What 1,000 leads really cost

"How much does a lead cost?" is a question with no honest single answer, because lead tools do not sell leads. They sell seats, or credits, or results, and those three things behave very differently once you put a real job through them.

This article explains the three pricing models in plain words, then takes one concrete job (find every business of a type in an area, email half of them) and works out the cost at three volumes under Leadralia's pay-as-you-go prices, with every multiplication written out so you can check it.

No competitor prices here. For verified numbers from the vendors' own sites, see the 2026 comparison of B2B lead-finding tools.

Three ways lead tools charge you

Per seat, per month

The most common model in B2B software. You pay a fixed monthly fee for each person who logs in, and that fee usually includes an allowance of exports, credits or "views". The bill is predictable, which finance likes.

The catch is that it is predictable whether you use the tool or not. A quiet month costs the same as a busy one, a colleague who needs the list once a quarter costs a full seat, and the allowance inside the seat is often the real limit, so heavy months turn into an upsell conversation.

Credit packs

You buy a block of credits up front and spend them on lookups, exports or email reveals. This feels closer to paying for what you use, and it usually is cheaper per unit at large blocks.

Two details decide whether it is a good deal. The first is expiry: credits that reset every month are a use-it-or-lose-it deadline, and unused credits are pure margin for the vendor. The second is what a credit buys. One credit for a company record and another for the email behind it means the headline price per credit is not the price per usable lead.

Pay per result

You pay only for the things you actually receive and use. There is no seat, no monthly minimum and no expiry date, so a month where you run nothing costs nothing.

This is Leadralia's default. It is the easiest model to audit, because every line in your wallet history maps to one thing that happened. It is not automatically the cheapest at high steady volume, and the table further down shows exactly where a plan overtakes it.

What one job costs at Leadralia's prices

Here are the prices everything below is built from:

Now the job. You pick a type of business and an area, Leadralia finds every one of them live from the map, the email behind each business is found and verified for free, and you email the best half. The same job at three sizes:

So 1,000 leads, with a verified email address for each and your offer in 500 inboxes, cost €45. The same shape of job is €0.045 per business at any size, because nothing here is a subscription: the price is linear, and the only way it moves is if you email a different share of the list.

Two numbers are easy to miss. The email line reads €0.00 at every volume because finding and verifying the address is part of the search, not an add-on. And a business you already have is free in every later search, forever, so re-scanning the same city next month charges you only for what is genuinely new.

If you email a different share, change one line. Emailing everybody in the 1,000 job: 1,000 x €0.05 = €50 of sending plus €20 of finding, so €70, which is €0.07 per business. Emailing only the top 100: 100 x €0.05 = €5 plus €20, so €25. The finding cost is fixed by the size of the market; the sending cost is your choice.

Failed sends do not count. If a send fails, the €0.05 returns to your wallet automatically and the dead address is remembered, so you never pay for it twice.

When a plan beats pay-as-you-go

Plans are optional. They give you the same credits at a lower unit price, every feature is in every tier, and you can change or cancel anytime. This is the live plan list on 2026-09-11, with the derived columns.

To get the effective unit prices, value each plan's monthly allowance at pay-as-you-go prices (searches x €0.02 plus sends x €0.05), then apply the resulting discount to both unit prices. Starter is €19 for €35 of credits, so you pay 19/35 of the list price, which is €0.02 x 0.543 = €0.011 per search and €0.05 x 0.667 = €0.027 per send.

The discount per tier falls out of those two columns: Starter is €19 for €35 of credits, a little under half price. Growth is €49 for €105 and Agency is €299 for €700, both a little over half off. Scale is €99 for €245, the deepest cut of the four.

Yearly is "pay for ten months, get twelve", so the yearly price is ten times the monthly price and the saving is two monthly payments. Scale yearly is €990 instead of 12 x €99 = €1,188, a saving of €198, and an effective €990 / 12 = €82.50 a month. On Agency yearly the effective per-send price drops again: €299 x 10 / 12 = €249.17 a month for €700 of credits, so €0.021 x 10 / 12 = €0.018 per send.

