Apollo vs Prospeo
Both start at $49 and they are closer than either rate card suggests: Apollo gives 2,500 credits a month and Prospeo 2,000, at $0.0196 and $0.0245 a credit. Apollo is the better arithmetic at almost every volume once you scale by seats. Prospeo is the better answer when you want the one job done without a platform attached, and it has a free tier you can measure your own match rate on.
Where they actually differ
Every value comes from the same record that drives the Enrichment APIs listing, so this table cannot disagree with the cards. Accented tags are data one provider returns and the other does not.
| Compare | Apollo API | Prospeo |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Search, enrich and sequence from one credit balance | The lowest paid floor for verified work email |
| Entry price | $49/seat/mo | $49/mo |
| Unit cost | $0.02 per credit | $0.025 per credit |
| Billing model | Per seat Credit packs Free tier | Subscription Credit packs |
| Free tier | Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month | Free plan, 100 credits a month, and no API access on it |
| GTM motion covered | Source Enrich Engage Sync | Source Enrich |
| Data returned | Work emailMobile phoneFirmographicsTechnographicsJob postingsIntent and newsLinkedIn profileCRM records | Work emailMobile phoneLinkedIn profile |
| MCP server | Yes https://mcp.apollo.io/mcp | Yes https://prospeo.io/api-docs/mcp |
| Interfaces | REST API MCP server Webhooks Bulk or async Native in Clay n8n node | REST API MCP server Bulk or async Native in Clay n8n node |
| Auth | API key in the x-api-key header | API key in the X-KEY header |
| Rate limits | 200 req/min, 2,000/day on Basic. Enrichment gets 1,000/min with no daily cap. | Per plan: Enrich 5/300/2,000 on Starter up to 30/1,800/500,000 on Pro. No API on Free. |
| Coverage | Global | Strongest in EMEA |
| Compliance | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA | GDPR DPA |
| Best for | Best all-in-one GTM API | Cheapest entry for email |
The same workload, priced both ways
Computed from each provider's published entry-plan rate. The monthly floor is shown separately, because at low volume the floor is the bill.
| Workload | Apollo API | Prospeo | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 verified work emails | $196.00 $0.02 per email |
$245.00 $0.025 per email |
Apollo API by 25% |
| 2,000 mobile numbers | $352.80 $0.176 per mobile |
$490.00 $0.245 per mobile |
Apollo API by 39% |
| Monthly floor at entry | $49/seat/mo | $49/mo | Identical |
| Charged on a miss | No | No | Neither |
Rates read from each vendor's own pricing page between 8 and 19 October 2026. Bulk figures assume the entry-plan rate holds at that volume, which in practice means moving up a plan tier.
Pick each one when
Neither vendor publishes a match rate you could hold them to, so the rate card only tells you half the story. Take 500 rows from the segment you actually sell into, run them through one free tier and one trial, verify both result sets, and divide spend by survivors. Half a day and about $20, and on a close pair it changes the answer often enough to be worth it.
What each one costs, tier by tier
Both publish a full rate card, so this comparison runs on numbers rather than on adjectives. Apollo API lists 4 tiers and Prospeo lists 4. Every figure is read off the vendor's own pricing page, and the pages they came from are listed at the foot of this one.
| The short version | Apollo API | Prospeo |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan | Basic, $49 | Starter, $49 |
| Tiers published | 4 | 4 |
| Free tier | Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month | Free plan, 100 credits a month, and no API access on it |
| Unit cost at entry | $0.0196 per credit | $0.0245 per credit |
The cheapest paid plan is rarely the plan you end up on, because what moves you up a tier is usually volume rather than a feature. The two rate cards below are what you are choosing between.
Apollo API
Apollo API publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $49 to $119.
Free
- Full API access, not a trial of it
- Granted monthly, so 75 credits a month in practice
- 2 sequences and basic filters
Basic
- US$588 a seat a year, credits granted upfront and pooled across the team
- 2,500 credits a month, at $0.0196 each
- Annual billing saves 24% against paying monthly
Professional
- 4,000 credits a month, at $0.0198 each
- AI lead scoring and multi-touch outreach
Organization
- 72,000 credits a seat a year, so 6,000 a month
- $0.0198 a credit, so the rate is flat across every paid tier
- The three-seat minimum makes US$357 a month the real floor
Prospeo
Prospeo publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $49 to $249.
