Apollo.io
Apollo.io is a B2B lead database with outreach built in: you search more than 240 million contacts by company, job title and buying signals, reveal verified emails and phone numbers for credits, and send email sequences and calls from Apollo.
It suits founders selling to businesses who have to find their first customers by reaching out to them.
The free plan has 900 credits a seat a year and 2 sequences; Basic is $65 a seat a month, or $49 a month billed yearly, as checked on 30 October 2026.
Reviewed by the IndieHacked team
- What it does
- Search a database of business contacts by company and job title, reveal verified emails and phone numbers, and send outreach sequences and calls from the same place.
- Our take
- Founders selling to businesses who have to find their first customers themselves. Build a list from Apollo's contact database, send sequences from your own mailbox and make calls from Apollo, or run the same searches from Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor through Apollo's MCP server.
- Pricing
- FreemiumMid priceFree: 900 credits a seat a year, granted monthly, 2 sequences, one Gmail mailbox and 250 emails a day. Basic is $65 a seat a month with 2,500 credits a month, or $49 a month billed yearly with 30,000 credits up front; Professional is $99, or $79 billed yearly, with 4,000 credits a month, unlimited daily sends and A/Z testing, as checked on 30 October 2026. Both have a 14-day trial. Organization needs at least 3 seats on a yearly contract. Apollo's API docs charge 1 credit for an email and 8 more for a mobile number; credits expire at the end of each billing cycle, and extra credits renew each cycle until you remove them. Startups under 20 people tied to an Apollo partner can get 50% off Basic or Professional for a year, up to 5 seats. Downgrades take effect at once with no refund for the unused time.
The IndieHacked breakdown
What it does
Apollo is a database of more than 240 million business contacts and 30 million companies, which Apollo says it refreshes from a contributor network, its own engagement data, the public web and data partners. You filter by job title, company size, industry and buying intent, then spend credits to reveal an email or a mobile number, or to enrich the contacts already in your CRM.
The outreach runs in the same workspace: sequences of emails, calls and tasks, a deliverability suite with mailbox warm-up, a dialer, a meeting scheduler, call recording and deal tracking. Apollo's MCP server connects it to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Perplexity and Replit, so a list can be searched, enriched and put into a sequence from a chat; your plan, permissions and credits apply there too.
Who it suits
Founders selling to businesses who have to find their first customers by reaching out. Apollo's own pitch for small teams is that a data provider, an email sequencer, a dialer, a forms tool and a website visitor tracker become one tool, and the free plan is enough to build a first list and send a first sequence from Gmail.
It also fits a founder who keeps a CRM elsewhere. Apollo syncs both ways with HubSpot on paid plans, logging emails, calls and meetings on the matching HubSpot contact, and describes the pairing in one line: "Neither one replaces the other." It connects to Pipedrive and Salesforce too.
Not the right fit for
Founders whose buyers come to them, or who sell to consumers. Apollo's data is business contacts for outbound; to track inbound leads and deals, HubSpot's free CRM or Pipedrive, both reviewed here, fit the job, and Apollo connects to either.
Founders who would rather not take on the rules of cold outreach. Apollo's terms make the customer responsible for whether their use is lawful and bar use that breaks marketing laws such as CAN-SPAM, CASL or the TCPA; a founder emailing from the EU or UK also has their own privacy rules to check.
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