Hunter vs Snov.io vs Apollo for Solo Founders (2026)
Last week I watched a friend build a 50-person prospect list in a Google Doc. Forty tabs of LinkedIn profiles, guessing email patterns off company websites, pasting guesses into a verifier, deleting the bounces. Three hours gone, and the list was maybe 60 percent right.
That job has a name now, and three tools fight over it: Hunter, Snov.io, and Apollo. All three will hand you verified email addresses at a domain. All three advertise a free tier. The differences are what counts as a credit, how many you actually get each month, and how much of the cold-email workflow each one wants to own. For a solo founder, those three numbers decide which one to install.
I don’t work for any of these companies, and I won’t pretend this was a six-month hands-on pilot. What I did was read each vendor’s pricing pages and help docs on October 27, 2026, cross-check the numbers against third-party pricing teardowns published this fall, and run the credit math for a realistic one-person workload: fifty qualified leads a month. Where a number isn’t published or has moved recently, I say so instead of guessing. Some links below carry affiliate tracking, which supports this site if you eventually buy, at no extra cost to you.
The three, in plain terms
The 2026 twist is that they’re converging on each other. Hunter, historically the domain-search email finder, now pitches itself as an all-in-one outreach platform with sequences, a small CRM, and its own AI writing assistant. Snov.io has been the all-in-one bargain for years, with drip campaigns, warm-up, and LinkedIn automation bolted on. Apollo remains the biggest database of the three and wants to be your entire sales operating system. You can send cold email from any of them now, so the real question is which layer each one does best.
Hunter
Hunter started as “type a domain, get the email pattern.” In 2026 it’s find, verify, and send on one platform. The free plan is genuinely usable: 50 credits a month, one connected email account, 500 recipients per sequence, and unlimited team members. Paid starts at Starter, $34 a month ($408 billed yearly), which front-loads 24,000 credits for the year along with auto-verification and lead enrichment. Growth is $104 a month for 120,000 credits, Scale is $209 for 300,000. One honest catch from Hunter’s own comparison table: on monthly billing the credits reset every month and don’t roll over, while annual plans get the full year’s balance upfront.
Snov.io
Snov.io splits its bill into four meters, and it’s the only one of the three that’s upfront about all of them. Credits pay for finding and verifying (50 on the free plan, 1,000 a month on Starter), recipients pay for outreach (100 free, 5,000 on Starter), phone searches and enrichment draw on separate tokens at about $0.02 each, and LinkedIn automation slots run $69 a month per account. Plan prices run Starter $39 a month, Pro S $99, Pro M $189, with 25 percent off annual billing. Two things stand out for a bootstrapper. First, Snov’s credits roll over while your plan renews, unlike Hunter’s monthly reset on monthly billing. Second, every plan including Starter includes unlimited team seats, although Snov’s own docs reserve the full shared-credit teamwork features for Pro, so a two-founder shop should confirm that fine print before paying for Starter.
Apollo
Apollo is the database play: 240 million-plus verified contacts, with search and filtering that cost nothing. The free plan allots 900 credits a year, which Apollo’s own documentation describes as 75 per month. Revealing an email costs 1 credit; revealing a phone number costs 8, which is why Apollo’s free-plan guide practically begs you to stay email-only. Where Apollo wins is when your list has to come from filters (job title, company size, funding stage) rather than from a domain you already know. Where it loses is pricing transparency: the cheapest paid plan isn’t cleanly priced on the public page, and the moment you outgrow 75 credits you’re in a signup flow or a sales conversation to see current numbers.
Head to head
| Category | Hunter | Snov.io | Apollo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free plan | 50 credits/mo, 500 recipients per sequence | 50 credits + 100 recipients/mo | 75 credits/mo (900/yr) |
| Cheapest published paid tier | $34/mo Starter ($408/yr) | $39/mo Starter ($29.25/mo annual) | Not cleanly published; signup required |
| Credits at entry paid tier | 24,000/year, upfront | 1,000/mo, roll over | n/a (verify at signup) |
| Seats | Unlimited on every plan | Unlimited incl. Starter (team features on Pro) | Per-user on paid tiers |
| Sending built in | Sequences, 1 account free | Drip campaigns + warm-up incl. free | Sequencing + dialer |
| List building style | Domain-first, Chrome extension | Finder + LinkedIn automation | Filter-first, 240M+ contacts |
| Affiliate program | 30% recurring | 40% lifetime | Up to 20% per referral |
| Best fit | Domain lists, lean sending | Automation and warm-up on a budget | Filter-built lists at scale |
The credit math for a 50-lead month
Here’s the workload that actually matters: 50 qualified, verified emails a month. That’s reachable for one person sending 20 to 30 careful cold emails a day, and it’s the number every “you need Apollo Growth!” review quietly ignores.
