AI-Ark Pricing 2026: Plans, Credits and What 1M Records Cost

The cheapest way in is the free plan: 100 credits a month, no card. The cheapest paid plan is $49 a month for 5,000 credits, or $470 a year billed yearly for 60,000 (AI-Ark pricing, September 2026). AI-Ark does not say which plan sells most. Its guide points small teams to Starter and scaling teams to Builder.

There is no public 1M price. A person with a valid email costs 1 credit, so 1M records is 1,000,000 credits. That sits inside the Scale plan, which spans 450,000 to 5,000,000 credits for $1,249 to $9,999 a month, and AI-Ark prints no figure for 1M in that range. LeadOcean Pro is $499 a month, flat.

AI-Ark charges per result returned, not per email you can use. A profile is 0.5 credits and a valid email adds 0.5. A mobile number is 5.

Plans

AI-Ark sells credits on a monthly or yearly subscription. Every plan includes the full API and the AI features, and plans differ in credits, seats and rate limits (AI-Ark pricing, September 2026). The pricing page prints the $0 and $49 tiles. The Starter, Builder and Scale ranges come from AI-Ark's own comparison page (AI-Ark comparison, September 2026).

Sources: AI-Ark pricing, AI-Ark comparison page and AI-Ark API docs, all checked September 2026.

The ranges show only the two ends of each plan. AI-Ark prints a few steps between them, such as 15,000 credits at $79 a month, and no full ladder (AI-Ark comparison, September 2026).

Yearly billing takes 20% off, is paid upfront, and grants all credits on day one. Unused credits roll over up to 2x your monthly allowance (AI-Ark pricing, September 2026).

What a credit buys

A credit is spent when data is delivered, and you pay once per contact. Re-exporting a contact you own is free. If no valid email is found, you pay the 0.5 profile cost and nothing more.

All sources checked September 2026. The docs list People Search at 0.5 per result and Company Search at 0.1 per result.

Hidden costs

The headline rate is $2 to $4 per 1,000 credits above 30,000 credits a month (AI-Ark pricing, September 2026). The bill depends on what you pull.

• Phones cost six times a person. A mobile is 5 credits. A person with an email and a phone is 6 credits, not 1.
• You pay for profiles with no email. Searches bill 0.5 per person returned. AI-Ark's own comparison pages use a 70% find rate, so a valid email costs about 1.2 credits in practice (AI-Ark comparison, September 2026).
• Sizing a market costs credits. People Preview is 1 credit per page of 25 to 100 results.
• Rollover is capped. Credits above 2x your monthly allowance are lost.
• Upgrades reset your renewal date. You pay the full new price the same day. A downgrade or cancellation lands at the end of the cycle.
• Running out mid-month has no self-serve fix. You re-subscribe, which resets the billing cycle, or ask Customer Success for a one-off top-up. No top-up price is published.
• No dollar price in the middle. The pricing page shows $0 and $49. The rest is a range, or a quote.
• Job and search caps. One export job holds 10,000 people and one search retrieves 10,000 records. The default API rate is 5 requests per second (AI-Ark docs, September 2026).
• Seats are capped by plan. Starter has up to 3 seats, Builder 5 and Scale 10.

Worked examples

All three examples assume 1 credit per person with a valid email. Credit counts are arithmetic. Dollar figures are published plan prices, never a rate multiplied out.

10k records a month

• Credits needed: 10,000 x 1 = 10,000, if every person has a valid email.
• At a 70% find rate: 10,000 / 0.7 = 14,286 profiles. That is 14,286 x 0.5 = 7,143 credits, plus 10,000 x 0.5 = 5,000 for the emails, so 12,143.
• Both fit the 15,000-credit plan: $79 a month, or $758 a year billed yearly.
• Mobile on all 10,000: 10,000 x 6 = 60,000 credits. That is Builder's entry step: $219 a month, or $2,102 a year billed yearly.
• LeadOcean Pro: $499 flat, phones included. At this volume AI-Ark is cheaper.

1M records a month

• Credits needed: 1,000,000 x 1 = 1,000,000. At a 70% find rate it is about 1,214,286.
• Plan: Scale. It runs 450,000 to 5,000,000 credits at $1,249 to $9,999 a month. No public 1M price.
• Floor: the lowest Scale step is $1,249 a month at 450,000 credits, about 2.5 times Pro.
• Mobile on every record: 1,000,000 x 6 = 6,000,000 credits. That is above Scale's ceiling, so Enterprise.
• Job size: 10,000 people per export job, so 100 jobs.
• LeadOcean Pro: $499 flat. POST /v1/exports takes 50,000 rows a request, so 1M rows is 20 requests over two days.

25M records a month

• Credits needed: 25,000,000. No public 25M price.
• Scale stops at 5,000,000 credits and $9,999 a month. 25M is five times that ceiling, so it is an Enterprise quote.
• Search cap: 10,000 records a search means at least 2,500 searches.
• LeadOcean Pro: $499 flat. Exports stop at 500,000 rows a day. A very large month is paced down to one request a minute past the fair-usage line, not cut off. One email to support raises the headroom.

Is it worth it

AI-Ark is worth it when you want an app, lookalike search and emails checked at export, at modest volume. It gets expensive when you pull phones or very large lists.

• Solo founder or small team: The free plan, then the $49 tile. 5,000 credits is up to 5,000 people with a valid email. AI-Ark is cheaper than LeadOcean here.
• Agency with several clients: Credits are pooled across the team. Builder gives 5 seats and Scale gives 10.
• RevOps or data engineer: Check the 5 requests per second and the 10,000-record search cap before you commit. LeadOcean allows 100 requests per second per key.
• Anyone buying phones: At 6 credits a person, model the phone share first.
• 1M records or more: Expect a quote. AI-Ark costs less than Pro on Starter and the low Builder steps. At 300,000 credits Builder is already $879 a month, above Pro.

For a head-to-head, see LeadOcean as an AI-Ark alternative and AI-Ark alternatives. For other pricing breakdowns, see Wappalyzer pricing, Harmonic pricing and ZeroBounce pricing.

Alternatives with a different price model

These three bill per seat, per profile and flat.

Apollo: per seat, with credits. Basic is $65 per seat a month with 2,500 credits, Professional $99 with 4,000, Organization $149 with 6,000 (3-seat minimum). Billed yearly they are $49, $79 and $119 (Apollo pricing, September 2026). An email is 1 credit, a phone 8, and credits expire each cycle (Apollo API pricing, September 2026). 1M work emails is $24,750 a month at list on monthly billing, or $19,600 a month equivalent billed yearly. See Apollo.io alternatives.

People Data Labs: per profile. Pro starts at $98 a month for 350 credits, $0.28 a credit, or $940 a year billed yearly (PDL pricing, September 2026). PDL says Pro profiles cost about $0.20 to $0.28 each (PDL blog, February 2026). Self-serve is meant for under roughly 100,000 profiles a year, and no 1M price is published (PDL blog, September 2026). See People Data Labs alternatives.

LeadOcean: flat fee. Free is 1,000 records, one-off, no card. Pro is $499 a month with unlimited searches, enrichments and lookups, 100 requests per second per key and 5 API keys. There are no credits and no overage invoice. It covers 693M people and 63M companies over REST and MCP, and the app has an Exports page with a filter builder and CSV download. It has no sequencer, dialer or CRM. See pricing.

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