Cold Email Software Cost Index

Updated August 6, 2026 · 8 platforms checked against their own pricing pages

5 of the 8 cold email platforms we track give you unlimited mailboxes on their cheapest paid plan and qualify that nowhere, and on those the mailbox count is not what limits you. What limits you is emails sent per month, contacts stored, or on one platform contacted prospects per month, and each vendor publishes at least one of those figures; where one is unpublished the table below says so. The other 3 are worth naming rather than averaging away: Apollo.io caps its cheapest paid tier at 1 mailbox per user; lemlist and Reply.io state the unlimited allowance and then qualify it elsewhere on the same site. That is the finding this page exists to record. Below, each platform is ranked by its cheapest published recurring price, with the allowances that cap its entry plan in the next column, each quoted from the vendor’s own page and dated. The cheapest place to start is Woodpecker at $23.33/mo billed annually (our arithmetic on the published $280/year; the vendor displays $24, which is above what its own annual total implies).

RangeYourself has no affiliate relationship with any platform on this page as of August 6, 2026: every link here goes straight to the vendor’s own site and earns us nothing. We may pursue one in this category, and if we do we will say so here. Either way the ordering follows published prices and each vendor’s own stated terms, and a vendor that pays nothing is listed on exactly the same basis as one that does. See how we make money and our editorial standards.

The index

Ranked by cheapest published recurring price ascending, on whichever billing term each vendor prices lowest, with the term labelled. Pricing disclosure is shown as its own column rather than folded into the ranking: there is no combined score here, because a combined score would hide which of the two things you were buying on.

What you pay for refusing the annual commitment

Both figures are the vendor’s own; the percentage is arithmetic on the two of them and nothing else. 1 of the 8 platforms publishes only one billing term, so there the price on the card is the price.

Every unlimited claim, with the vendor’s own qualification

In our reading this is the easiest part of the category to misread, and not because anyone is lying. The claims below are real. On most plans they are simply not the constraint. Where a vendor qualifies its own claim somewhere on its site, the qualification is printed beside it in the vendor’s own words; where it does not, the cell says so, which is a statement about the page rather than a suggestion the claim is false.

Where a vendor’s own page disagrees with itself

On August 6, 2026, 4 of the 8 platforms stated something twice on their own pricing page and stated it differently the second time. Both quotes are below so you can check each one. None of this is evidence of intent, and pages are edited by many hands: it is recorded because if you are buying on one of these numbers, you want to know the other one exists.

How the disclosure rating is decided

It is not a judgement. The five disclosure items, checked against the vendor's own pricing page for its entry paid plan: a month-to-month price; an annual price for the same plan, or only one billing term offered; a stated sending allowance; a stated contact or prospect allowance; and a stated mailbox or sender allowance. Full means all five, Partial means one to four, None means no paid plan carries a price. The rating measures what the vendor publishes, not whether the product is good value. As of August 6, 2026, 6 of the 8 platforms rate Full and 2 rate Partial. The rating is derived from the same stored figures that populate the tables above, so it cannot drift away from the evidence.

• Instantly: Full (5 of 5). Price on every term it offers, plus the sending, contact and mailbox allowance, all on its own page.
• lemlist: Full (5 of 5). Price on every term it offers, plus the sending, contact and mailbox allowance, all on its own page.
• QuickMail: Full (5 of 5). Price on every term it offers, plus the sending, contact and mailbox allowance, all on its own page.
• Saleshandy: Full (5 of 5). Price on every term it offers, plus the sending, contact and mailbox allowance, all on its own page.
• Smartlead: Full (5 of 5). Price on every term it offers, plus the sending, contact and mailbox allowance, all on its own page.
• Woodpecker: Full (5 of 5). Price on every term it offers, plus the sending, contact and mailbox allowance, all on its own page.
• Apollo.io: Partial (4 of 5). Not published: contact or prospect allowance.
• Reply.io: Partial (4 of 5). Not published: month-to-month price.

Vendor-stated details worth knowing before you buy

Each of these comes from the vendor’s own page or is a plain reading of what it publishes. None is a performance claim, and this page makes no claim about how any platform performs.

• Instantly: The Outreach plans and the lead-database Credits plans are priced separately. A buyer who needs both pays for both, or buys one of the bundles, which are priced differently again.
• Smartlead: The tiers named Unlimited are unlimited on contacts, not on email sends. Smartlead publishes the send cap for each, so the distinction is checkable rather than hidden.
• lemlist: The page we read carried a personalised banner offering a 30-day trial through a named creator's link. The trial lemlist publishes on the plan cards and in its own FAQ is 14 days, and that is the figure recorded here.
• Woodpecker: Prices are stated excluding VAT, so a buyer in a VAT jurisdiction pays more than the listed figure.
• Woodpecker: Woodpecker displays $24 a month on annual billing, which is above the $23.33 a month its own $280 annual total implies. The $280 is the figure it bills.
• Saleshandy: The Lead Finder database is priced separately from the Outreach plans, so a buyer who needs both pays for both.
• Reply.io: Reply publishes an llms.txt on its own domain that carries a fuller price list than the pricing page renders. That file tells its reader to link the pricing page rather than repeat its figures, and flags its own numbers as needing verification, so nothing on this page is taken from it.
• QuickMail: QuickMail publishes only a monthly price. There is no annual option to compare it against, so the figure on the card is the figure you pay.
• Apollo.io: Apollo labels its current prices as introductory and says on the same page that features and pricing may change.
• Apollo.io: Prices are stated excluding tax.

How this index is verified

Every figure on this page was read from the vendor’s own site and is stored with the URL it came from, a verbatim quote, and the date it was checked (most recent: August 6, 2026). That is the vendor’s pricing page in almost every case; where a vendor publishes its own machine-readable pricing file, a fact may come from that instead, and the stored URL says so. Where a page renders its prices in the browser rather than in the served HTML, we read the rendered page at the same URL and record that we did. Where a vendor publishes no number, we say so instead of repeating a figure from elsewhere. Nothing here is a performance claim: we have not tested deliverability, and no vendor’s own marketing is repeated as a result. Percentages are arithmetic on two published figures and nothing else. See our editorial standards and how we verify.

Which platforms are in it. Platforms are included if they sell cold email or outbound sequencing software directly to the sender and appear in the buying consideration set for that decision. The set was chosen before any pricing was checked, so a vendor is never added or dropped on the basis of what its pricing turned out to look like. It is not an exhaustive census of the category.

How each page was read. 3 of the 8 pricing pages render their figures in the browser rather than in the served HTML, so they were read in a browser at the same URL: Woodpecker, Reply.io, Apollo.io. One of them, Reply.io, refuses a plain HTTP request outright.

Frequently asked questions

Cold email software with unlimited email accounts · Cold email software under $50 a month · How much does Instantly cost? · Do these tools really offer unlimited mailboxes?