Instantly vs Saleshandy
Saleshandy
One credit covers the waterfall and the verification $34/Instantly vs Saleshandy both bundle data with sending, and they price it in opposite directions. For a team that wants data and sending in one bill, Saleshandy is both cheaper and simpler. The catch is the integration surface, and for anything event-driven it settles the question in Instantly's favor.
Where they actually differ
Every value comes from the same record that drives the Sending APIs listing, so this table cannot disagree with the cards. Accented tags are data one provider returns and the other does not.
| Compare | Instantly | Saleshandy |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Sending and data sold separately, or bundled | A 113-endpoint API, and no webhooks |
| Entry price | $47/mo | $34/mo annual |
| Unit cost | Not sold by the unit | $0.023 per credit |
| Billing model | Subscription Credit packs | Subscription Credit packs |
| Free tier | No free tier. Outreach and Credits are sold separately from $47 each. | No free tier published. Credits come with the plan. |
| GTM motion covered | Source Enrich Engage | Engage Enrich Verify |
| Data returned | Work emailFirmographicsJob postingsIntent and news | Work emailMobile phoneFirmographics |
| MCP server | Yes https://mcp.instantly.ai/mcp | Yes https://mcp.saleshandy.com/mcp |
| Interfaces | REST API MCP server Webhooks Bulk or async n8n node | REST API MCP server Bulk or async |
| Auth | Bearer token, from a scoped API v2 key in workspace settings | API key from Settings then API Key, shown once at creation |
| Rate limits | 100 req/s and 6,000/min, shared across v1, v2 and every key in the workspace. | Not published as a figure. GET /v1/enrich/rate-limits reports the account's own status. |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | GDPR DPA | GDPR DPA |
| Best for | Best for unlimited mailboxes and warmup | One credit covers the waterfall and the verification |
Pick each one when
Instantly
- Anything event-driven: Saleshandy has no campaign webhooks yet.
- 100 requests a second, published, against no figure at all.
- Unlimited mailboxes and warmup included on every sending plan.
Saleshandy
- One credit covering the waterfall and the verification, with failures free.
- Data and sending on one bill from $34 rather than two $47 subscriptions.
- Buying domains and mailboxes through the API rather than by hand.
A sender's rate card is not the part that bites. Confirm the API is on the plan you intend to buy, then run one real sequence of 200 contacts through each on a mailbox you have already warmed, and compare what the API tells you afterwards: which replies it classifies, what it reports on a bounce, and whether the webhook arrives at all. None of that is on a pricing page.
What each one costs, tier by tier
Both publish a full rate card, so this comparison runs on numbers rather than on adjectives. Instantly lists 4 tiers and Saleshandy lists 3. 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 | Instantly | Saleshandy |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan | Outreach only, $47 | Starter, $34 |
| Tiers published | 4 | 3 |
| Free tier | No free tier. Outreach and Credits are sold separately from $47 each. | No free tier published. Credits come with the plan. |
| Unit cost at entry | Not sold by the unit | $0.0227 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.
Instantly
Instantly publishes 4 tiers, none of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $47 to $194.
Outreach only
- Unlimited email accounts and warmup
- 5,000 emails, 1,000 uploaded contacts
- No database access
Credits only
- 1,500 credits a month
- 450M contact database and waterfall enrichment
- No sending
Starter bundle
- Both halves, at the same combined price
- 5,000 emails, 1,000 contacts, 1,500 credits
- AI Sales Agent
Scale bundle
- 100,000 emails, 25,000 uploaded contacts
- 5,000 credits a month
- AI Reply Agent and premium live support
Saleshandy
Saleshandy publishes 3 tiers, none of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $34 to $149.
Starter
- $41 a month paid monthly, $408 a year
- 6,000 emails a month, 2,000 active prospects
- 1 user, 40+ search filters
- $0.0227 a credit
Pro
- $99 a month paid monthly, $912 a year
- 100,000 emails a month, 30,000 active prospects
- 10 users, 70+ search filters
Scale
- $189 a month paid monthly, $1,788 a year
- 200,000 emails a month, unlimited active prospects
- Unlimited users
What Instantly and Saleshandy 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.
Instantly
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
Saleshandy
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is 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 | Instantly | Saleshandy |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $564 Outreach only | $408 Starter |
| 10,000 a month | $2,328 Scale bundle | Quoted |
| 50,000 a month | $2,328 Scale bundle | 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
Saleshandy charges one credit for a verified work email with an eight-provider waterfall and the verification both inside that credit, and nothing at all when the lookup fails. At $34 a month for 1,500 credits that is about 2.3 cents a verified email, and annual billing hands you the whole 18,000 upfront rather than monthly. Instantly sells its 450M contact database as a separate $47 subscription on top of the $47 sender, so you are buying two products.
Saleshandy's help center states plainly that it does not offer webhooks and has them on the roadmap, so a reply has to be polled for rather than pushed to you. Its API is otherwise the broader of the two, 113 endpoints including buying domains and provisioning mailboxes programmatically, but no published rate limit figure. Instantly publishes 100 requests a second and ships webhooks.
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.
Instantly
A published rate limit, which Saleshandy does not have
A hundred requests a second per workspace. Saleshandy publishes no figure at all, so one of these two can be designed against and the other is discovered by hitting it.
Anything event-driven has one option here
Saleshandy has no campaign webhooks. For a build where a reply or a bounce should trigger something in your own systems, that is not a feature gap, it is the whole architecture, and Instantly is the only side of this page that supports it.
