Smartlead costs $39 a month on Base, $94 on Pro, $174 on Unlimited Smart and $379 on Unlimited Prime, with annual billing knocking 17 percent off every tier. Every plan includes unlimited email accounts, which is the single biggest reason teams pick it, and every plan comes with a free trial that does not ask for a card. All four figures were re-read off smartlead.ai/pricing for this update, along with the add-on sheet and the mailbox infrastructure prices that most write-ups leave out.
That is the sticker. The number that actually decides your bill is what each plan lets you send, because the four tiers are not priced on features, they are priced on volume. Base buys 6,000 emails a month. Prime buys 500,000. Work out your cost per thousand emails and the plan ordering stops looking obvious, which is what the rest of this covers.
How much does Smartlead cost?
Smartlead publishes four plans. Here is the full table as it renders, with the monthly rate, the annual rate, and the three allowances that separate the tiers.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual (17% off) | Contacts | Emails sent/mo | Verified prospect emails/mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base | $39 | $32 | 2,000 | 6,000 | 2,000 |
| Pro | $94 | $78 | 30,000 | 90,000 | 30,000 |
| Unlimited Smart | $174 | $144 | Unlimited | 150,000 | 50,000 |
| Unlimited Prime | $379 | $315 | Unlimited | 500,000 | 170,000 |
The annual rates round slightly. Applied exactly, the 17 percent discount gives $32.50, $78.30, $144.50 and $314.60, and Smartlead's own page metadata carries the $32.50 and $78.30 figures. Either way the saving is real and it is the same percentage on every tier, so there is no billing-term arbitrage between plans.
Unlimited email accounts on every plan
This is the genuinely unusual part of Smartlead's pricing and it is worth stating plainly, in their own words from their pricing FAQ: "All Smartlead plans include unlimited email accounts at no extra cost." Most tools in this category either cap connected mailboxes or charge per sender, and mailbox count is the hard constraint on cold email volume, so removing it from the price sheet changes the math for anyone sending seriously.
It matters because of how cold sending actually works. A safe rate is roughly 30 emails per mailbox per day, and across 22 business days that is about 660 emails per mailbox per month. Sending 90,000 emails a month, the Pro allowance, needs roughly 136 mailboxes. On a tool that charges per sender, 136 mailboxes is the entire bill. On Smartlead it is $94.
What does Smartlead cost per email?
Divide each plan's price by its send allowance and the ordering gets interesting. Unlimited Smart, the plan Smartlead flags as most popular, is more expensive per email than Pro.
| Plan | Emails/mo | Monthly cost per 1,000 emails | Annual cost per 1,000 emails |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base | 6,000 | $6.50 | $5.33 |
| Pro | 90,000 | $1.04 | $0.87 |
| Unlimited Smart | 150,000 | $1.16 | $0.96 |
| Unlimited Prime | 500,000 | $0.76 | $0.63 |
Pro at $1.04 per thousand beats Smart at $1.16. Nobody upgrades from Pro to Smart for cheaper sending, because it is not cheaper sending. You upgrade for unlimited contact storage instead of 30,000, for 20,000 more verified prospect emails, and for SmartDelivery included rather than charged. Those are good reasons. Cost per email is not one of them.
The other thing this table shows is how badly Base scales. At $6.50 per thousand it is six times the unit cost of Pro. Base is priced as a starter plan and behaves like one: fine for testing a motion at 6,000 emails a month, expensive the moment you get serious.
What are the Smartlead add-ons and what do they cost?
The add-ons are where a $94 plan quietly becomes a $200 plan. Smartlead publishes rates for all of them, so this is checkable rather than guesswork.
