minimum purchases in a comparison last updated in September 2025.

That is a gap of roughly 8 to 13 times. Not verified: we could not confirm which figure applies to your account, so read Apollo's cost preview before you confirm.

Apollo export credits

Apollo export credits are a credit category that may apply only to certain plans. Apollo's help center (Review Credit Usage, updated October 15, 2026) lists Exports as credits used to export or push records outside Apollo, and says they may apply only to certain plans or legacy configurations. Apollo's about-credits page says credits may sometimes be used when exporting company data.

Older plans and older articles describe separate monthly buckets for email, mobile and export credits. UpLead's comparison, last updated in September 2025, lists 1,000 export credits a month on Basic, for example. Apollo's current plan cards show one credit allowance per seat, and its API docs warn that API credit use can differ on legacy plans. For unified credit plans, the API docs describe one shared balance that already accounts for mobile reveals, exports, dialer minutes and enrichment.

The Apollo pages we read do not say what exporting an already revealed contact costs. Test with 25 rows and watch your balance.

Record selection limits are a separate cap on how many records you can select at once: 25 on Free, 1,000 on Basic, 2,500 on Professional and 10,000 on Organization, per Apollo's plan comparison.

Does Apollo refund credits for bounced emails?

Yes, for emails, with limits. Apollo's help center says that if you send to an Apollo-verified email within 30 days of requesting it and it bounces, Apollo refunds the credits in the next billing cycle.

Three limits follow:

• The email must have been sent from inside Apollo.
• The 30 days run from when you request the email, not when you send.
• Mobile numbers are never refunded.

The article does not say how Apollo defines a bounce, or whether a refunded credit can itself expire. The credit usage table has a Show refunds toggle, so you can see what came back.

The refund is small. At about 2 cents an email it returns pennies, and it does nothing for your sending domain's reputation after a bounce. Verify addresses before you send, whoever found them. See how to find and verify a work email and our guide to cold email deliverability.

A worked example with a fictional team

Take a three-person agency on Professional, billed annually. Each rep reveals 300 new emails and 60 phone numbers a month.

At the 10-cent figure an email costs about 10 cents and a phone number about 81 cents. That is an upper bound, since it charges the whole seat to credits and the seat also pays for sequences, mailboxes and the dialer. It shows that the list price per credit is the floor, not the typical cost.

Now the refund. If 4% of the team's 10,800 yearly emails bounced (a hypothetical rate) and all were sent from inside Apollo, 432 credits would come back, worth about $8.50 at list price.

Where the sources disagree

• Add-on credit price: 1.5 to 2.5 cents (Carly) against 20 cents (Salesforge, UpLead). Not verified.
• Basic on monthly billing: $65 on Apollo's pricing page today. Salesforge's review and the older UpLead page list $59.
• Trial credits: Apollo's pricing FAQ says the 14-day trial includes 75 credits, while its What Are Credits help article (updated May 8, 2026) says 100.
• Rollover: Apollo's September 3, 2026 blog post says credits typically do not carry forward and tells readers to confirm. The pricing page, help center and terms say flatly that they do not.
• Waterfall misses: Apollo's waterfall article says you are not charged when a source finds nothing, while the API docs say some vendors consume credits per lookup even when no data is found.
• Unlimited emails: the pricing FAQ mentions unlimited email addresses for your contacts on entry-level plans, while the credits table charges 1 credit to reveal an email. Apollo does not reconcile the two on that page, so ask support what applies to your plan.

How to estimate your credit needs before you buy

1. Multiply net-new contacts per month by 1 for email only, or by 9 for email plus phone. Then add AI research, enrichment and mailboxes.
2. Compare the total with the pool: seats times credits per seat.
3. Run 50 to 100 real records first, as Apollo's own September 3, 2026 post suggests, and read the credit usage table.
4. Set per-user credit caps so one rep cannot drain the pool. Apollo's pricing FAQ says admins can do this.
5. Calendar the renewal date and the 30-day notice date.

How FoxKnock handles credits

We make FoxKnock, so we are not neutral, and the two products are shaped differently. Apollo is a contact database with sequences and a dialer. FoxKnock researches companies and drafts outreach that, by default, you approve before it goes out from your own mailboxes. FoxKnock does not use Apollo's API.

Where its credit pricing differs:

• Seats are bundled into the plan instead of billed per seat. Starter is $49 a month for 5,000 credits and 2 seats, Growth is $149 for 20,000 and 5 seats, and Agency is $399 for 60,000 with unlimited seats.
• Credits roll over every month.
• A lookup that finds nothing is free, and the cost of a paid action is shown before you click.
• If an email FoxKnock found hard-bounces, its find credits (10 at default credit prices, which may change) are refunded automatically, once. The 1-credit verification is not refunded.

Where Apollo is cheaper: at default credit prices a found and verified work email is 11 credits, or $0.11 at list ($0.01 per credit). If your team uses most of Apollo's pool, Apollo's price per email of about 2 cents is lower. If it uses a small share, as in the example above, the gap narrows.

FoxKnock's Free plan includes 500 one-time credits and needs no card, granted once you verify your email. At default credit prices that covers about 45 found and verified work emails, enough to run a test list and compare the result with what Apollo returns for the same companies. Try FoxKnock with the free credits, or read FoxKnock vs Apollo and FoxKnock pricing.