Apollo.io Free Plan Limits 2026: What You Actually Get

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Short answer: Apollo.io's free plan is real, permanent and genuinely usable, but it is a 900 credit a year account, which works out to 75 credits a month per seat. A verified email costs 1 credit and a phone number costs 8, so 75 credits a month is roughly eight fully contactable prospects a month, or 75 email only reveals. That is enough to test the database and run one small campaign. It is not enough to run outbound. This guide lists every limit we could verify on Apollo's own pages on September 5, 2026, including three that are not printed on the plan card at all.

We use Apollo daily inside client lead generation systems, so these are the limits we hit in practice, not a rewrite of a comparison table. Every number below comes from apollo.io/pricing, Apollo's About Credits page, Apollo's help centre, or Apollo's developer docs. Where we did the arithmetic ourselves, we say so.

What Apollo's free plan actually includes

Read straight off the plan card on September 5, 2026, the free tier gives you:

• 900 credits per seat per year, granted monthly
• 2 sequences per team and 2 automated workflows per team
• 1 mailbox per user, Gmail only, capped at 250 emails a day
• A record selection limit of 25
• AI Assistant with a 5 chat limit, and 5,000 AI writing words a month
• CRM enrichment capped at 100 records a month, and 1 project
• Website visitors, capped at identifying 20 companies a month
• Real time form enrichment with a 5 limit, 1 intent topic, 1 meeting event, 150 minutes of call recording

Nothing there is crippled or time limited. Apollo's pricing FAQ describes the tier you land on after a trial as "our Starter plan which is free forever", and the search, filtering and Chrome extension all work. The constraints are about volume.

The credit math: 900 a year is 75 a month

Apollo's pricing page prices data in credits and states the two rates plainly: an email costs 1 credit, a phone number costs 8 credits. A contact where you want both is therefore 9 credits.

Our arithmetic on Apollo's numbers: 900 credits a year divided by 12 is 75 credits a month. At 9 credits per fully contactable person, that is eight people a month, or 100 people a year. If you never touch a phone number, it is 900 verified emails a year.

For comparison, the paid tiers on annual billing are $49 per seat per month for 30,000 credits a year, $79 for 48,000, and $119 for 72,000 with a three seat minimum. Dividing price by credits, all three land at roughly two cents a credit. The step from free to the cheapest paid tier is a 33x jump in credits and a 40x jump in the record selection limit.

If you want the fuller tier by tier breakdown, we keep one in our Apollo.io pricing guide, and the return on investment question is answered in is Apollo.io worth it. You can start on Apollo's free plan here and check your own credit burn before you decide anything.

The 25 record selection limit is the real cap

The limit almost nobody reads about is the record selection limit, and on the free plan it is 25. Basic gets 1,000, Professional 2,500, Organization 10,000. It governs how many new records you can select from the database in one go, which means every list you build on the free plan is assembled 25 rows at a time.

This matters more than the credit count for anyone doing list building, because it is a time cost rather than a data cost.

Apollo's own example does not divide

Apollo explains the limit in its pricing FAQ like this: with a record selection limit, to save 10,000 leads "you would need to click a button to select 25 leads and add them, 2,000 times."

Check the arithmetic. Ten thousand divided by twenty five is 400, not 2,000. Apollo's own worked example is off by a factor of five against its own stated limit. The underlying point is fair, and 400 clicks is still 400 clicks, but the number printed on the vendor's pricing page does not reconcile with the limit in the vendor's own comparison table.

Free teams drop to one seat after 100 days

This one is not on the plan card. Apollo's help centre article on managing your plan states: "Free plans are limited to 1 seat after 100 days of active use."

So a free account can carry teammates at first and then quietly becomes a single seat account roughly three months in. The same article adds that if you downgrade from a paid plan to a free plan, you are limited to 1 seat and lose all other seats 10 days after downgrading. If you are trialling Apollo with a team, that 100 day clock is the real deadline, not the credit balance.

Sending limits: 2 sequences, 250 emails a day

Free gives you 2 sequences per team, one mailbox per user and 250 email sends a day. Apollo's pricing FAQ adds a restriction the card does not: on non paying plans you can only connect Gmail accounts. Microsoft and other providers need a paid plan.

