Prospecting is lumpy. Credit plans are flat. Work out what the gap costs you over a year, what you really pay per credit you actually use, and how a monthly reset compares to an annual pool and to a pack that does not expire.
Every vendor rule below is quoted from the vendor's own page, with the date it was read.
The example below is a 600 credit plan at 69.90 a month, which is the shape of Lusha Professional as recorded on 2026-09-05. Change any field and every figure updates.
The same demand, metered four different ways. Every model in this table is one a real vendor actually sells, cited in the sources at the foot of the page.
| Credit model | Demand met | Demand you could not serve | Credits expired in the year | Money lost | Real cost per credit used | Year cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly reset, no rolloverLusha free tier, RocketReach Base and Starter | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Monthly reset, credits roll over 3 monthsLeadsforlinked subscription | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| One annual poolSurfe annual billing, Amplemarket | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Pack that never expires, buy what you useLeadsforlinked one-time packs | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
One credit is one lead, duplicates are refunded, and one-time packs never expire. 100 free leads on signup, no card.
Get my 100 free leadsSubscription credits reset monthly but roll over for up to 3 months, so a quiet month does not wipe your balance. Read the whole pricing model before you decide.
How our pricing worksNothing here is a black box. Every figure comes out of five inputs and four rules.
The advertised rate is the number a vendor implies on its pricing page: what one credit costs if you use every single one. It is almost never what you pay in practice.
Each month stands alone. Unused credits die at the reset, and demand above the allowance is simply unserved: it does not reach back into last month's leftovers. This is the model that punishes lumpy prospecting hardest.
Credits granted in a month can still be spent in the following three months, then they expire. The page simulates all twelve months with a first in, first out balance, spending the oldest credits first, and spreads your heavy months evenly across the year so the result is deterministic. This is how the Leadsforlinked subscription is described on our own site, quoted in the sources below. Credits still alive at the end of month twelve are reported separately, because they are not lost, they simply carry forward.
The whole year's allowance is one balance, so a busy month can draw on a quiet one. Only under-use across the entire year costs you anything.
You buy exactly what you consume at the advertised rate, so nothing expires and nothing is unserved. Its year cost is total demand times the advertised rate, which means it beats the subscription by exactly the money the subscription loses to expiry. When your demand runs above the included allowance, the pack costs more and the subscription is the better buy. The calculator says so when that happens rather than pretending otherwise.
Lusha's free tier is 40 credits a month with no rollover. RocketReach spells the rule out per plan in its own knowledge base table: Base at 5 dollars is listed as
Expire monthly with no rolloverknowledgebase.rocketreach.co, read 2026-09-05
and Starter and Loyalty plans are listed as
No Rolloversknowledgebase.rocketreach.co, read 2026-09-05
Monthly plans bought on the RocketReach website do get rollover while the plan stays active. Kaspr states its allowances per month rather than per year, and its permanent free plan is 5 phone and 5 direct email credits a month with 3 CSV launches and 25 rows per CSV. We have not verified a Kaspr rollover rule from a Kaspr page, so this page does not assert one.
A credit is not a lead everywhere. On Lusha a verified email is 1 credit and a phone number is 5, so a contact with both can cost 6. Lusha's own site contradicts itself on the phone figure: the pricing page shows 10 and the documentation shows 5. Both numbers are on Lusha's own property, so both are printed here and neither is treated as settled.
LeadIQ moved to a single pool announced on 24 August 2026. The per-unit costs are published plainly, verbatim from the pricing page:
Email = 1 Credit. Phone number = 10 Credits. Email + Phone number = 11 Credits. Account enrichment = 3 Credits.leadiq.com/pricing, read 2026-09-05
A phone number therefore costs ten times an email and a full record eleven times. LeadIQ does not state an expiry or rollover rule anywhere on that pricing page, so this page does not claim one. Pro renders a price only at the 200 credit slider step, 200 a month; every higher step is unpriced on the page.
