Hunter.io Pricing 2026: Plans, Credits, the Free Tier and the Real Cost per Verified Email

Hunter.io pricing runs from $0 to $299 a month on monthly billing. Billed yearly, the paid plans cost $34 to $209 a month. One credit finds an email, verification included; half a credit verifies an address you already hold.

The list price is the easy part. The real cost is what one deliverable address costs after catch-all results, rejected addresses and unused credits. With every credit spent, our worked example puts that at $0.0086 to $0.025 a verified email at list price. Use half your credits and it doubles.

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Hunter.io pricing: plans and credits

Hunter sells four self-serve plans plus Enterprise. Paying for the year upfront takes 30% off every paid plan. Team size never moves the price: Hunter has no per-seat pricing, and unlimited team members share one credit pool.

Monthly credits reset each month and do not roll over. On a yearly plan, every credit sits in the account from day one. A team that prospects in bursts can spend them unevenly.

Monthly billing has no minimum term: Hunter's help center says you can use the service for one month and stop.

Enterprise has no list price. Vendr's buyers report a median of $18,364 a year for Hunter, with no plan named. Their contracts ran from $2,488 to $31,608, which is what buyers paid, not a published rate.

What one Hunter credit buys

Hunter has run one credit pool across every tool since it merged search and verification credits on July 16, 2025. Pages that still quote separate searches and verifications describe the old system. The credit rules fit in one table.

Two rules set your real cost. An address that cannot be found is free. An accept-all result is not: Hunter's help center titles the answer "Why am I charged for Accept-all emails" and confirms the charge.

Email Finder also needs a person's name and company, or their LinkedIn handle. Our guide to finding a business email address covers what to do without them.

Hunter.io pricing free tier: limits and who it suits

Hunter.io is not completely free, but its Free plan costs nothing for as long as you want it. Hunter calls it a plan with no time limit, asks for no credit card, and loads 50 credits a month. That buys 50 found emails, or 100 verifications, or any mix of the two.

The plan suits a founder who sends one small sequence a month, or a developer testing the API before buying credits. The API on Free caps Domain Search at 10 results per domain, the same ceiling as the CSV export. A team that needs more than two emails a working day has outgrown it: Starter sells 40 times the credits for $49.

What does one verified email cost on Hunter.io?

Most pages that rank for Hunter's prices divide the plan price by its credits. That gives the price of a credit, not of a usable email. Three things sit between the two: catch-all and rejected results, unspent credits, and the billing rule itself. The four steps below use list prices and Spona's benchmark sample, so read the result as an illustration, not a quote.

1. Divide the plan price by its credits

A credit costs $0.0084 on Scale billed yearly and $0.0245 on Starter billed monthly. The middle column adds the catch-all and rejected share from step 2. The last one doubles it for a team that spends half its credits.

If you already hold a list and only verify it, halve every figure: the Verifier charges 0.5 credit. Our guide to email list cleaning covers that route.

2. Add the catch-all and rejected share

Hunter does not publish its pass or catch-all rates. The share below comes from Spona's benchmark sample instead. It covers marketing contacts at German IT services companies, searched, checked and emailed over the past three months.

It is a German sample used as an illustration. Your own Hunter results, on US or UK lists, will split differently.

Spona checked one candidate address per profile it found. Pass, catch-all and rejected are shares of the addresses checked, and no address sits in two of them. The hard-bounce rate counts bounces per attempted send to the passed addresses.

If your Hunter results split the same way, 2.4% of the emails you pay for are catch-all or rejected. Each usable email then costs up to 2.5% more than a credit. That is the gap between the first two price columns in step 1.

A catch-all domain accepts every address and tells a verifier nothing. Our catch-all email guide explains why some of those addresses bounce later. On the passed addresses, hard bounces stayed at 0.61% in the sample.

Verifiers also disagree with each other. Hunter tested 15 of them on 3,000 addresses and ranked its own first, with Unknown results counted as misses. Hunter adds that its own data may have given it an edge.

3. Count the credits you will not use

At the sample's split, unused credits move the price per email more than catch-all results do. A Growth team that spends half its credits pays double per verified email: $0.031 instead of $0.015. Yearly plans soften this. All 120,000 Growth credits sit in the account from day one and renew after 12 months.

Running out mid-month costs more than the plan rate. Hunter sells credit packs on Starter, Growth and Scale only, to the account owner. They expire 3 months after purchase, carry no refund, and Hunter spends your plan credits before touching them.

Those are the prices in Hunter's newer help article. An older article lists other packs from $10, and the pricing page shows none. Checkout shows the final price before you confirm. The lowest pack rate is $0.02 a credit, against $0.012 on Scale's monthly plan.

4. Spona's per-result prices: where they fit

Spona also bills by result, with a stricter rule. Its Data Enrichment prices your own lists per field returned, on every paid plan. A lookup that returns nothing costs zero, as on Hunter. A work email costs 13 credits only when a verified address comes back; a catch-all or rejected result costs nothing.