Here is the part worth pausing on, and it argues against the cheap upgrade. Basic, at $49 per seat per month billed annually, has the same 250 email daily cap and the same one mailbox per user as the free plan. Unlimited daily sends and multiple Google, Microsoft and SMTP mailboxes only arrive at Professional. If your reason for upgrading is send volume, Basic does not solve it, and a dedicated sending stack may be cheaper than jumping two tiers. That is the kind of decision we work through when we build cold email systems for clients.

Credits expire, and free accounts cannot top up

Apollo's About Credits page is explicit: "Your credits expire at the end of each billing cycle. Credits do not roll over into the following billing cycle or upon renewal." A month where you do not prospect is a month of credits gone.

Free accounts also cannot buy their way out. Apollo's help centre states that customising your credit allowance is paid plans only. On paid plans, add on credits are a recurring charge, they are not prorated, and buying them mid cycle charges the full amount for credits that still expire at the end of that same cycle. Reducing them only takes effect at the start of the next cycle.

Where Apollo's pages disagree with each other

We diff vendor marketing pages against their own documentation. Apollo produced three mismatches worth knowing before you build on the free tier.

• API access. The free plan card lists "API Access" as an included feature. The FAQ further down the same page says "We also offer API Access on our Custom plans for more advanced integrations." Same page, two readings.
• Cost per contact. The About Credits page says "Apollo never charges more than 1 credit per contact." That line sits under the Email heading, and in context it is about email. Read as a general promise, which is how most people will read it, it does not survive the phone number rate of 8 credits printed on the pricing page.
• Waterfall enrichment. Apollo's developer docs, updated August 21, 2026, put people enrichment at 1 to 9 credits per person, then note that email waterfall "typically uses 1 to 4 credits, but some vendor configurations or successful higher cost matches may result in 20+ credits", and phone waterfall "typically uses 8 to 25 credits, but some configurations may result in 45+ credits." The same page adds that some vendors consume credits per lookup even when no data is found, which is the opposite of the "only charged for emails Apollo can verify" line on the marketing page.

Waterfall is a paid feature, so it does not bite free users directly. It matters because it empties a credit balance fastest after you upgrade, and no plan card shows a 45.

The licence clause agencies need to read

The single most consequential sentence on Apollo's pricing page is in the FAQ, not on any card: "The plans shown on this page are permitted for internal business use only. Use of these plans to power external products, share data with customers, or resell Apollo data is not allowed under our standard terms."

If you are an agency pulling lists in Apollo and handing them to clients, that is worth reading twice. Apollo directs those use cases to a separate agreement through its reseller path. This is not a free plan quirk, it applies to the self serve tiers generally, and it is why we structure client lead generation engagements around who holds the data licence.

When to upgrade, and which tier to pick

Three triggers, in the order they usually arrive:

• You are list building at scale. The 25 record selection limit bites before the credits do. Basic at 1,000 fixes it.
• Your team is about to hit day 100. Seats, not credits, are what forces the decision for teams.
• You need to send more than 250 a day, or from a non Gmail mailbox. Skip Basic, this one needs Professional.

Apollo offers a 14 day trial of Basic or Professional from a free account, and its FAQ says trial plans include 50 credits and 5 mobile credits. Run your exact target filter and count the verified records before you pay. If it holds up, you can upgrade your Apollo plan here.

Verdict: who the free plan really works for

The free plan is a good fit for a founder validating a market, a solo seller working a short list, or anyone who wants to test Apollo's data coverage in their own niche before spending. Eight fully contactable prospects a month is a real budget for that.

It is the wrong tool for a team, for anyone building lists in the thousands, for anyone who needs a Microsoft mailbox, and for an agency delivering data to clients under the standard licence. In those cases the honest answer is either the right paid tier or a different stack, and the fastest way to find out is a fortnight on the free tier watching your own credit meter. When you are ready, open a free Apollo account and see for yourself.

If you would rather not run the meter yourself, we build and operate outbound systems on top of Apollo for clients, including list building, mailbox infrastructure and sequencing. See our lead generation service, or read the best Apollo alternatives if you want to compare before you commit.