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Hunter.io has a free plan with 50 credits a month and three paid plans: Starter at $49, Growth at $149 and Scale at $299 a month, or $34, $104 and $209 billed yearly. Searches, finds and verifications all spend one shared credit pool, and a verification costs half a credit.
Hunter.io is one of the most focused tools in the space: give it a domain, get likely email addresses and the company's address pattern. Its pricing is equally focused, and equally easy to misread. Every plan is one monthly pool of credits that searches, finds and verifications all draw from, and the moment your prospecting volume grows, the credit math takes over.
This guide covers every Hunter plan in 2026, how the shared credits meter your usage, what a real prospecting workflow costs, and where Hunter stops being the right tool for the job.
Hunter.io pricing at a glance
The short version before we dig in. Here is what Hunter.io pricing looks like on the published tiers:
Confirm the current numbers on the official Hunter.io pricing page, and read unfiltered user sentiment about value on Hunter.io's G2 reviews. Published prices change; the pricing model rarely does.
The Hunter.io plans, decoded
Each tier targets a different buyer. Here is what actually changes as you move up:
Free
50 credits a month and one connected mailbox. Genuinely useful for spot checks, nowhere near enough for outbound.
Starter ($49/mo)
2,000 credits and 3 mailboxes for campaigns. The tier most solo users pick, and the first place credit anxiety appears.
Growth ($149/mo)
10,000 credits and 10 mailboxes. Serious volume, at a price where dedicated databases start looking cheaper per contact.
Scale ($299/mo)
25,000 credits and 20 mailboxes for teams that run list building as a production line. Enterprise adds custom volume above that.
What actually drives the Hunter.io bill: shared credits
Hunter meters everything through one monthly credit pool: a domain search, an email find and a verification all spend from it, with verifications at half a credit. A real workflow burns the pool from both ends: you find the address, then verify before sending, so a 1,000-contact list costs about 1,500 credits.
The deeper limitation is the search model itself. Hunter answers 'what emails exist at this company?', not 'give me 2,000 marketing directors at US SaaS companies'. If you do not already have a target account list, Hunter cannot build one for you, and the credits only meter what it can do.
The real cost of Hunter.io in practice
Sticker prices are the floor, not the ceiling. Here is the realistic annual math for common setups:
Monthly billing shown; yearly billing takes 30% off. Per found and verified contact, Growth works out to about $0.02 when every search hits (1.5 credits from a 10,000 pool). Flat allowances get cheaper per contact as volume grows; credit pools do not.
Hidden costs to budget for
Beyond the plan itself, these are the costs that surprise new Hunter.io buyers:
- Every step spends credits. Finding and verifying draw from the same pool, so each clean contact costs about one and a half credits, not one.
- No persona search. Hunter needs a domain list as input. Building that list (the actual hard part of prospecting) requires another tool or database.
- Sending is basic. Hunter Campaigns exists, but serious senders add dedicated sending and warm-up infrastructure, which is another line item.
Is Hunter.io worth the price?
If your workflow starts from known target accounts (ABM, partnerships, PR, link building), Hunter is excellent: best-in-class domain search, a reliable verifier and a clean API. The free tier is genuinely usable for spot checks.
If your workflow starts from a persona ('find me 2,000 CTOs'), Hunter is the wrong shape regardless of price: it cannot search by persona, and at Growth prices you are paying database money without getting a database.
A flat-rate alternative: Getlead
If the recurring math above made you wince, Getlead flips the model. Instead of credits it is a flat subscription from $19.90 a month that bundles the full outbound stack: a 177M+ verified B2B database, a lead scraper (50,000 scraped leads a month on Pro), built-in SMTP verification, cold email sending (300,000 a month on Pro) with AI warm-up and a CRM. No credits, no seats, no add-on invoices.
Hunter.io still wins for some buyers, and the honest breakdown of where is in our Getlead vs Hunter.io comparison. But if your job is finding verified contacts and emailing them, a full stack of Hunter.io plus a data source plus a verifier costs several times what Getlead does on one plan.
Hunter.io pricing FAQ
How much does Hunter.io cost?
Free (50 credits a month), then Starter $49, Growth $149 and Scale $299 a month billed monthly, or $34, $104 and $209 billed yearly. Enterprise is custom.
Is Hunter free?
Yes, the free plan includes 50 credits a month and one connected mailbox, enough for occasional domain searches and spot checks.
Are Hunter verifications included?
Verifications spend from the same credit pool as searches, at half a credit each. There is no separate verification allowance anymore.
How much does the Hunter API cost?
Standard API requests use your plan's credits. High-volume buyers can use Hunter's separate Data Platform, which is sold by volume rather than by plan.
Can I search Hunter by job title or industry?
No. Hunter searches by domain or person name. It finds addresses at companies you already know, it does not build persona-based lists.
What is a cheaper Hunter alternative for list building?
For persona-based prospecting, a database tool like Getlead (177M+ contacts, from $19.90 a month, verification included) does the list building Hunter cannot, without per-credit costs.