Lusha API review
Best published credit costs for contact data
POST https://api.lusha.com/v3/contacts/search api_key: $LUSHA_API_KEY Content-Type: application/json # email 1 credit, phone 5, company profile 1 # x-minute-requests-left tells you the rate headroom # what that number should be is not published
Lusha is the inverse of most vendors in this directory, and the inversion is the reason to read this page. Almost everyone publishes a rate limit and hides the price. Lusha publishes the price of every single operation, down to the credit, and does not publish the rate limit at all. You can work out to the cent what revealing ten thousand phone numbers will cost before you sign anything, and you cannot find out how quickly you are allowed to ask for them without talking to an account manager.
The credit table is genuinely complete. A verified email is 1 credit. A phone number is 5. A company profile through the API is 1. A signal or premium data point is 1, an intent topic is 1, an AI recommendation is 1, a de-anonymised IP is 2, and a recorded call with conversation intelligence is 8. Nothing is rounded and nothing is a range, which makes Lusha one of the few providers here you can model on a spreadsheet rather than a phone call.
The second thing the arithmetic shows is that volume does not buy you cheaper data. Work out the cost per credit on each tier and it barely moves: 9.4 cents on Starter, 8.7 on Pro, 8.8 on Premium. Premium is 5.7 times the price of Pro for 5.7 times the credits, so what the bigger plan actually buys is seats, API Advanced, team management and credit allocation. If you are upgrading to get a better unit rate, there is not one.
The rest of the category is in the Enrichment APIs listing.
What every operation costs, in credits
This is the whole metering model, published by Lusha rather than inferred here. The dollar column is the Pro tier rate of $0.0874 a credit, derived from $52.45 a month billed yearly for 7,200 credits a year.
| Operation | Unit | Credits | At the Pro rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Verified email | 1 contact email address | 1 | $0.087 |
| Phone number | 1 contact phone number | 5 | $0.437 |
| Company data | 1 company profile via API | 1 | $0.087 |
| Signals and premium data | 1 data point, company or contact | 1 | $0.087 |
| Buyer intent | 1 intent topic per company or contact | 1 | $0.087 |
| AI recommendations | 1 lead or account | 1 | $0.087 |
| De-anonymised IP address | 1 successful identification | 2 | $0.175 |
| Conversation intelligence | 1 recorded call, including insights | 8 | $0.699 |
The ratio that matters is five to one. A phone number costs five times an email, so a mobile-first motion is a fundamentally different bill from an email-first one on the same plan, and it is the single biggest lever on your Lusha spend. At the Pro rate a mobile is about 44 cents, which puts Lusha at the expensive end of this directory for phone data; LeadMagic charges 5 credits against 10 for the same thing and publishes what a credit costs, and Prospeo sells EU mobiles from a cheaper floor.
On monthly plans unused credits roll over and accumulate up to twice your plan's credit limit. On annual plans you get every credit up front and anything unused is reset at the end of the annual cycle, with no rollover. Pro and Premium are the tiers that carry the x2 monthly cap; Free and Starter carry no rollover at all. So the cheaper annual billing is also the one that punishes uneven usage, and a team that front-loads a big list build in month one and then goes quiet will hand credits back at renewal.
Lusha API pricing, plan by plan
Lusha API pricing is a credit subscription with five tiers, four of them published. The prices below are the monthly figures Lusha advertises for annual billing, with credits granted up front.
Free
- 40 credits a month, 1 seat
- No credit card required
- API access, but strictly rate limited
Starter
- 4,800 credits a year, granted up front
- 1 seat. Works out at $0.094 a credit
- API still strictly rate limited
Pro
- 7,200 credits a year, at $0.087 each
- 2 free seats, full API, webhooks, CSV enrichment
- Credits roll over to twice the monthly cap
Premium
- 40,800 credits a year, at $0.088 each
- 5 free seats, API Advanced, team management
- Credit allocation across the team
Scale
- Custom annual credit volume
- SSO and a dedicated customer success team
- No rollover: the cap does not apply
Pro is where the API stops being throttled and where rollover starts, which makes it the real entry point for anything programmatic. The jump from Pro to Premium is $247.50 a month for 33,600 more credits a year and three more seats, and as the intro notes it is very slightly worse per credit, so treat it as a seats-and-features decision rather than a volume discount.
Across Starter, Pro and Premium the cost per credit moves from 9.4 cents to 8.7 to 8.8. Premium is actually 0.9% more expensive per credit than Pro despite being 5.7 times the size. Most credit vendors in this directory price a volume curve, so if you are being sold a larger Lusha plan on the grounds of a better rate, do the division: the published numbers say the rate is the same and you are buying seats and administration.