Free
- No API access, Enrich or Search
- 28 search filters, 3 intent topics
- Max 25 rows per selection
- App only, which is the thing to notice
Starter
- $441 a year, which is $37 a month
- 24,000 credits delivered upfront on annual
- 32 filters, 6 intent topics, 20,000 row selection
- $0.0245 a credit
Growth
- $888 a year, which is $74 a month
- 60,000 credits upfront on annual
- 38 filters, 9 intent topics
- $0.0198 a credit
Pro
- $2,241 a year, which is $187 a month
- 180,000 credits upfront on annual
- All 41 filters, 12 intent topics
- $0.0166 a credit, and the highest rate limits
What Apollo and Prospeo cost at your volume
Put your own volume in. The model picks the cheapest published plan that covers it on each side, which is the question a rate card cannot answer and the one that decides the bill.
Plans are read from each vendor's own pricing page and the model picks the cheapest one that covers you, so these are list prices before any discount you negotiate and before annual billing, which most of these vendors discount.
What a year costs at three volumes
The same plan-fit arithmetic as the model above, run out to a year, because an annual number is what a budget actually asks for. Every column moves with volume, because all of these meter usage rather than seats.
| A year at | Apollo API | Prospeo |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $588 Basic | $588 Starter |
| 10,000 a month | $2,352 Basic | $2,988 Pro |
| 50,000 a month | $11,760 Basic | Quoted |
2 of the 2 providers here publish enough to be put in this table. These are list prices on the published plan that covers each volume, so they are the number before you negotiate and before annual billing, which most of these vendors discount by between a fifth and a half.
How this plays out once it is running
Both start at $49 and that is where the similarity ends. Apollo's 30,000 credits are granted per seat per year, so the monthly figure is 2,500 and reaching more means buying seats. Prospeo's 2,000 are monthly per user. The decision is whether you will use the platform Apollo attaches, not whether you will use the credits.
The trap is buying Apollo for a pipeline nobody logs into. At 2,000 lookups a month you are spending $49 on about $39 of data plus a seat that sits empty, which is close to what Prospeo charges for the data alone. Past 2,500 a month Apollo pulls ahead and keeps pulling, because its per-credit rate is a fifth lower and seats scale linearly.
What each one is genuinely good at
Not a feature list. These are the things that make somebody keep paying after the novelty has worn off, which is a different question from what the marketing page leads with.
Apollo API
A fifth cheaper per credit, with 25% more of them at the same price
$0.0196 against $0.0245, and $49 buys 2,500 credits a month here against Prospeo's 2,000. Both entry plans are $49, so this is more volume at a lower rate for the same money.
The platform comes with it
Search, enrichment, sequencing and CRM write-back on one balance, with the sequence and task endpoints free to call, plus an MCP server. Prospeo does one job. Whether that is an advantage depends entirely on whether you were going to use the rest.
The free plan includes the API
Nine hundred credits a seat a year with full access. Prospeo's free tier is 100 credits a month and explicitly excludes API access, Enrich and Search, so the free measurement there runs in the app rather than in code.
Prospeo
Strong European data, which is where Apollo is thinnest
Prospeo is in this directory because it covers EMEA well. Apollo sells its own database with no fallback behind it, so a European list is the segment where a fifth off the credit price buys you nothing because the row does not come back.
A free tier to measure on, every month
A hundred credits a month, which is more than enough to compare match rates on a real list before committing. It does not include the API, and for a match-rate test that is not the thing you are measuring.
No platform to pay for
Prospeo is $49 a month per user for 2,000 credits and nothing else. If the pipeline is headless and the only requirement is lookup, you are not funding a sequencer, a CRM or a signals product you will not open.
Where each one falls down
Every provider on this site has a case it handles badly, and the people who find out are the ones who bought it for that case. These are the ones worth knowing before you sign rather than after.
Apollo API
Thin on European lists
A single-source database with nothing behind it, and EMEA is where that shows first. Run 500 of your own European rows through the free plan and compare before moving anything, because the rate card will not tell you this.
Credits are granted per seat per year
Thirty thousand on Basic is 2,500 a month, and scaling means seats rather than tiers. The seat is also mandatory, so a pipeline nobody logs into still pays for a login.
Prospeo
Credits expire at renewal on monthly billing
Unused credits do not carry forward, which is the complaint its own alternatives page opens with. Annual billing delivers the year upfront at roughly a 25% discount, which is the way round that problem and a bigger commitment.
The free tier has no API access
A hundred credits a month in the app only. You can measure match rate and you cannot prototype the integration, so a developer evaluating Prospeo has nothing to build against until they pay.
A fifth more expensive per credit, and per user
$0.0245 against $0.0196, and the paid plans are priced per user, so the seat objection applies here too rather than being Apollo's alone.
Using Apollo and Prospeo together
A two-way comparison assumes the answer is one of them. On this pairing it often is not, and the arrangement below is what teams actually end up running.
