How much does Instantly cost?

As of October 2026, Instantly's Outreach plans start at $47/month ($37.60/month billed annually) for 5,000 emails and 1,000 uploaded contacts. Hypergrowth is $97/month and Light Speed $358/month. Lead database credits are a separate subscription starting at $47/month for 1,500 credits, and bundles combining both start at $94/month.

How many emails per day should I send per inbox with Instantly?

Instantly's help center recommends 30 campaign emails per inbox per day for standard mailboxes and up to 20 for its AirMail inboxes. Set the campaign limit to the number of inboxes times that figure. Warmup emails do not count toward the limit.

How do Instantly lead credits work?

A verified email found by Instantly costs 1 credit, one from a partner provider costs 2, and nothing is charged if no verified email is found. Verification costs 0.25 credits per lead. Credits expire two months after purchase on monthly plans and one year after on annual plans.

Instantly vs lemlist: which is better?

Instantly is cheaper for high-volume email because it allows unlimited inboxes without per-seat or per-inbox fees. lemlist costs more per user but puts email, LinkedIn and calls in one sequence. Choose Instantly for email at scale and lemlist for multichannel outreach by a small team.

Yes, it is an established, bootstrapped company founded in 2021 and widely used for cold email. Its Trustpilot rating is currently hidden over fake reviews, and many remaining complaints are about billing and renewals, so start on a monthly plan and track your subscriptions.

Instantly review

The cheapest way to send cold email at volume, as long as you read the billing terms

Cold email software that lets you connect unlimited inboxes, warms them up, and rotates sending across them

4.0/5 · The Marketing Tool Reviews Desk · Updated 2026-10-14

The short answer

Instantly sends cold email campaigns from as many inboxes as you connect, with warmup included and no per-inbox fee, and sells a B2B lead database on a separate credit plan. It suits founders, agencies and SDR teams whose outbound is mainly email. The sending product is strong value; the add-on subscriptions and the billing complaints are what to watch.

Pick it if

Your outbound is email-first and you plan to spread volume across many inboxes. Unlimited accounts and warmup are included on every outreach plan.
You run an agency or several brands and need one place to rotate dozens of sending accounts.
You want to buy a list, verify it and send to it without stitching three tools together.
You are a solo founder testing outbound for under $100 a month.

Skip it if

LinkedIn steps, calls or WhatsApp need to sit in the same sequence as your emails. lemlist does multichannel; Instantly is about email.
You want deep per-row research before sending. Pair a research tool like Clay with it, or use Clay alone.
You cannot keep an eye on renewals and subscriptions. Billing surprises are the most common complaint in public reviews.

What you are buying

Instantly is several products sold as separate subscriptions. Outreach is the sender: campaigns, inbox rotation, warmup and the Unibox where replies land. Credits buys access to its lead database, which the pricing page puts at 450M+ B2B contacts, plus verification and enrichment. Bundles combine the two at a small discount. Website visitor tracking, a CRM, inbox placement testing and done-for-you email accounts are sold separately again.

The core idea is the one that made cold email tools popular: no single mailbox should send much, so you connect many and let the tool share the load. Instantly does not charge per inbox, which is the reason agencies and high-volume senders pick it.

Deliverability: what the tool does and what you still have to do

Warmup runs inside Instantly's network and the defaults are sensible: start at one warmup email a day, add one a day, cap at 10 for new accounts, with a 30% reply rate. The help center is explicit that the slow ramp should never be skipped on a new account. Warmup mail does not count toward your sending limits, so keep it running after campaigns start.

For campaigns, Instantly's own guidance is 30 emails per inbox per day for normal mailboxes (20 for its AirMail inboxes), with the campaign limit set to inboxes times 30. That number is the one to plan around. Ten inboxes at 30 a day over 22 working days is about 6,600 emails a month, which tells you how many inboxes, and how many domains to hold them, you need before you pick a plan.