Three windows, and Lusha publishes none of the numbers
Lusha API rate limits are applied per plan across three windows, per minute, per hour and per day, and they vary by account. Lusha documents the headers thoroughly and then says that to find your plan's actual limits you should check the help center or contact your account manager.
| Header | What it reports |
|---|---|
| x-rate-limit-minute | Total requests allowed per minute |
| x-minute-requests-left | Requests remaining in the current minute window |
| x-minute-usage | Requests made in the current minute window |
| x-rate-limit-hourly | Total requests allowed per hour |
| x-hourly-requests-left | Requests remaining in the hourly quota |
| x-rate-limit-daily | Total requests allowed per day |
| x-daily-requests-left | Requests remaining in the daily quota |
What this means in practice
Discover your limits at runtime.
- The first call tells you your ceiling, because x-rate-limit-minute carries it.
- Build the client to read the headers rather than to a constant, since the number is per plan and can change with the account.
- Three windows means passing the per-minute check is not enough; an hourly or daily ceiling can still stop a backfill.
- The Credit Usage API has its own limits, different from the standard endpoints.
The Free and Starter caveat
API, but strictly limited.
- Lusha's plan comparison marks the API on Free and Starter as carrying strict rate limits.
- From Pro upward that annotation disappears.
- The free plan is still a real way to test the shape of a response, with 40 credits a month and no card.
- It is not a way to measure throughput, because the throughput is the thing being restricted.
It is worth being explicit about what this costs you as a buyer. You can model the Lusha bill exactly and you cannot model the Lusha schedule at all. For a nightly enrichment of a few thousand rows that does not matter.
For a backfill of a million records, or a real-time lookup on a form submission, the unpublished number is the one that decides whether the design works, and you have to ask for it before you build. Make that call early rather than discovering a daily ceiling in week three.
How to create a Lusha API key
Lusha uses a plain API key rather than OAuth, which makes it one of the faster providers here to get a first call out of, and puts the burden of handling it safely on you.
Getting and sending the key
One header, server side only.
- Generate and manage the Lusha API key in the dashboard, under manage API keys.
- Pass it in the api_key request header on every call.
- The key is tied to your account and your plan, so it carries your rate limits and your credit balance with it.
- Lusha is explicit that it belongs in server-side environments only and must never ship in browser or mobile code.
What that implies
No scopes, no expiry.
- There is no OAuth flow and no short-lived token, so a leaked key works until somebody rotates it.
- There are no per-key scopes documented, so a key that can read can do everything your plan allows.
- Rotate on a schedule rather than on an incident, and keep it in a secrets manager.
- For a multi-team account, credit allocation on Premium is the control that limits what one team can spend.
Where the Lusha API documentation lives
The Lusha API documentation is at docs.lusha.com, built on Mintlify, which means the .md trick works on any page if you want the Markdown. The reference is organized by endpoint and the commercial detail sits in the account section rather than with the endpoints.
| Surface | Where | What it answers |
|---|---|---|
| API overview | docs.lusha.com/apis | Auth, the first call, and the shape of a search. |
| Contacts search | api.lusha.com/v3/contacts/search | The main endpoint: several contacts by different identifiers in one request. |
| Account usage | docs.lusha.com/api-reference/account/usage | Credits, rate limits and pricing, read programmatically. |
| MCP docs | docs.lusha.com/mcp/overview | The Lusha MCP server for assistants. |
| Dashboard | dashboard.lusha.com/api/manage-api-keys | Where the Lusha API key is generated. |
| Help center | info.lusha.com | Where Lusha sends you for the rate limit numbers. |
The Account Usage endpoint is the one worth wiring up early, because it reports credits, rate limits and pricing for your own account and is therefore the only authoritative answer to the question this page cannot give you. Lusha also publishes an MCP server, and its MCP documentation says any plan can connect, with calls drawing on the account's credit pool.
Lusha also ships an MCP server, and it is on the MCP page with the others in this directory.
Lusha's own walkthrough of the API
Lusha publishes this on its own channel, so it is Lusha's account of Lusha, 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.
YouTube · Lusha MCP& API- Lesson 3: Hands-On with Claude & Lusha - Your First Smart Prompts 2:07 · Published July 2025The third lesson of Lusha's own MCP and API series, and it is hands on: prompts in Claude against the Lusha MCP for contact lookups and company research. That is closer to how most teams will reach this data than a REST walkthrough, and lesson one on the same channel covers the difference between the two.
Published 16 July 2025 on Lusha, the channel Lusha'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 a Lusha page.
Strengths and limits
Lusha is the most financially legible provider in this directory and the least operationally legible.
What it does well
- Every operation has a published credit cost, with no ranges and no rounding.
- A genuine free plan: 40 credits a month, one seat, no card.