The split that works is geographic, and it is the reason both are in this directory. Apollo for North America, Prospeo for Europe, routed on the territory field you already hold in the CRM.
Running that as a waterfall rather than a split is also reasonable: Apollo first because it is cheaper, Prospeo on what comes back empty. Since neither charges on a miss, the ordering costs nothing to get wrong, which is unusual and makes the arrangement cheap to test.
What does not work is buying both for one market. The coverage overlap in North America is high enough that the second provider finds very little, and at these volumes the two floors cost more than the rows they add.
Apollo or Prospeo, for you
Four questions, answered from the same records as the rest of this page. Nothing is sent anywhere and there is no result to email yourself.
Each answer leans one way. The recommendation appears here once you have picked at least two.
A tool like this can only weigh what is on the page. It does not know your segment, and the one test that does is the bake-off further down: real rows, cheapest entry on each side, spend divided by survivors.
Where an answer leans on a certification or an integration, it means that vendor publishes it on the pages this directory read, which is not the same as the other one lacking it. The sources are listed at the foot of the page.
Where the data comes from, and what you may do with it
The question that arrives late and expensively is not how good the data is, it is who is allowed to hold it. These are the fields each one returns, the coverage it claims and the compliance it publishes.
| Provider | Fields returned | Coverage | Compliance | Redistribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apollo API | Work email, Mobile phone, Firmographics, Technographics, Job postings, Intent and news, LinkedIn profile, CRM records | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA | Not stated |
| Prospeo | Work email, Mobile phone, LinkedIn profile | Strongest in EMEA | GDPR DPA | Not stated |
None of these states a redistribution position on its pricing or docs pages. Internally that never matters. Put the rows in something your customers can see and it becomes the question your legal team asks first.
Two practical notes that apply to every provider on this page. A compliance badge describes the vendor, not your use of it, so a GDPR DPA does not give you a lawful basis for the outreach you send. And every one of these vendors runs its own opt-out, which means a person who asks you to delete their record has to be removed from your copy as well as from theirs.
Moving between Apollo and Prospeo
Most readers of this page are already on one of these two. A swap is four hours of code and a month of watching, and the order below is the one that catches the expensive mistakes while they are still free.
Measure the thing you are about to lose
Run 500 rows you already have through Apollo API and record the match rate, the fields that came back populated and the cost. Without that number a migration cannot be judged, because every provider looks cheaper per unit than the one you are paying for today.
Check the fields, not the field count
Prospeo does not return Firmographics, Technographics, Job postings, Intent and news and CRM records, which Apollo API does. If anything downstream reads firmographics, that is a change to your pipeline and not just to your vendor.
Rewrite the auth and the limits, in that order
Apollo API authenticates with API key in the x-api-key header. Prospeo uses API key in the X-KEY header.
The limits are the part that bites later. Apollo API rate: 200 req/min, 2,000/day on Basic. Enrichment gets 1,000/min with no daily cap.
Prospeo rate: Per plan: Enrich 5/300/2,000 on Starter up to 30/1,800/500,000 on Pro. No API on Free. A loop tuned to the first will either crawl or get throttled on the second.
Run both for one billing cycle
Keep the old key live and route a slice of real traffic to the new one. A month is the shortest honest test, because credit expiry, rollover and the overage rate only show up at renewal and those are where the surprises live.
Cancel on the renewal date, not before
Credits on most of these plans do not survive a downgrade. Check what happens to the balance you have already paid for, and time the switch so you are not buying the same records twice.
The step people skip is the first one, and it is the only one that cannot be done after the fact. Once the old key is off you have nothing to compare the new match rate against, so a provider that is quietly worse on your segment looks like a provider that is fine.
What practitioners say about Apollo
The one part of this page that is not a vendor claim. Quotes are transcribed as written, linked to the thread, and nothing here is the only source for a figure in the tables above. Where a comment makes its point in crude words, we summarize it in our own words instead of quoting it.
The rate limit, not the credit price, is what people actually hit
In our words: A practitioner building on the API says the rate limits are what their team hit, that they got past them by routing requests across three Apollo accounts, and that Apollo charges per request even when a lookup returns nothing.
r/gtmengineering · May 2026 · summarized rather than quoted
Two halves worth separating. The limit is real and it is on this page: 200 requests a minute and 2,000 a day on Basic, with enrichment on a separate 1,000 a minute and no daily cap, which is why a bulk job and a per-row loop feel like different products.
The charge-on-no-output half needs care, because Apollo publishes 0 credits when nothing is found and that matches what we read. What a miss does spend is a request against the rate limit, and when the limit is the binding constraint that is the cost you feel. Pooling accounts to get round a published limit is a terms question before it is an engineering one.