The break-even, in businesses per month

Use the job shape from the table above: for every business you find, you email half. That is €0.02 + (0.5 x €0.05) = €0.045 per business at pay-as-you-go. Divide each plan price by €0.045 and you get the monthly volume where the plan starts to win.

• Starter (€19): €19 / €0.045 = 422 businesses a month.
• Growth (€49): €49 / €0.045 = 1,089 businesses a month.
• Scale (€99): €99 / €0.045 = 2,200 businesses a month.
• Agency (€299): €299 / €0.045 = 6,644 businesses a month.

Read against the three jobs above, at these prices the answer usually favours the wallet. The 200-business job costs €9 at pay-as-you-go, against €19 for the cheapest plan. The 1,000-business job costs €45, just under the €49 of Growth, the smallest plan with room for 1,000 searches. Even the 5,000-business job, at €225, comes in below the €299 of Agency. A plan wins once you repeat that volume every month rather than once a quarter: Growth pays for itself from 1,089 businesses a month, Scale from 2,200.

The rule of thumb: pay-as-you-go for occasional and irregular work, a plan once you are doing the same volume every month.

The wallet

Pay-as-you-go runs from a wallet. You top it up from €5 by card, and the balance never expires, which is the practical difference between this and a credit pack. Money you put in during a busy quarter is still there in a quiet one.

Every search also has a spending limit that you set. The search stops when it reaches your number, so a bill can never pass it. That matters most when you search a large area and do not yet know how many businesses are in it.

Free to try without a card: the free tier covers 25 searches and 25 email sends a month.

Hidden costs to check in any tool

The list price is rarely the whole bill. Before you compare any two tools, get answers to these five.

• Seats. Is the price per user? What does a second person cost, and can a colleague who needs a list once a quarter get in without a full seat?
• Expiring credits. Do credits roll over or reset every month? Credits you did not use are money you paid for nothing, and a monthly reset quietly raises your real unit price.
• Verification as an add-on. Is the email address included, or is it a separate credit, tool or subscription? An unverified address is not a lead, and verification bought elsewhere never appears on the pricing page.
• The sending tool. If the tool only exports a list, you still need something that sends and handles replies. Count that subscription too.
• Bounces. Do you pay again for an address that did not work? A tool that charges for dead addresses is charging you for its own error rate.

Leadralia's answers, for the record: no seats in the pricing, a wallet that never expires, verification included at €0.00, sending and replies inside the product, and failed sends refunded automatically with the dead address remembered.

Where this model is the wrong fit

Per-result pricing is honest, but it is not right for every job.

Leadralia finds businesses and the email address a business publishes about itself. If what you need is a named decision maker at a large company, a direct dial, or a list built on job titles and headcount, this is the wrong shape of tool and no arithmetic fixes that. The right comparison there is a contact database, not a map search.

It is also the wrong fit if your buying process needs a fixed annual line item agreed in advance. Pay-as-you-go is deliberately variable, and a plan makes it fixed only monthly or yearly, not on a multi-year contract.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a plan to use every feature? No. Every feature, the AI that writes the outreach included, is available on every tier and on pay-as-you-go. Plans change the unit price, not the product.

What happens to money in my wallet if I stop using Leadralia? Nothing. The balance never expires, there is no monthly fee draining it and no reset date.

Is €0.045 per business the real all-in price? For the job in the table (find a business, get its verified email, email half the list) yes: €0.02 to find plus €0.05 on half the list. Emailing everyone makes it €0.07 per business, emailing a tenth makes it €0.025. Revealing an address to use elsewhere is €0.02, so that changes the sum if you use it.

Bottom line

A thousand leads cost €45 at Leadralia's pay-as-you-go prices: €20 to find 1,000 businesses, €0 for the verified email addresses, €25 to put your offer in 500 inboxes. That is €0.045 per business and €0.09 per message actually sent, with no seat, no contract and no expiry date on the money.

If you run that volume every month, Growth covers it for €49 and still leaves room for half as much again, or €40.83 a month on the yearly term. If you run one campaign a quarter, stay on pay-as-you-go and pay nothing in the months you are quiet. If you need named contacts inside large companies, use a contact database instead.

You can check the arithmetic yourself with the free tier: 25 searches and 25 sends a month, no card needed. The details of every charge and refund are in the documentation.