| Add-on | What it does | Price |
|---|---|---|
| SmartDelivery | Inbox placement testing across seed accounts | $59/mo on Base and Pro. Free on Smart and Prime |
| SmartDelivery standalone | Growth, 120 sequence tests, up to 50 senders per test | $49/mo |
| SmartDelivery standalone | Pro, unlimited tests, up to 200 senders per test | $174/mo |
| Whitelabel | Agency branding, one client workspace | $29/mo per workspace, from Pro up. Prime includes 3 |
| SmartServers | Dedicated server and IP for sending | $39 per server per month |
| Email verification | Validates addresses before sending | From $33.00 for 6,000 credits, one-time or monthly |
| SmartSenders (Google or Outlook, fresh) | Buy and connect mailboxes, via Zapmail | $13 per domain per year, $4.50 per mailbox per month |
| SmartSenders (Google or Outlook, pre-warmed) | Mailboxes with existing sending history | $18 per domain per year, $9.00 per mailbox per month |
| SmartSenders (SMTP, via Mailreef) | SMTP mailboxes rather than Google or Microsoft | $19 per domain per year, $3.99 per mailbox per month |
| SmartDialer | Voice calling credits | Credit packs from $9 to $699 per month |
Add-ons are the part that creeps, because each one lands on the company card as its own line and nobody notices the total until someone goes through the software subscriptions at quarter end. Two of these are worth deciding on deliberately rather than drifting into.
The SmartDelivery decision is really a plan decision
SmartDelivery costs $59 a month as an add-on on Base and Pro, and nothing on Smart and Prime. So Pro with placement testing is $94 plus $59, which is $153 a month. Unlimited Smart is $174 and includes it.
That $21 gap buys unlimited contact storage instead of 30,000, 150,000 sends instead of 90,000, and 50,000 verified prospect emails instead of 30,000. If you have decided you need inbox placement testing, and any team sending at Pro volume should have decided that, then Pro plus the add-on is close to the worst configuration available. Either skip SmartDelivery on Pro or go to Smart.
Mailboxes bought through SmartSenders are not free
Unlimited email accounts means Smartlead does not charge you to connect a mailbox. It does not mean mailboxes are free. If you buy them through SmartSenders you pay $4.50 per mailbox per month for fresh Google or Outlook inboxes, or $9.00 for pre-warmed ones.
Run that against real volume. Sending 90,000 emails a month needs roughly 136 mailboxes at a safe rate, and 136 fresh mailboxes at $4.50 is $612 a month, against a $94 software bill. The software was never the expensive part. Buying the same capacity directly, Google Workspace Business Starter runs $7.00 per user per month on an annual commitment and a .com renews around $11.08 a year, so the tradeoff is convenience against unit price. The full arithmetic at various volumes is worked out in the breakdown of what it costs to send 10,000 cold emails a month.
Does Smartlead have a free plan?
No. Smartlead offers a free trial on all four plans with no credit card required, but there is no free forever tier. Once the trial ends, Base at $39 a month is the cheapest way to keep sending.
That is standard for the category now. lemlist, Instantly and ListKit all sell trials rather than free plans. ColdMailer skips the trial and gives every new account 25 free emails instead. Apollo is the notable exception, still running a genuinely free seat, though it caps you at 2 sequences.
Is Smartlead cheaper than lemlist?
At one user, no: Smartlead Base is $39 a month against lemlist Email at $55 a month on yearly billing. At three or more users, Smartlead is dramatically cheaper, because lemlist bills per user on its Multichannel tier at $87 each and Smartlead bills per plan tier regardless of headcount.
Three seats on lemlist Multichannel is $261 a month on yearly billing before a single credit is spent on contact data. Smartlead Pro is $78 a month annual for the whole account, with unlimited mailboxes and 90,000 sends. The two are not really competing on the same axis, since lemlist bundles a 650M contact database and multichannel outreach while Smartlead sells sending capacity, but if your motion is email at volume the per-seat model gets punishing fast. The full breakdown sits on our lemlist pricing page.
Does Smartlead require a long-term commitment?
No. Smartlead publishes monthly and annual plans with no lock-in contract and cancellation at any time. Annual billing is a discount rather than a commitment device in the usual sense, though you are paying up front for the 17 percent saving.
What is the difference between a lead credit and an email credit?
A lead credit is a unique prospect email address stored in your account, counted against the plan's contact limit. An email credit is each individual message sent. They are separate counters, which is why Base lists 2,000 contacts and 6,000 email sends: the design assumes roughly three touches per prospect across a sequence.
That three-to-one ratio holds across the tiers. Pro is 30,000 contacts to 90,000 sends, Smart is 50,000 verified prospect emails to 150,000 sends. If your sequences run longer than three steps, sends will be your binding constraint rather than contacts, and you will hit the ceiling earlier than the contact number suggests.
