Apollo API review

Our scorecard

Our own editorial read across six dimensions, scored 1 to 5. Not an aggregate of user reviews, and deliberately kept out of this page's structured data so it cannot be scraped as if it were a rating.

What a call costs, endpoint by endpoint

Apollo is one of the few providers that publishes credit consumption per endpoint rather than per plan. The Apollo REST API endpoints below are all authenticated the same way and priced independently of each other, which matters because the Apollo people search API is free and the enrichment call next to it is not. This is the table to model your workload against.

Apollo API pricing, plan by plan

Every plan is priced per seat per month, so the Apollo API cost you end up modeling has two parts: the seat you have to buy and the credits you then draw down. Credits are the same currency across the API and the interface, so a heavy API workload competes with your reps for the same balance.

Credit allowances and their types vary by plan, and some categories are capped separately from the headline number. Check your own plan's credit page before you model a large job. Prices read from apollo.io/pricing on 8 October 2026.

Three windows, enforced at once

Apollo API rate limits are the part of this product that surprises people. They are per team rather than per key, per endpoint rather than per account, and checked against minute, hour and day windows simultaneously. You have to stay inside every window that applies. Apollo API limits also sit on top of your credit balance rather than replacing it, so clearing the Apollo rate limits does not mean a call will be served.

How to create an Apollo API key

Apollo API access depends on your plan, so confirm yours carries it before anyone writes code. Once it does, a key takes about a minute: open Settings, then Integrations, then API Keys, or go straight to the Apollo API developer portal at developer.apollo.io. Name the key, describe it, pick the endpoints it may call, and copy the value before you leave the screen, because Apollo shows it in full only once.

A minimal enrichment call

Credentials read from the environment rather than pasted inline. Note that reveal_phone_number is what moves this call from 1 credit to 9.

curl -X POST "https://api.apollo.io/api/v1/people/match" \
  -H "x-api-key: $APOLLO_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
        "first_name": "{first_name}",
        "last_name": "{last_name}",
        "domain": "example.com",
        "reveal_personal_emails": false,
        "reveal_phone_number": true,
        "webhook_url": "https://your.app/apollo/hook"
      }'

# reveal_phone_number is asynchronous: Apollo posts
# the number to webhook_url when it resolves.

Phone reveals do not come back on the original response. If you are not handling the webhook, you will be charged for a number you never receive.

Where the Apollo API documentation lives

Apollo splits its developer material across six surfaces, and knowing which one answers your question saves a lot of clicking. The Apollo API documentation is the prose: what an endpoint is for, how credits work, how to get a key. The Apollo API reference is the machine-readable half, one page per endpoint with a request builder attached.

That last row is worth more than it looks. Apollo publishes its documentation in a form an agent can read without a browser, which means a coding assistant can get the current credit cost of an endpoint rather than the one it was trained on. Point your agent at docs.apollo.io/llms.txt before asking it to write Apollo code.

Apollo also ships an MCP server, and it is on the MCP page with the others in this directory.

Apollo's own walkthrough of the API

Apollo publishes this on its own channel, so it is Apollo's account of Apollo, not ours. It is here because a rate card cannot show you the thing moving, and a few minutes of the product is faster than any paragraph on this page at telling you whether the shape of it fits yours.

Two minutes, and it is the credential walkthrough rather than a product film: settings, integrations, create the key, then the API reference. It stops where the work starts, so it covers the API key section on this page and nothing about rate limits or what a miss costs.

Published 22 July 2024 on Apollo, the channel Apollo's own pages link to, and read on 13 October 2026. Nothing in it is a source for a price or a limit on this page: every figure in the tables above comes from an Apollo page.

Set it up with an agent

Everything on this page that an agent needs in order to wire Apollo up, in one file: the auth header, the first call, what each call costs in credits, the three rate windows, the license line and how to check your real cost once it is running. Hand it over instead of pasting Apollo's docs into a prompt.

---
name: apollo-api-setup
description: Set up the Apollo API: the key, a first enrichment call, the
  credit model, the three rate-limit windows and the license line....
---

# Apollo API setup

## What you are building
## Prerequisites              → 4 rows
## The API                    → auth, limits, MCP, verified calls
## Set it up                  → 6 steps
## Gotchas                    → 6
## How to verify it works     → 5 checks
## What it costs

For Codex, Cursor, or anything else that reads a file or fetches a URL, hand it https://frontal.so/gtm-apis/skills/api-apollo.md directly. It is plain markdown with YAML frontmatter, and the numbers in it are generated from the same records as this page, so the two cannot drift apart.

Strengths and limits

If Apollo is not the answer

Almost nobody leaves Apollo over price, because at $0.0196 a credit it is still marginally the cheapest unit here. They leave for one of three specific reasons, and each one points at a different replacement.

Each of those is a trade rather than an upgrade. Leaving Apollo means giving up the lowest per-credit rate here, by about one percent, job postings at 1 credit for 10,000 rows, and free write endpoints for every sequence and CRM operation.

Before you build against it

Four things to settle first, each one read off Apollo's own pages. The ticks are remembered in this browser, so you can come back to a half-finished integration.

Who should actually buy this