Hunter.io Pricing 2026: Plans, Cost Per Credit and API Limits

Hunter.io costs $49 a month for Starter, $149 for Growth and $299 for Scale, with a free plan at $0 and a custom priced Enterprise tier. Paying yearly drops those to an effective $34, $104 and $209 a month. The plans are separated by credits, connected mailboxes and recipients per sequence rather than by feature category, so the right plan is the one whose limits fit your workflow, not the one with the features you recognise.

Hunter also publishes the yearly totals rather than only the monthly equivalent, which is worth checking against: $408 for Starter, $1,248 for Growth and $2,508 for Scale. Those divide to exactly $34, $104 and $209 a month, so unlike some vendors there is no rounding trick hiding in the annual figure.

A credit is Hunter's single unit of usage, shared across Email Finder, Email Verifier and Domain Search, and a verification costs 0.5 credit while a search costs 1. That half credit rate is stated in a tooltip on Hunter's own plan comparison and it appears on every tier including Free. It is the detail that most pricing write ups get wrong, and getting it right roughly halves the modelled cost of any list cleaning work.

Two API behaviours reduce this further and are documented in Hunter's API reference. The Email Finder charges nothing when it fails to find an address, so a low match rate on a hard segment costs you less than the request count suggests. And in Discover, the search itself is free with addresses hidden; you spend credits only on the rows you choose to reveal, at 1 credit per personal email and 1 credit per domain for generic addresses, with all generic addresses on that domain released together for that single credit.

Monthly, a Hunter credit costs $0.0245 on Starter, $0.0149 on Growth and $0.0120 on Scale, so Scale is about 51 percent cheaper per credit than Starter. This is worth calling out because it runs opposite to how most email vendors price. Amazon SES, SendGrid and Brevo all have tiers where the higher plan costs more per email at its own entry volume; higher plans there buy features, not a better unit rate. Hunter does the ordinary thing and rewards volume.

Because a verification is half a credit, the verification rate is half of each figure above: $0.01225 per verification on Starter, $0.00745 on Growth and $0.00598 on Scale, before the annual discount. Those are the numbers to carry into any comparison with a dedicated verification vendor, and they are considerably better than the per credit line alone implies.

Hunter's annual pricing saves about 30 percent, which is unusually large: three times what Brevo discounts and half again the 20 percent that is standard across this category. On Scale it is $1,080 a year. The trade is the usual one, twelve months of commitment on a tool whose value depends on match rate against your specific market, so the sensible order is to run the free plan or a month of Starter against your real target accounts first, then commit.

The saving is a consistent 30.1 to 30.6 percent across all three tiers, so there is no tier where annual is disproportionately better or worse. If you have already decided on Hunter, take the annual price on whichever tier you land on.

Hunter connects 1 mailbox on Free, 3 on Starter, 10 on Growth and 20 on Scale, with additional email accounts sold from $10 a month each. For cold outreach this is usually the binding constraint rather than credits, because sensible per mailbox daily volume forces you to spread sending across inboxes long before you exhaust a credit allowance. Hunter also sells managed custom domains with accounts starting at $6.00 a month if you would rather not buy and configure them yourself.

Do the add-on arithmetic before you choose. Ten mailboxes on Starter means the 3 included plus 7 extras at $10 or more, so at least $119 a month for only 2,000 credits, against $149 for Growth with 10 mailboxes and 10,000 credits. The add-on price is published as a floor rather than a flat rate, so treat $10 as the best case. Past roughly six mailboxes, moving up a tier is usually cheaper than stacking add-ons.

Hunter's API does not carry a separate subscription: it draws on the same credit pool as the web app, and the rate limits are set per endpoint rather than per plan. That makes the API cheap to adopt but means a scripted job and your team's manual searches compete for one allowance. The limits below come from Hunter's own API documentation, read on 5 September 2026.

Two things are worth planning around. The Email Verifier is the slowest of the core endpoints at 10 per second and 300 per minute, so a large one off list clean takes longer than the credit maths suggests: 30,000 verifications is at least 100 minutes of wall clock at the cap. And Discover is far more tightly limited at 5 per second and 50 per minute, which makes it unsuitable for brute force enumeration by design. Exceed a limit and you get a 403 rather than a queued request.

The cold outreach features split at two points: most sequencing tools turn on at Starter, and the custom tracking domain waits until Growth. Below is the gating that actually affects outbound work, taken from Hunter's plan comparison table. Opens tracking, CSV export, browser extensions, CRM integrations, MCP access and evergreen sequences are available on every plan including Free, which is more generous than it sounds.

The custom tracking domain gate is the one to weigh carefully. Tracking links pointing at a shared vendor domain are a known deliverability liability, so on Starter you are effectively choosing between having click data and keeping a clean sending footprint. If you are sending genuine cold email rather than warm follow up, that decision is worth $100 a month.