The answer to the limit is the bulk endpoint, and it gets missed
Are you using bulk enrichment? You should be able to compress 10 enrichments per call, and based on the documentation I'm reading, the limit should be 600 calls, so that's 6000 total contacts per hour. If you have more, you can write some code to stagger them with 60 minute delays per 6000.
r/gtmengineering · May 2026 · 1 point
This is the right instinct and it is the same one the batch endpoints exist for: ten records in one call is one request against the limit rather than ten. The arithmetic here is this person's reading of Apollo's documentation rather than ours, so check the current bulk limit on Apollo's own reference before sizing a job around 6,000 an hour. The shape of the advice holds whatever the number is.
11 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page.
Where each one sits in a working pipeline
Neither of these is bought in isolation. These are the worked stacks on this site that use one or both, with the cost run end to end.
Waterfall email enrichment
$0.0364Four providers chained cheapest-first, each taking only what the last one missed, then verification routed per source.
Hiring signal to outbound
$0.13A company hiring three SDRs has already decided to spend. Turn that job posting into a sequenced contact inside a day.
Inbound speed to lead
<60sForm submission to enriched, verified, routed and sequenced in under a minute, with no human in the path.
The wider field for both
A two-way comparison assumes the answer is one of these two. Often it is not, and the reason you are comparing them at all points somewhere else entirely: Apollo alternatives and Prospeo alternatives both start from the reason people leave.
Apollo API alternatives
6Apollo's credit is level with the specialists once you read the period on it. What sends teams looking is the seat it is attached to, the license, or a European list.
See the alternatives →Prospeo alternatives
4The cheapest paid floor in the directory, and credits that vanish at renewal.
See the alternatives →Everything in Source
13The full category these two sit in, filtered by data returned, billing model and entry price.
Browse the category →Related comparisons
The 26 providers behind every pairing here are in the main listing.
Pairings that share a side with this one: Apollo vs People Data Labs, Hunter vs Prospeo and Apollo vs ZoomInfo.
And: LeadMagic vs Prospeo and Apollo vs RocketReach. Every comparison in the directory is on the compare hub.
Apollo API vs Clay
One key for the whole motion against a router sitting in front of 150 vendors.
Compare them →Apollo API vs People Data Labs
A go-to-market license at two cents a credit against a license written for redistribution.
Compare them →Apollo API vs LeadMagic
A seat license with 30,000 credits against a published per-operation rate card.
Compare them →Comparison pages end at the rate card. Your list does not.
We run the bake-off on your actual data, pick the provider order, and build the pipeline behind it: waterfall routing, credit ceilings and the write-back that puts a verified contact in front of a rep the same day.
Worked with 300+ companies. A senior operator runs your account.
Apollo and Prospeo, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is Apollo or Prospeo cheaper?
They start at the same price, $49/seat/mo each. Per unit it is $0.02 per credit against $0.025 per credit, which is the figure that decides it at volume.
Can I try Apollo and Prospeo for free?
Apollo: Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month. Prospeo: Free plan, 100 credits a month, and no API access on it.
What are the rate limits on Apollo and Prospeo?
Apollo: 200 req/min, 2,000/day on Basic. Enrichment gets 1,000/min with no daily cap. Prospeo: Per plan: Enrich 5/300/2,000 on Starter up to 30/1,800/500,000 on Pro. No API on Free.
Do Apollo and Prospeo both have MCP servers?
Both do. Apollo: https://mcp.apollo.io/mcp. Prospeo: https://prospeo.io/api-docs/mcp.
Which is better, Apollo or Prospeo?
Both start at $49 and they are closer than either rate card suggests: Apollo gives 2,500 credits a month and Prospeo 2,000, at $0.0196 and $0.0245 a credit. Apollo is the better arithmetic at almost every volume once you scale by seats.
What are the downsides of Apollo and Prospeo?
Measured against each other rather than in general. Apollo: none of the structural gaps in this answer; the limits section carries its operational ones. Prospeo: there is no free tier, so you cannot measure your own match rate before paying.
Can you use Apollo and Prospeo together?
The split that works is geographic, and it is the reason both are in this directory. Apollo for North America, Prospeo for Europe, routed on the territory field you already hold in the CRM.
Can I migrate from Apollo to Prospeo without losing data?
Not without losing a field. Prospeo does not return firmographics, technographics, job postings, intent and news and CRM records, which Apollo does, so anything downstream that reads it has to change. Either way, measure your match rate on 500 rows before you switch, because that number is the one you cannot recover afterwards.