PhantomBuster does not meter credits at all. It meters execution time, slots and export rows as three separate quantities, and they are not interchangeable, so one can be exhausted while the others sit idle. The free plan is 30 minutes of execution time a month, 1 slot and a 10 row export cap. Start is 69 a month with 20 hours and 5 slots, Grow is 159 with 80 hours and 15 slots, Scale is 439 with 300 hours and 50 slots, billed in euros or dollars by location, with unlimited users. Whether unused execution hours roll over is not documented in any source we hold, so this page does not model it.
Three vendors publish an unlimited plan and a cap on the same page. All three deserve credit for writing the cap down, because plenty of vendors do not.
SignalHire, in a tooltip sitting on cards that advertise UNLIMITED exports and an Unlimited Package:
fair usage policy restricts excessive data extraction. According to the policy, your spending is limited to 2k credits per month.signalhire.com/pricing, read 2026-09-05
RocketReach, on its annual unlimited lookup plans:
a fair usage cap of 10,000 lookups per monthknowledgebase.rocketreach.co, read 2026-09-05
Wiza, on the unlimited annual plans:
You can enrich up to 500 profiles in 24 hourshelp.wiza.co, read 2026-09-05
Within any 5-minute span, you can roughly enrich a maximum of 50 profileshelp.wiza.co, read 2026-09-05
a hard cap of 2,500 export credits per monthhelp.wiza.co, read 2026-09-05
A rate cap is not the same thing as an expiry rule, and this calculator does not fold them together. They matter for a different reason: a 500 a day ceiling means a heavy month cannot be compressed into a heavy week, which makes lumpy demand harder to serve even when the credits exist.
Two vendors count in years, and the framing catches buyers out because a year number looks enormous next to a month number.
Surfe Essential on annual billing is 39 per user per month and lists 1,800 email credits and 600 mobile credits per year. That is 150 email and 50 mobile a month. Pro annual at 79 lists 12,000 email and 1,200 mobile per year, which is 1,000 and 100 a month. Email and mobile are separate pools, so a spare email credit cannot buy a phone number. Surfe's terms are explicit about what happens to the remainder:
any Credits which you purchase but fail to use before the end of a given Subscription Period CANNOT be rolled oversurfe.com/terms-and-conditions, read 2026-09-05
you will NOT be refunded for any unused Creditssurfe.com/terms-and-conditions, read 2026-09-05
Amplemarket counts per user per year too. Startup is 600 a month on an annual term for 2 users, with 13,500 email address credits and 600 phone number credits per user per year. That works out at 50 phone numbers per user per month. Growth lists 35,000 email and 5,000 phone, Elite 40,000 email and 9,600 phone, and neither renders a price: both read Custom, so this page does not guess them. Amplemarket does not document expiry, rollover or duplicate handling on its pricing page.
Expiring credits are a normal way to sell data, not a scandal. It smooths a vendor's revenue, it caps the load on an expensive data supply chain, and every large player in the category uses some version of it. A page that pretended otherwise would be worth less than one that just prices the thing. So, plainly:
Wiza does not charge you twice for the same person. Verbatim from its help centre: Export credits are NOT deducted for people who have already been exported or saved to your Wiza account. That is duplicate handling written down in public, which is more than most of this category manages.
Clay publishes its rollover rule in plain words. Verbatim: Actions reset each billing cycle and don't roll over. and Data Credits work more like a currency and do roll over. On Launch and Growth plans, unused credits can accumulate up to 2x your monthly credit amount. Clay also says annual plans get all credits up front. A buyer can price Clay accurately from Clay's own page, which is the standard the rest of the category should be held to.
Snov.io gives its expiry a reason. Verbatim: Each token package is valid for 90 days, reducing waste if your work is more seasonal. Ninety days is a longer runway than a monthly reset, and stacked packages spend the soonest expiring one first, which is the buyer friendly ordering.