Credits are not dollars. On the paid plans, which carry Data Enrichment, a credit costs $0.008 to $0.0095. So a verified work email costs $0.104 to $0.12, our arithmetic. Email plus mobile comes to 101 credits.

Unused Spona credits, add-ons included, expire at the start of each billing period. The half-use problem from step 3 applies here too.

Where Hunter wins: price. With every credit used, Hunter is 4 to 14 times cheaper per verified email than Spona's field price. At equal credit use it stays cheaper on every plan.

Hunter also bundles the outreach: Sequences with 1 to 20 connected mailboxes, and an API with a free key on every plan. Spona's API key is coming soon.

Where Spona fits: when you cannot predict how many results will verify. Hunter came up on 87 of Spona's recorded sales calls. On one, a head of growth at a US company with 10 to 49 staff wanted verification spend to stay predictable across campaigns. Charge-on-return does that: a list heavy in catch-all domains costs only the addresses that verify.

Two more differences matter to buyers who call, or who prospect from scratch. Spona prices mobiles, at 88 credits each, which Hunter's plans do not sell.

Spona's Standard Search also finds the people for you. It searches an ideal customer profile and verifies each lead at 3 to 7 credits a lead. Each new search session also carries a one-time cost of 1,000 credits. That is $8 to $10, by plan.

Hunter.io API pricing and add-ons

The API uses the same credits as the web app. A found or revealed email costs one credit, a verification 0.5 and an enriched email or domain 0.2 through the Enrichment API. Every plan, Free included, gets a free API key, and the MCP server draws on the same pool.

Rate limits run at 15 requests a second and 500 a minute for Domain Search and Email Finder. Discover allows 5 a second and 50 a minute, and its calls are free, as is Domain Count. On the Free plan, Domain Search returns at most 10 results per domain.

Data Platform: credits for API users

Teams that want the data without the outreach tools buy Data Platform credits. Hunter aims them at users who only need email finding and verification.

On Data Platform a verification costs a full credit, not half. An enriched email or domain costs a full Search credit. There are no Sequences, Signals or credit packs. The pricing page carries a calculator whose summary does not match these rates; confirm the figure with Hunter before you buy.

Add-ons sit outside the credit pool. Extra email accounts start at $10 a month each. Custom sending domains and accounts start at $6.00 a month per account. Inbox Protection also starts at $6.00 a month per account.

Hunter.io monthly or yearly: when the 30% discount pays off

Yearly billing wins if you stay nine months or longer. Eight months of Starter cost $392 on monthly billing, under the $408 yearly price; the ninth month tips it. Growth and Scale tip in month nine as well.

The catch is commitment. Hunter offers no refunds on early cancellation, though it may make exceptions for unauthorized charges. You can cancel at any time and keep access to the end of the cycle you paid for. Upgrading a yearly plan mid-term keeps your credits: unused ones from the old plan roll into a 12-month extra pack.

Monthly subscribers get one more lever. The account owner can pause renewal for one, two or three months. While paused, the account drops to the Free plan's 50 credits and add-ons keep billing. The first payment after resuming carries a 30% discount.

Tax and currency depend on where you bill from. Hunter charges in USD, EUR or GBP by billing country and fixes the currency at your first purchase. UK buyers pay the GBP prices in the plan table with no VAT added, because Hunter is a US-registered company.

US buyers pay sales tax where Hunter must collect it. US 501(c) non-profits get 30% off monthly plans. One UK reviewer on Trustpilot started on a monthly plan, then bought 24,000 credits upfront.

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Hunter.io pricing FAQ

Is Hunter.io worth it?

For a team that supplies its own names and spends most of its credits, yes. In our worked example, a verified email costs $0.0086 to $0.025 at list price. Capterra reviewers rate its value for money at 4.6 out of 5. It fits less well when your monthly volume is hard to predict, or when you need phone numbers.

Is Hunter.io legal?

Yes, where you follow the email rules of the market you send to. Hunter makes you the controller of the data and lets anyone remove their address through its Claim feature. In the UK, PECR lets you email any corporate body, while sole traders and some partnerships count as individuals. The US CAN-SPAM Act makes no exception for business email: honor opt-outs within 10 business days or risk up to $53,088 per message.

Is Hunter AI free?

Partly. The Free plan includes 30 AI Discover searches and 15 AI suggestions a month. Starter raises both to 150 a month; Growth allows 450 and Scale 900. The AI Writing Assistant starts at Starter.

Does Hunter.io find phone numbers?

Not as a product: every plan and credit rule prices emails only. The Domain Search API carries a phone_number field, which you can filter on, though Hunter's own example shows it as null. If you call prospects, you need a second source; Spona's Data Enrichment adds a mobile at 88 credits, charged only when one returns.

What are some alternatives to Hunter.io?

Our review of the best email finder tools covers the field, Hunter included. Our Apollo.io pricing post shows what a seat that bundles phone data costs. Spona's Standard Search works from an ideal customer profile rather than names you supply, at 3 to 7 credits a verified lead.