Unlimited mailboxes and warmup on every sending plan
Included rather than metered. Saleshandy prices mailboxes separately, from $2.99 each a month on an annual fixed plan up to $3.99 quarterly, which is a real line item at scale.
Saleshandy
One credit covers the whole waterfall and the verification
Saleshandy queries itself, Prospeo, RocketReach, Findymail, Enrich.so and Scalelist in sequence, then verifies through ZeroBounce and BounceBan, all for one credit. Unverified results cost nothing. Nothing else in this directory bundles an eight-provider waterfall into a single credit.
Data and sending on one bill from $34
Starter is $34 a month billed annually with 1,500 credits and 6,000 emails. Instantly's equivalent is two $47 subscriptions. For a team wanting both halves, that is a materially cheaper starting point.
Mailboxes and domains bought through the API
Rather than configured by hand, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC auto-configured. For an agency spinning up sending infrastructure per client, that is the step that usually takes the longest.
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.
Instantly
Two subscriptions to get both halves
Forty-seven dollars for the sender and $47 for the data. Against Saleshandy's $34 all-in at Starter, the bundled comparison favors the other side until volume is real.
A thousand uploaded contacts on the entry tier
Against Saleshandy's 2,000 active prospects at $34. The contact ceiling is the constraint on both, and Instantly's is tighter at the entry price.
Saleshandy
No campaign webhooks
The single largest gap on this page for an API-first build. Polling is the only option, which is both slower and a cost you carry forever.
No published rate limit
Nothing to design against, so throughput is something you find out in production rather than plan for.
Mailboxes are a separate line
From $2.99 each a month on annual fixed up to $3.99 quarterly. For an operation running dozens of mailboxes that is a meaningful bill on top of the plan, where Instantly includes them.
Using Instantly and Saleshandy 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.
Both cover sending and data, so running both is duplication. The choice turns on one question: does anything in your systems need to react to an event?
If the answer is yes, Saleshandy's lack of campaign webhooks settles it regardless of price. If the answer is no, and you want data and sending on one bill, Saleshandy at $34 is the cheaper and simpler purchase, and the one-credit waterfall with free unverified results is genuinely good value.
Where both are already running, consolidate the data rather than the sending. Saleshandy's single credit covering eight providers and verification is hard to beat on price, and Instantly's Credits half is the easier of the two to drop.
Instantly or Saleshandy, for you
Two 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Instantly | Work email, Firmographics, Job postings, Intent and news | Global | GDPR DPA | Not stated |
| Saleshandy | Work email, Mobile phone, Firmographics | Global | 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 Instantly and Saleshandy
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 Instantly 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
Saleshandy does not return Job postings and Intent and news, which Instantly does. If anything downstream reads job postings, that is a change to your pipeline and not just to your vendor.
Rewrite the auth and the limits, in that order
Instantly authenticates with bearer token, from a scoped API v2 key in workspace settings. Saleshandy uses API key from Settings then API Key, shown once at creation.
The limits are the part that bites later. Instantly rate: 100 req/s and 6,000/min, shared across v1, v2 and every key in the workspace.
Saleshandy rate: Not published as a figure. GET /v1/enrich/rate-limits reports the account's own status. 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.
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: Instantly alternatives both start from the reason people leave.
Related comparisons
The 26 providers behind every pairing here are in the main listing.
Pairings that share a side with this one: Instantly vs Outreach, Smartlead vs Saleshandy and Instantly vs lemlist.
And: Instantly vs QuickMail and Instantly vs Woodpecker. Every comparison in the directory is on the compare hub.
Apollo API vs Instantly
One seat that does everything against two subscriptions that each do one thing well.
Compare them →Smartlead vs Instantly
The two senders that both give you unlimited mailboxes, gating the API in opposite ways.
Compare them →Instantly vs Reply.io
Unlimited mailboxes with no stated ceiling against unlimited mailboxes with a published ratio.
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.
Instantly and Saleshandy, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is Instantly or Saleshandy cheaper?
On the entry plan it is Saleshandy, $34/mo annual against Instantly at $47/mo. The entry price is the comparable figure, because they do not meter the same thing.
Can I try Instantly and Saleshandy for free?
Instantly: No free tier. Outreach and Credits are sold separately from $47 each. Saleshandy: No free tier published. Credits come with the plan.
What are the rate limits on Instantly and Saleshandy?
Instantly: 100 req/s and 6,000/min, shared across v1, v2 and every key in the workspace. Saleshandy: Not published as a figure. GET /v1/enrich/rate-limits reports the account's own status.
Do Instantly and Saleshandy both have MCP servers?
Both do. Instantly: https://mcp.instantly.ai/mcp. Saleshandy: https://mcp.saleshandy.com/mcp.
Which is better, Instantly or Saleshandy?
Instantly vs Saleshandy both bundle data with sending, and they price it in opposite directions. For a team that wants data and sending in one bill, Saleshandy is both cheaper and simpler. The catch is the integration surface, and for anything event-driven it settles the question in Instantly's favor.
What are the downsides of Instantly and Saleshandy?
Measured against each other rather than in general. Instantly: there is no free tier, so you cannot measure your own match rate before paying. Saleshandy: there is no free tier, so you cannot measure your own match rate before paying.
Can you use Instantly and Saleshandy together?
Both cover sending and data, so running both is duplication. The choice turns on one question: does anything in your systems need to react to an event?.
Can I migrate from Instantly to Saleshandy without losing data?
Not without losing a field. Saleshandy does not return job postings and intent and news, which Instantly 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.