Evaboot added credit rollover in 2026, along with a billing pause. A billing pause is arguably a better answer to seasonality than rollover, because it stops the meter instead of banking against it.
An annual pool genuinely beats a monthly reset for lumpy work. Run the numbers above and you will see it: Surfe's and Amplemarket's per-year counting is confusing to read but structurally kinder to a business with four busy months and eight quiet ones, because a busy month can draw on the whole year. The framing is the problem, not the mechanism.
For the contrast to be worth anything it has to be accurate, so here it is exactly as published on our own site, with nothing rounded up.
One-time credit packs never expire. Subscription credits reset monthly but roll over for up to 3 months.leadsforlinked.com homepage FAQ, read 2026-09-05
1 credit = 1 lead. Period. No double-billing, no enrichment credit split. If you buy 500 credits, you get 500 real LinkedIn profiles. Duplicates are refunded.leadsforlinked.com homepage FAQ, read 2026-09-05
Two things follow. Subscription credits are not immortal: they roll for up to three months and then they go, which is why the second row of the table shows a real expiry figure rather than a zero. One-time packs are the row that shows zero. And because one credit is one lead with duplicates refunded, the advertised rate and the real rate stay closer together than they do in a pool where a phone number costs ten times an email.
If you want the neighbouring numbers, the Sales Navigator cost calculator prices the seat you may not need, and the outreach ROI calculator prices what the leads are worth once you have them. For the vendor by vendor view see our notes on Lusha, Kaspr, Surfe, Wiza, PhantomBuster and Snov.io.
Most of them do. Lusha's free tier is 40 credits a month with no rollover. RocketReach states that Base and Starter credits expire monthly with no rollover. Surfe's terms say any credits you fail to use before the end of a subscription period cannot be rolled over. Some vendors are more generous: Clay lets data credits accumulate up to two times the monthly amount, and Snov.io token packages are valid for 90 days. A few, including Leadsforlinked one-time packs, do not expire at all. Expiry is a normal industry model, not a scandal, but it is worth pricing.
It depends entirely on how lumpy your prospecting is. Take a 600 credit plan at 69.90 a month, four heavy months at 900 credits and eight quiet months at 120. Under a monthly reset you lose 3,840 credits a year, which is 447.36 at the advertised rate of 0.1165 per credit, or 53 percent of the subscription. Your real cost per credit used is 0.2496, more than double the advertised figure. Run your own numbers in the calculator above.
No. A pack wins when your usage is well below your allowance or very seasonal, because you buy only what you consume. A subscription wins when you consistently use more than the plan includes, because the included allowance is cheaper per credit than topping up. The calculator shows both, and it will tell you when the subscription is the better deal.
Surfe lists 1,800 email and 600 mobile credits per year on Essential annual billing, which works out at 150 email and 50 mobile a month. Amplemarket counts per user per year too, with 600 phone credits a year on Startup, which is 50 a month. The per-year framing confuses buyers because it looks larger, but for lumpy usage a single annual pool is genuinely better than a monthly reset, since a busy month can draw on the whole year. Surfe's terms still forfeit whatever is left at the end of the period.
Not usually. SignalHire's fair usage tooltip sits on cards that advertise unlimited exports and states that your spending is limited to 2k credits per month. RocketReach's annual unlimited lookup plans carry a fair usage cap of 10,000 lookups per month. Wiza's unlimited annual plans allow up to 500 profiles enriched in 24 hours and a hard cap of 2,500 export credits per month for bulk exports. These caps are published by the vendors themselves, which is more than many competitors do.
Every figure on this page traces to one of these. Vendor pages were read on the dates shown. Where a vendor's own site gives two different numbers, both are printed and neither is resolved.
Page last verified 2026-09-05. Vendor pricing in this category changes often, and several of the pages above are JavaScript rendered, so check anything load bearing against the vendor's own site before you commit budget to it. If you spot a figure that has moved, we would rather hear about it than keep it.