What Instantly cannot do for you is choose good domains, write emails people want and keep your list clean. Use secondary domains rather than your main one, verify every list before it goes in, and treat the inbox placement test as a pre-launch check rather than an optional extra.

The lead database and its credits

SuperSearch charges 1 credit for a verified email Instantly finds itself and 2 for one sourced from a partner, with nothing charged when no verified email turns up. Verification is 0.25 credits a lead. In practice the help center's average is about 1.5 credits per verified email, so the $47 Growth Credits plan (1,500 credits) is roughly 1,000 contacts a month.

Two things to know. Credits expire, two months after purchase on monthly plans and a year on annual plans. And the outreach plans cap uploaded contacts as well as emails sent, at 1,000 on the cheapest plan, so a large imported list can push you up a tier even if your send volume is low.

The trust question

Instantly's Trustpilot page does not show a score: Trustpilot says the rating is unavailable due to a breach of its guidelines and that it removed fake reviews. Among the reviews that remain, the recurring complaints are renewals people say they did not expect, a separately billed CRM subscription one reviewer did not knowingly buy, and support that starts with a bot. The company replies to most of them, and some reviewers report refunds after escalating.

None of that changes what the sender does well, but it changes how you should buy it. Start monthly, note every subscription you add, and set a calendar reminder before each renewal.

What it gets right

Unlimited email accounts and warmup on every outreach plan, so adding inboxes to stay under per-inbox limits costs nothing extra in Instantly.
Clear, conservative sending guidance in the docs: 30 campaign emails per inbox per day, warmup on, slow ramp for new accounts.
Built-in lead database charged only when a verified email is found.
Low entry price: outreach starts at $47 a month, or $37.60 a month billed annually.
Done-for-you Google inboxes at $5 a month each, with DNS records configured in 24 to 72 hours.

Where it falls short

Several separately billed products (outreach, credits, CRM, visitor tracking), which makes the real monthly bill easy to lose track of.
Trustpilot has withheld Instantly's score over fake reviews, and the remaining reviews focus on renewals and hard-to-reach support.
Replying from the Unibox is listed as a feature of higher tiers, and users report being asked to upgrade to reply.
Email only. No LinkedIn or call steps in sequences.
The pricing page contradicts itself in places, for example listing Hypergrowth at both 125,000 and 100,000 emails a month.

Instantly pricing

Checked October 2026. Prices change, so confirm on Instantly's pricing page before you buy.

Free option: You can start free with no credit card. The pricing page does not state the trial length or limits.

Outreach Growth $47/mo monthly, $37.60/mo annual 5,000 emails and 1,000 uploaded contacts a month, unlimited accounts and warmup

Outreach Hypergrowth $97/mo monthly, $77.60/mo annual Up to 125,000 emails (100,000 in the comparison table) and 25,000 uploaded contacts a month, premium live support

Outreach Light Speed $358/mo monthly, $286.30/mo annual 500,000 emails and 100,000 uploaded contacts a month, SISR deliverability system

Growth Credits $47/mo monthly 1,500 lead database credits a month, waterfall enrichment, CRM export. Larger credit plans run from $97 for 5,000 to $1,700 for 200,000

Bundles Starter $94/mo, Scale $194/mo, Agency $555/mo (about 10% less annually) Outreach plus credits. Scale adds the AI Reply Agent and Unibox replies

What you will actually pay

The plan price is the smallest part. A founder sending about 5,000 emails a month needs eight or so inboxes at Instantly's 30-a-day guidance; through Instantly's done-for-you Google accounts that is about $40 a month, plus registering two or three secondary domains. Add Outreach Growth at $47 and Growth Credits at $47 if you need the database, and a realistic starting bill is around $135 a month. Anyone who wants to reply from the Unibox or use the reply agent should price the Scale bundle at $194 instead. Annual billing saves roughly 10 to 20% but locks you in, which, given the billing complaints, is worth doing only once you are sure.

