The Apollo alternative with no seats and no credits

Apollo is an all-in-one sales platform: a contact database, sequences, a dialer and a rep workspace, priced per seat with a credit allowance. LeadOcean is only the data layer, over REST and MCP, at one flat price with no seats. If you use Apollo mainly as a data source, LeadOcean is the simpler and more predictable one. If reps live in Apollo all day, keep it and add LeadOcean for volume.

Why teams switch from Apollo

You pay per seat for data you pull by API

Apollo prices Basic at $49, Professional at $79 and Organization at $119 per seat per month, billed annually (Apollo pricing, September 2026). Organization needs three seats. A data pipeline that no rep opens still pays for the seats that hold its credits. Add a second engineer or an agent account and the seat count moves with headcount, not with the records you pull.

Credits expire and extras renew

Credits reset each billing cycle and do not roll over, including purchased add-on credits. Add-on credits renew automatically until you remove them (Apollo pricing FAQ, September 2026). A quiet month wastes what you paid for. A busy month sends you to the credit slider, and whatever you add keeps renewing until you drag it back to zero.

Export and selection limits

Apollo caps how many records you can select in one action. The pricing page lists 25 on Free, 1,000 on Basic, 2,500 on Professional and 10,000 on Organization (Apollo pricing, September 2026). Large pulls become many small batches. On Professional, a 100,000-row audience is at least 40 separate selections of 2,500.

API rate limits by plan

General endpoints allow 200 requests a minute on Basic and Professional, with 400 an hour and 2,000 a day. Free drops to 50 a minute and 600 a day (Apollo API docs, September 2026). Enrichment endpoints are looser at 1,000 a minute on paid plans. LeadOcean allows 100 requests per second per key on every plan, which is 6,000 a minute, and the limit is the same on Free.

LeadOcean vs Apollo

Apollo figures come from apollo.io/pricing, docs.apollo.io and the pages linked in each cell, checked in September 2026. Apollo labels its plan prices as introductory and subject to change, so check the page before you buy.

What 1M, 5M and 25M records cost

Apollo meters data in credits, so the cost scales with volume. LeadOcean Pro stays at $499 a month. The Apollo column buys the credits the cheapest published way: Basic seats at $49 a month, each carrying 30,000 credits a year, or 2,500 a month. One email is one credit.

Apollo arithmetic: records x 1 credit per email / 2,500 credits per Basic seat a month x $49 per seat, billed annually (Apollo pricing, September 2026). That is about $0.02 per email. Phone numbers cost 8 credits each, so a phone pull costs eight times as much. Buying seats nobody logs into may not fit Apollo's terms, and add-on credits have no published price, so ask Apollo for a quote at your volume.

Apollo prints no price per additional credit on its pricing page or docs. The rate shows only in the Customize Credits slider inside a logged-in account (Apollo pricing, October 2026).

Where LeadOcean wins

A flat bill at any volume

Pro is $499 a month. Every person or company returned counts as a record, but there is no credit balance to watch and nothing expires. A very large month is paced down to one request a minute until the reset, not cut off, and one email to support gets you more headroom.

No seats, one schema

LeadOcean holds 693M people and 63M companies in one database, and you pay nothing per seat. Email status comes back on every record, with 13 values from verified and catch_all_valid to risky and spam_trap. A pipeline and an agent can each take an API key from the five on Pro instead of buying extra logins. Search, enrichment and company lookup all come from that one database.

Built for code and agents

The same data is reachable over REST and over MCP, and the Free plan includes both. Send one request and get a profile, email status and, with reveal_email, the emails and phone numbers we hold, for one record. A miss on POST /v1/people/enrich is a 404 and costs nothing.

curl -X POST "https://api.leadocean.io/v1/people/enrich" \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"linkedin_url":"https://www.linkedin.com/in/jane-doe","reveal_email":true}'

For Claude or Cursor, add the MCP URL https://api.leadocean.io/mcp and sign in with OAuth. No key gets pasted into a chat.

Search and export at database scale

Search people with 50 filters and companies with 34, across 254 countries and 534 industries. Counts are free. Export up to 50,000 rows per request with POST /v1/exports, so a 1M-row pull is 20 calls over two days, not 100 batches of 10,000 clicked by hand. Call count_leads first, because counts are free, and you know the size of the pull before you spend a record.

Where Apollo wins

A workspace for reps

Apollo is an app people work in: lists, tasks, a unified inbox, deal tracking and a Chrome extension that finds contacts on any site. LeadOcean's app has an export page with a filter builder, not a rep workspace. A sales team that wants one place to prospect and work should stay in Apollo.

Sequencing and a dialer

Apollo sends the email, and it does it well. Sequences are on every plan, with deliverability tools and mailboxes on paid ones, and the dialer bills 1 credit per 30 seconds in the US (Apollo pricing, September 2026). LeadOcean stops at the data, so you bring your own sequencer.

Intent, job changes and a generous free plan

Apollo adds intent topics, job change enrichment and website visitor identification, which tell a rep who to contact this week. Its Free plan gives an individual seller real access to the product with no card. LeadOcean has no intent data and no signals of its own. It answers who exists and how to reach them, not who is ready to buy.

Use both: LeadOcean for volume, Apollo for outreach

You do not have to drop Apollo to cut its credit cost. Pull the list from LeadOcean, then import the CSV into Apollo for sequencing and calling. Reps keep the workspace they know, and the bulk data comes from a source that has no seat count.

1. Create a free LeadOcean key at app.leadocean.io/register. The free plan needs no card.
2. Export the audience with POST /v1/exports. Set filters, limit and preset, and poll the job until it finishes.
3. Import the CSV into Apollo as contacts and put them in a sequence. Only verified and catch_all_valid rows need to go in.

curl -X POST https://api.leadocean.io/v1/exports \
  -H "x-api-key: $LEADOCEAN_API_KEY" -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "CTOs in Germany",
    "filters": { "title": ["CTO"], "country": ["DE"], "emailStatus": ["verified"] },
    "limit": 5000,
    "preset": "full"
  }'

In an agent, add both MCP servers. Apollo's lives at https://mcp.apollo.io/mcp, LeadOcean's at https://api.leadocean.io/mcp. Let the agent search and enrich in LeadOcean, and create sequences in Apollo. Each server bills on its own terms, so the agent's volume work lands on the flat plan and only outreach touches Apollo's credits.

FAQ