- Apollo free: search and filtering cost nothing, so 50 email reveals use 50 of your 75 monthly credits. You finish the month at $0. Add phone reveals at 8 credits each and the same list collapses your balance before week three. Email discipline, not plan tier, is the lever.
- Hunter free: 50 credits cover 50 finds if verification needs stay light. The moment you re-verify a list or eat a few bounces, you’re out. Hunter’s math improves dramatically on Starter, because 24,000 credits upfront averages to 2,000 a month, four times your one-person need.
- Snov.io free: 50 credits for finding plus verifying, 100 recipients for sending. It covers a careful month, and the paid tiers buy automation headroom and warm-up rather than raw data volume.
The punchline: at true one-person volume, all three have a free tier that genuinely covers the data layer. You upgrade when you want sending automation, warm-up, team features, or bigger, filter-built lists, not because the free tier locked you out of finding emails.
Where each one earns the upgrade
Hunter earns Starter from the domain-first founder. If your ICP is “the 40 fintech companies in Atlanta” and you work from company websites more than from filter databases, Hunter’s Chrome extension plus domain search is the least friction per email, and unlimited users on every plan quietly removes a whole pricing conversation later. Front-loaded annual credits also fit founders with seasonal pushes, like a launch month at 3x volume.
Snov.io earns Starter or Pro S from the founder who wants the whole loop under one login: find, verify, drip sequences, warm-up, and a light CRM, on the smallest bill of the three. The warm-up inclusion matters more than most reviews admit, because it can replace a separate deliverability subscription entirely. Just price the extras honestly: LinkedIn automation slots are $69 a month on top, and phone tokens meter separately, so the headline number is the floor, not the ceiling.
Apollo earns the upgrade from the founder whose lists must come from filters: “seed-stage fintech ops managers in the US,” not “everyone at this company I found.” Filter search is free, the database is the deepest of the three, and if outbound ever grows into an inside-sales motion with a dialer, you won’t need to migrate. The cost is patience with its pricing process and a stricter credit meter than the free tier suggests.
What I’d pick
Start free and let the workload pick the winner. Apollo’s free tier is my default first install for list building, because 75 monthly email reveals with free filtering beats signing up for anything in month one. If your lists come from domains rather than filters, Hunter’s free plan is the better daily driver, and its $34 Starter is the cheapest genuinely useful paid tier once you need auto-verification and richer sending.
Snov.io is the pick when sending infrastructure is the bottleneck instead of data: if you’re warming mailboxes, running multi-step drips, and want it all on one $39 to $99 invoice, Snov bundles more of the stack per dollar than either rival. And if you outgrow all three on the sending side, that’s a sign to look at dedicated delivery tools, because no data tool fixes deliverability.
One caveat that applies to all three: no vendor in this category is 100 percent accurate on accept-all domains, and bounces are your problem, not theirs. Verify every list, especially anything scraped before buying a tool, and keep your send volume within mailbox limits. The data layer feeds the sending layer, and choosing cold email sending tools is a separate decision entirely. If you’re still shaping the offer those emails will sell, the first 100 customers playbook pairs well with this one.
Key takeaways
- At 50 leads a month, every free tier here covers the data layer. Paid tiers buy automation, warm-up, and headroom.
- Hunter Starter ($34/mo, 24,000 credits upfront, unlimited users) is the best first paid step for domain-first prospecting.
- Snov.io bills four meters (credits, recipients, tokens, LinkedIn slots); its credit rollover suits spiky workloads, and warm-up is included.
- Apollo free is 75 email credits a month with free filtering; phone reveals cost 8 credits each, so stay email-only on free.
- Apollo’s paid pricing isn’t cleanly public; Hunter and Snov.io publish full tables. Budget demo time accordingly.
- Affiliate programs run 30% recurring (Hunter), 40% lifetime (Snov.io), and up to 20% (Apollo), which says something about how sticky these subscriptions are.
The next step
If your inbox pipeline is empty today, do this: start with Hunter’s free plan if you prospect by domain, or open Apollo’s free database if you prospect by filters. Then, when sending automation is the bottleneck rather than data, check Snov.io’s plan table against your volumes. Fifty verified leads from a free tier beats three hours in a Google Doc, and it’s the version of prospecting that survives contact with month two.
– Nova, who verifies every list before it touches a mailbox.