Which Smartlead plan should you buy?
| Situation | Plan | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| Testing outbound, under 6,000 emails a month | Base | $39 |
| One sales team at real volume, no placement testing | Pro | $94 |
| Real volume and you want SmartDelivery | Unlimited Smart | $174 |
| Agency with client workspaces | Smart or Prime plus $29 per client | $174 plus |
| Above 150,000 emails a month | Unlimited Prime | $379 |
The general shape: Base is a trial that costs money, Pro is the value plan on a pure cost-per-email basis, Smart is the plan you buy when deliverability tooling stops being optional, and Prime is for agencies and anyone above 150,000 sends a month. Prime is also the only tier that includes SmartServers and three client workspaces, which is what makes it an agency plan rather than just a bigger one.
What is the real annual price of each Smartlead plan?
Smartlead advertises "nearly 17% OFF" on annual billing and the figure holds, but it is not flat. The discount creeps from 16.67 percent on Base to 16.99 percent on Prime, so the top tier saves fractionally more than the entry tier. Here are the exact annual rates rather than the rounded ones most roundups print.
| Plan | Annual rate per month | Discount vs monthly |
|---|---|---|
| Base | $32.50 | 16.67% |
| Pro | $78.30 | 16.70% |
| Unlimited Smart | $144.50 | 16.95% |
| Unlimited Prime | $314.60 | 16.99% |
The discount percentages are our arithmetic from the two published rates. Annual billing on Smartlead is a genuine saving with no allowance change attached, which is not true of every vendor in this category.
Why does Unlimited Smart cost more per email than Pro?
Because it does. Pro is $94 for 90,000 sends, which is $1.04 per thousand. Unlimited Smart is $174 for 150,000 sends, which is $1.16 per thousand. The tier Smartlead marks "most popular" is about 11 percent more expensive per email than the one below it, and no roundup we found mentions this.
| Plan | Cost per 1,000 emails (monthly) | Cost per 1,000 (annual) |
|---|---|---|
| Base | $6.50 | $5.42 |
| Pro | $1.04 | $0.87 |
| Unlimited Smart | $1.16 | $0.96 |
| Unlimited Prime | $0.76 | $0.63 |
Those are our figures, divided from the published price and the published send allowance. To be fair to Smartlead, Smart is not a bad deal, it is just not priced on sending. What you are buying at $174 is unlimited contact storage and the verified prospect emails that cost $59 a month as an add-on on the tiers below. If you were going to buy that add-on anyway, Smart is effectively $115 for 150,000 sends, or $0.77 per thousand, and the ordering flips back. The trap is buying Smart purely for volume, because on volume alone Pro is cheaper per email and Prime is cheaper still.
Does the verified emails add-on ever make sense on Base?
No. The verified prospect emails add-on is $59 a month on both Base and Pro, and it is included free on Smart and Prime. Add it to Base and you are paying $39 plus $59, which is $98 a month. Pro is $94 a month and already includes 30,000 verified emails, 15 times the sends and 15 times the contacts.
The annual comparison is starker. Base annual is $32.50 plus the $59 add-on, which does not discount, for $91.50 a month. Pro annual is $78.30 with the verified emails already in the box. Anyone who adds this bundle to Base is paying more for substantially less, and the pricing page does not arrange the numbers in a way that makes that obvious. If you need verified prospect emails at all, the cheapest route through Smartlead's own catalogue is Pro.
What does Smartlead cost once you add mailboxes?
Smartlead includes unlimited mailbox connections on every plan, but it does not give you the mailboxes. You buy those separately through the partner providers listed on its pricing page, and that line is what separates the sticker from the invoice.
| Mailbox type | Domain cost | Per mailbox per month |
|---|---|---|
| Google or Outlook, fresh (Zapmail) | $13 per year | $4.50 |
| Outlook, fresh (InfraInbox) | $16 per year | $5.00 |
| SMTP, fresh (Mailreef) | $19 per year | $3.99 |
| SMTP (AeroSend) | $13 per year | $4.20 |
| Google or Outlook, pre-warmed (Zapmail) | $18 per year | $9.00 |
Run the arithmetic on a realistic setup. Twenty-five fresh Google mailboxes at $4.50 is $112.50 a month, plus five domains at $13 a year, which is about $5.42 a month. That is roughly $118 a month of infrastructure sitting on top of the plan. A Pro account billed annually at $78.30 becomes about $196 all in, which is two and a half times the number on the pricing page. Pre-warmed mailboxes double the per-mailbox line to $9, taking the same twenty-five to $225 a month.
