PhantomBuster Pricing 2026: Plans, Credits and What 1M Records Cost

The cheapest way in is the 14-day free trial. The cheapest paid plan is Start at $69 a month, or $56 a month billed yearly ($672 a year). The plan marked "Most popular" is Grow at $159 a month, or $128 billed yearly (PhantomBuster pricing, September 2026).

What 1M records cost: no public 1M price. PhantomBuster has no per-record price and no plan above Scale ($439 a month). It sells slots, execution hours and small credit pools, so 1M records is a capacity question, not a price you can look up.

PhantomBuster scrapes public pages through your own accounts. You build the list yourself, and you pay for the hours and credits you use to do it.

Plans

PhantomBuster has a free trial and three paid plans. Users are unlimited on every plan. The API is part of the product, and the vendor's blog says paid plans have no row cap on exports or API output (PhantomBuster pricing explained, July 2026).

Source: PhantomBuster pricing, September 2026, with the Monthly and Annual toggle read both ways. The trial row also uses the vendor blog, July 2026, which describes the same 14-day trial and a 10-row cap on exports and API output.

Yearly billing is marked 20% cheaper. Start costs $828 over twelve months billed monthly and $672 billed yearly. Every plan, including the trial, lists the hosted MCP server at https://mcp.phantombuster.com (PhantomBuster MCP docs, September 2026).

What a credit buys

PhantomBuster keeps separate credit pools for each metered step. Most scraping uses none of them. It uses execution time and slots instead.

All sources checked September 2026. The vendor blog says built-in email discovery runs on BetterContact's waterfall under PhantomBuster's own credit model. The pricing page does not list a price per email.

Hidden costs

The monthly fee is the smaller number once volume grows. Plan around these limits.

• Misses cost credits. An email attempt that finds nothing still uses one credit. A 40% match rate means 60% of credits buy nothing. The vendor blog uses 40% as an illustration, not a measured rate.
• Hours cap the work. Start has 20 hours a month and Scale has 300. When hours run out, automations pause until the reset. The pricing page says no overage is charged automatically (PhantomBuster pricing, September 2026).
• Slots cap parallel work. Start runs 5 automations at once. Some multi-step workflows take more than one slot.
• No record counts are published. PhantomBuster does not state how many profiles fit in an hour. It depends on the automation.
• You bring the accounts. Automations run through your own LinkedIn and other logins. The vendor says it works within platform constraints, so volume is paced by those platforms.
• The trial is a sample. Exports and API output stop at 10 rows until you pay.
• Credits are a monthly allowance. The pricing page lists email, AI and URL finder credits per month. It does not say whether unused credits roll over or whether extra credits can be bought (PhantomBuster pricing, October 2026).
• No list is included. The pricing FAQ says PhantomBuster does not sell or provide pre-built databases (PhantomBuster pricing, September 2026).

Worked examples

These examples count only email discovery, the one metered step that scales with records. They assume one attempt per record. List prices are USD. No example is a quote.

10k records a month

• Email credits needed: 10,000 attempts.
• Start has 500, Grow has 2,500, Scale has 10,000. Only Scale covers it.
• Scale: $439 a month, or $352 billed yearly.
• At the vendor's illustrative 40% match rate: 10,000 x 0.40 = 4,000 emails, so $439 / 4,000 = about $0.11 an email.
• This ignores the hours and slots the scraping needs.
• LeadOcean Pro: $499 flat. At this volume Scale is $60 cheaper on paper, but you still collect the list yourself.

1M records a month

• Email credits needed: 1,000,000 attempts.
• Scale includes 10,000 a month, so 1M is 100 times its allowance.
• No public 1M price. The pricing page lists no plan above Scale and no credit packs.
• Hours: Scale gives 300 hours. PhantomBuster publishes no records-per-hour rate, so the time cannot be worked out from public data.
• LeadOcean Pro: $499 flat.

25M records a month

• Email credits needed: 25,000,000 attempts, or 2,500 times the Scale allowance.
• No public 25M price. The pricing page lists no custom or enterprise tier.
• LeadOcean Pro: $499 flat. A very large month is paced down to one request a minute past the fair-usage line rather than cut off. One email to support gets more headroom.

PhantomBuster is a scraper first. At 1M records the question stops being price and becomes whether scraping through your own accounts can reach that volume at all.

Is it worth it

PhantomBuster is worth it when you need fresh data from specific public pages and a workflow around it. It is poor value as a source of a million contacts.

• Solo founder or one rep: Start at $56 to $69 covers a few weekly automations. Use the 14-day trial first. Expect to hit the 500 email credits fast.
• SDR team of 5 to 20: Grow at $128 to $159 is the plan most teams land on. Users are unlimited, so headcount does not raise the bill.
• RevOps or data engineer feeding a pipeline: The API controls automations, not records. Its docs cover launching and aborting agents and reading their output (PhantomBuster API docs, September 2026). You still own the scraping logic and its upkeep.
• Agency: Scale at $352 to $439 gives 50 slots and 300 hours. Plan for account limits on each platform you scrape.
• High volume, 1M or more: There is no public price. Ask PhantomBuster directly, or use a database with a flat or per-record price.

For a wider comparison, see PhantomBuster alternatives. Other breakdowns: Wappalyzer pricing, Harmonic pricing and ZeroBounce pricing.

Alternatives with a different price model

These three price by usage, by valid result or by flat fee.

Apify: pay for compute. Free is $0 with $5 of usage. Starter is $19 a month with $19 of usage, at $0.2 per compute unit. Scale is $199 a month with $199 of usage, at $0.16 (Apify pricing, September 2026). It is a scraping platform, so you still build the list.

BetterContact: pay per valid result. Pro runs from $49 a month for 1,000 credits up to $1,999 for 50,000. A work email is 1 credit and a mobile is 10, charged only on valid results (BetterContact pricing, September 2026; credits docs). It enriches a list you already hold.

LeadOcean: flat fee. Free is 1,000 records one-off with 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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