Yes. Hunter markets its outreach platform with the phrase find, verify, and send cold emails, so unlike several email vendors it does not prohibit the use case. That is a meaningful difference and it deserves saying plainly, because a lot of cheaper sending infrastructure quietly rules cold outreach out. Brevo's acceptable use policy prohibits purchased lists, Postmark is transactional only, and Amazon SES will review an account once complaint rates pass 0.1 percent.

Permission from the vendor is not the same as deliverability, though. Hunter sends your sequences through mailboxes you connect, which means the reputation at stake is your own domain's, not Hunter's. That is the correct architecture for cold outreach and it is the same model ColdMailer uses. It also means the usual groundwork still applies: separate sending domains, warmed mailboxes, sensible daily volumes and a custom tracking domain. If you want the infrastructure side priced out, our guide to cold email infrastructure covers domains, mailboxes and warm up as line items.

At the entry tier Snov.io is cheapest at $39, Hunter is $49 and Apollo is $49 per seat with a three seat minimum, which makes Apollo $147 in practice. The seat rule is the detail that flips this comparison, and it is easy to miss when scanning three pricing pages that all show similar numbers. Hunter and Snov.io both include unlimited team seats on every plan.

Snov.io's meter is the more complicated of the three because it runs two of them: credits for prospect search and verification, and separately recipients, where you are charged one recipient the first time you contact a lead and all follow ups within that billing period are free. Its ladder runs $39, $99, $189, $369 and $738, with 25 percent off annually, and LinkedIn automation is not included at all, sold as slots at $69 a month each. We priced the two head to head in Hunter.io vs Snov.io pricing, and Apollo's credit and seat maths is broken down on our Apollo pricing page.

Four causes account for nearly all the disagreement, and three of them are checkable in a few seconds. We hit all four while researching this page, which is why every figure here is dated and sourced to Hunter's own pages rather than to another article.

The first and most common is the verification rate. Hunter charges 0.5 credit per verification, stated in a tooltip that plain text scrapers drop, so articles that only read the rendered plan cards print one credit per verification and double the cost of any list cleaning estimate. The second is currency. Requesting hunter.io/pricing from a European address returns euro prices with the same numerals, so 149 EUR gets reprinted as $149; the figures happen to match here, but the method is wrong and will not match on vendors that price differently by region.

The third is the annual figure. Hunter shows both a discounted monthly equivalent and a yearly total, so $34 and $408 sit near each other and get mixed up. The fourth is that plan prices get quoted without the limit they buy, which is meaningless when the mailbox cap and the recipients per sequence cap decide the plan more often than credits do. One last note on method: Hunter's pricing page carries a customer count claim. We have deliberately not reprinted it, because we do not republish vendor social proof as though we had verified it.

Hunter is priced as a data product, so if you already have your list you are paying mostly for capacity you will not use. The credit pool is the bulk of what separates the tiers, and a team that imports contacts from a data provider, a CRM export or an existing customer list burns almost none of it. In that situation the mailbox cap is the only limit that binds, and it is the most expensive way to buy mailboxes on this page.

The arithmetic makes it concrete. Ten sending mailboxes on Hunter means Growth at $149 a month, or Starter at $49 plus seven add-ons at $10 or more, which is at least $119. ColdMailer Pro is $49 a month with unlimited sending mailboxes and no per inbox fee, because we do not sell contact data and are not pricing a database into the plan. The honest split: if you need to find and verify addresses, Hunter is a good tool at a fair price and you should buy it. If you need to send a list you already have, from mailboxes you already own, you are overpaying. Our cold email software pricing comparison lays out the full field, and Hunter.io alternatives covers the swap in detail.

Hunter is worth it if finding and verifying addresses is a real, recurring job for you, and it is poor value if it is not. That sounds obvious but it is the whole decision, because Hunter's tiers are sized by credits and credits only convert to value if you are actually prospecting from scratch each month.

The genuine strengths are easy to state. Unlimited seats on every plan is rare and materially cheaper than Apollo's three seat floor. The 0.5 credit verification rate makes list cleaning cheap relative to dedicated verifiers. Free Discover searching with pay per reveal means you can survey what exists before spending anything. No credit is charged when the Email Finder fails. And the roughly 30 percent annual discount is well above category norm.

The weaknesses are equally concrete. The custom tracking domain sitting at $149 is hard to justify for a $49 buyer doing real cold outreach. Mailboxes are capped and then metered from $10, which punishes exactly the multi inbox setup that modern cold email requires. The shared credit pool means finding and verifying compete for one budget. And the per sequence recipient caps constrain campaign design independently of how many credits you hold. Price the mailboxes and the tracking domain first; those two lines move the total more than the credit tier usually does.