Your first week with Instantly

If you sign up today, do these in this order.

Register two or three secondary domains (variations of your brand, never your main domain) and create two or three inboxes on each, either through your own Google Workspace or Instantly's done-for-you accounts, which arrive with SPF, DKIM and DMARC set.
Connect every inbox and switch warmup on with the default settings: increase per day 1, daily limit 10, reply rate 30%. Do not tick disable slow warmup on a new account.
While the inboxes warm (most teams wait around two weeks before sending), build your first list in SuperSearch or import your own, and run verification on it at 0.25 credits a lead.
Write a three to five email sequence, as Instantly's academy recommends, and turn on the skip hostile prospects and unlikely to reply settings. Send yourself a test to check variables and links.
Set each account's daily limit to 30 and the campaign limit to the number of inboxes times 30. Leave warmup running; it does not count toward either limit.
Run an inbox placement test, launch to a small slice of the list, and check replies and bounces daily before releasing the rest. Put the renewal date of every subscription you took out in your calendar.

Gotchas to know before you commit

Outreach, lead credits, the CRM and visitor tracking are separate subscriptions. Reviewers report being charged for ones they did not realise were active.
Lead credits expire, two months after purchase on monthly plans and one year on annual plans.
Plans cap uploaded contacts as well as emails sent. The cheapest plan allows 1,000 uploaded contacts, which a single imported list can exceed.
Unibox replies are listed with the Scale bundle, and users say they were asked to upgrade to reply from inside Instantly.
Instantly's own pricing page has conflicting figures in places, so confirm limits in the app before you rely on them.

Verdict

For email-only outbound, Instantly is the best value sender in this group: unlimited inboxes and warmup on a $47 plan is hard to beat, and the deliverability guidance in its docs is sensible and specific. It gets a 4 rather than more because buying it takes care. The product is split into separate subscriptions, the pricing page disagrees with itself, and the public complaints about billing are frequent enough that Trustpilot stopped showing a score. Buy it monthly, track what you subscribe to, and it will do the job.

4.0/5

Instantly alternatives

SmartleadPick it instead if you want a comparable unlimited-inbox cold email sender and prefer its interface or pricing. It is the tool most often weighed against Instantly.
lemlist ReviewedPick it instead if LinkedIn steps and calls need to run in the same sequence as your emails.
Clay ReviewedPick it alongside Instantly, not instead, if your lists need real research per row before they are worth sending to.
Apollo.ioPick it instead if you want a larger contact database with sequencing included and lower volume needs.

Instantly questions, answered

How much does Instantly cost?: As of October 2026, Instantly's Outreach plans start at $47/month ($37.60/month billed annually) for 5,000 emails and 1,000 uploaded contacts. Hypergrowth is $97/month and Light Speed $358/month. Lead database credits are a separate subscription starting at $47/month for 1,500 credits, and bundles combining both start at $94/month.
How many emails per day should I send per inbox with Instantly?: Instantly's help center recommends 30 campaign emails per inbox per day for standard mailboxes and up to 20 for its AirMail inboxes. Set the campaign limit to the number of inboxes times that figure. Warmup emails do not count toward the limit.
How do Instantly lead credits work?: A verified email found by Instantly costs 1 credit, one from a partner provider costs 2, and nothing is charged if no verified email is found. Verification costs 0.25 credits per lead. Credits expire two months after purchase on monthly plans and one year after on annual plans.
Instantly vs lemlist: which is better?: Instantly is cheaper for high-volume email because it allows unlimited inboxes without per-seat or per-inbox fees. lemlist costs more per user but puts email, LinkedIn and calls in one sequence. Choose Instantly for email at scale and lemlist for multichannel outreach by a small team.
Is Instantly legit?: Yes, it is an established, bootstrapped company founded in 2021 and widely used for cold email. Its Trustpilot rating is currently hidden over fake reviews, and many remaining complaints are about billing and renewals, so start on a monthly plan and track your subscriptions.