- A real API on every tier, including Free, albeit throttled below Pro.
- Credits are granted up front on annual plans rather than drip fed.
- Rate limit headroom is reported on every response across three windows.
- An MCP server on any plan, and webhooks from Pro.
- The Account Usage endpoint exposes credits, limits and pricing programmatically.
Where it falls short
- Rate limits are not published anywhere; you must ask an account manager.
- No volume discount: Premium is marginally more expensive per credit than Pro.
- A phone number costs 5 credits, about 44 cents, which is expensive for mobile here.
- Annual billing has no rollover at all, so unused credits are lost at renewal.
- Free and Starter carry no rollover and a strictly limited API.
- A plain API key with no documented scopes and no expiry.
- Conversation intelligence at 8 credits a call makes a recording-heavy workflow costly.
Where Lusha 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lusha | Work email, Mobile phone, Firmographics, Technographics, Intent and news, Job changes | Global | GDPR DPA CCPA | 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.
If Lusha is not the answer
Four providers in the Enrichment APIs listing that solve the same problem differently. Each one is a trade, and the trade is named.
Apollo
$49/seat/moA $49 seat for 2,500 credits a month and a free plan at 900 credits a year, covering search, enrichment and sequencing. Roughly four and a half times cheaper per credit than Lusha once past the seat.
LeadMagic
$99/moA published cost for every operation like Lusha, but mobile at half the credit cost and credits deducted only on success.
Prospeo
$49/moThe cheapest paid floor here, strong on European data, with 100 free credits a month so you can measure your own match rate first.
FullEnrich
$55/mo25 sources behind one call, charged per result rather than per attempt. The move when coverage rather than price was the real problem.
The full set, organized by the reason people leave, is on the Lusha alternatives page.
Lusha against the obvious rival
Same rate cards, read side by side, with the arithmetic done on a worked volume rather than left to you: Apollo vs Lusha, Cognism vs Lusha and Lusha vs RocketReach.
The same again, against the rest of the field: Lusha vs UpLead and Lusha vs ZoomInfo. Every pairing in the directory is on the compare hub.
Apollo vs Lusha
CompareA seat with credits bundled against a published price for every single operation.
Cognism vs Lusha
CompareNeither publishes the number you need, but they withhold opposite halves.
Lusha vs RocketReach
CompareFive credits for a phone number against one export for the whole contact.
Before you build against it
Five things to settle first, each one read off Lusha'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
Buy Lusha when you need to know the number before you commit. It is the provider here you can put in a spreadsheet: every operation has a price, the price does not change with volume, and the free plan lets you confirm the data shape before any of it matters. For a finance team that has been burned by a credit model where the effective cost depends on a match rate nobody publishes, that legibility is worth real money.
Pro at $52.45 a month is the honest entry point rather than Starter, because it is where the API stops being throttled, where webhooks appear and where rollover starts. Do not upgrade to Premium expecting a better rate; the arithmetic says it is 0.9% worse per credit, and what you are actually buying is five seats, team management and credit allocation.
Think hard before a phone-heavy motion. At 5 credits a number, mobiles are the single largest line in any Lusha bill, and LeadMagic charges half that in credits with a published credit price, while Prospeo sells EU mobiles from a cheaper floor. And whatever you build, ask for the rate limits in writing before you design around them. Lusha will tell you exactly what a million records will cost and not how long they will take, and on a backfill the second number is the one that decides the project.
A published rate card is only half of a predictable bill.
The other half is a motion that does not reveal phone numbers for people it was never going to call. Frontal builds the qualification in front of the enrichment, inside your own stack, so the credits go on contacts worth having.
Worked with 300+ companies. A senior operator runs your account.
Nothing worth quoting yet
The harvest this site runs searches Reddit for Lusha threads where the API itself is the subject, and it has not come back with a quote that survives the transcription rules yet. When one does, it lands here. Nothing on this page leans on an unquoted paraphrase.
Lusha API, answered
Is the Lusha API free?
Free plan, 40 credits a month, 1 seat, no card. API is rate limited strictly. Paid use starts at $37.45/mo annual.
How much does the Lusha API cost?
Lusha starts at $37.45/mo annual, which works out at $0.087 per credit. Billing is credit packs, subscription, per seat and free tier. Read from Lusha's own pricing page on 8 October 2026.
What are the Lusha API rate limits?
Per plan, across minute, hour and day windows. Numbers are not published.
How do I get a Lusha API key?
API key in the api_key header, generated in the Lusha dashboard. The current steps are in Lusha's own documentation, which is authoritative on anything that has changed since 8 October 2026.
Does Lusha have an MCP server?
Yes, at https://mcp.lusha.com. It is listed with the others on the MCP page.