This is not a criticism unique to Smartlead. Every platform in this category that rotates across many mailboxes has the same hidden line, and it is the single biggest gap between quoted price and real spend. It is also the reason some teams send from the mailboxes they already own instead, which is the approach behind our own SMTP email sender.
What does SmartDelivery cost?
SmartDelivery is Smartlead's inbox placement testing product and it bills separately from the sending plans. Growth is $49 a month for 120 campaign sequence tests with up to 50 sender accounts per test. Pro is $174 a month for unlimited tests with up to 200 sender accounts per test, and adds placement-optimised copy, campaign copy warmup, full API access and full whitelabel. Expert is $599 a month for unlimited tests with up to 500 sender accounts per test.
Put next to the alternatives, SmartDelivery Growth at $49 for 120 tests is about $0.41 a test by our arithmetic. GlockApps Essential is $59 a month for 360 spam test credits, or about $0.16 a test. MailReach bundles 20 spam test credits into its $19.50 per mailbox per month warmer. Which is cheapest depends entirely on how many tests you actually run, and most teams run far fewer than they buy.
What are Smartlead's other add-ons?
Three add-ons appear against the plan rows on the pricing page. Verified prospect emails are $59 a month, free on Smart and Prime. Dedicated sending infrastructure, the SmartServers line, is $39 a month per server, with three included on the top tiers. Client workspaces for whitelabelling are $29 a month each, which is the line agencies feel, because it scales with the number of clients rather than with volume. An agency running twelve client workspaces adds $348 a month to whatever the plan costs.
What does the Smartlead free trial include?
The Smartlead free trial runs 14 days, needs no credit card, and gives you 2,500 email sends and 1,250 contact storage. Every paid feature is available during the trial except white labelling, and mailbox connections are unlimited. Warmup emails do not count against the send limit, and neither do replies or bounce notifications.
What does count is every outbound campaign email, including follow-ups in a sequence and emails that bounce. That matters when you are sizing the trial, because a four-step sequence to 600 prospects is 2,400 sends before a single reply comes back. Plan the trial around one real campaign rather than several test runs.
Two numbers on Smartlead's own pricing page disagree
The compact plan table on Smartlead's pricing page lists Unlimited Prime at 510,000 email sends a month. The expanded plan card and the comparison table on the same page both list 500,000. It is a 10,000 email discrepancy on the tier that costs $379 a month.
The gap is small enough not to change which plan you buy, and we are not suggesting anything is wrong beyond a stale cell. We flag it because it is a useful reminder about this whole category: allowances get edited more often than the pages that quote them, which is why the roundups on the first page of search results are full of prices Smartlead stopped charging a year ago. Check the vendor's own page before you commit to twelve months.
If Saleshandy is the other name on your shortlist, the two are close enough on sticker price that the decision comes down to annual discount, mailbox cost and whitelabel. We put them head to head in Smartlead vs Saleshandy pricing.
What Smartlead's price does not include
Three things, and they are the same three on every tool in this category. Mailboxes, whether you buy them through SmartSenders or directly. Domains, at roughly $11 a year each, and you need one per three mailboxes to spread risk. And contact data, unless you use the included verified prospect emails, which are capped per plan.
Budget those separately and the comparison between outbound tools gets much clearer, because the software line is usually the smallest of the four. We keep a full cross-vendor breakdown on the cold email software pricing page, and if what you want is to connect mailboxes you already own without a per-inbox fee, that is exactly what ColdMailer as a Smartlead alternative is built around, starting at $49 a month, with 25 free emails for every new account.
All Smartlead figures on this page were read from smartlead.ai/pricing and its help center on 16 September 2026. Prices exclude tax and can change.
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