Know the company, not just the contact. 20 fields per credit, no seat fee.Apollo is a 275M-record contact database with built-in sequences. Kustiq profiles, classifies, and scores companies before you reach out. Apollo tells you who works there. Kustiq tells you what they do, whether they fit your ICP, and how to approach them.
§1The short version
Kustiq differs from Apollo in three ways most procurement reviews care about.
- Per-credit pricing with no seat fees. Kustiq bills $0.15 to $0.30 per company profile, paid only when a profile is generated. Apollo Basic is $59 per seat per month billed annually, before usage credits.
- AI ICP scoring 0-100 with rule-based disqualifiers. Every Kustiq profile carries a fit score and the rules that drove it. Apollo offers a basic lead-score field that requires the Pro tier and manual rule setup.
- Churn-risk signal on every profile. Kustiq returns a 90-day churn-risk score sourced from public hiring, leadership-change, and pricing-page signals. Apollo does not produce a churn signal.
The right call depends on volume. Below 5 SDRs sending under 4,000 emails a month, Kustiq's per-credit math wins. Above that, Apollo's per-record amortization beats us. Most teams we see run both — Kustiq scores which 50 accounts matter, Apollo handles the sequencing volume.
§2The price anchor
- Apollo Basic
- $59 / seat / mo · billed annually · 4,800 mobile credits / yr · 36,000 export credits / yr.
- Apollo Pro
- $99 / seat / mo · billed annually · adds sequences and outbound dialer.
- Kustiq Pro
- $119 / mo total · 800 credits · effective
$0.15per profile at full use. - Free tier
- Kustiq · 3 profiles a week, signed in. Apollo · 50 mobile credits / 6 mo.
| Tool | Per-contact cost | Per-seat fee | Verification quality |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kustiq | $0.15 to $0.30 | $0 | SMTP handshake on every contact |
| Apollo | Bundled in seat (4,800 mobile + 36,000 export credits / yr) | $59 / seat / mo | Catch-all aware, separate credit on send |
| ZoomInfo | ~ $1.00 / record | $15k / yr / seat | Confidence score, no SMTP handshake |
Apollo and ZoomInfo prices verified against published pricing pages on 2026-05-09. Apollo Basic was $49/seat through 2025-Q3, raised to $59/seat on 2025-10-01; Apollo Pro at $99/seat/mo verified the same day. Kustiq pricing is the public Pro tier at full credit utilization.
Comparison page for Apollo.
§3Where the products diverge
0-100 score with rule-based disqualifiers, on every profile.
Score, the rules that drove the score, and the disqualifiers a human can override. Lives on every profile, not behind a tier.
Basic lead-score field, Pro tier required.
Numeric score on contact records once a customer wires the rules manually. Not on every record by default.
90-day churn-risk score on every account.
Sourced from public hiring, leadership-change, and pricing-page signals. Used to skip dead accounts before outreach starts.
Not offered.
Apollo focuses on contact discovery. Account health is left to your BI stack.
On-demand, no rented contact list.
Profiles are generated from public sources at the moment a customer asks. Nothing is pre-rented or pre-cached.
275M-record contact rental, seat-licensed.
The contact universe is the product. Per-seat pricing is the access fee to the rental.
SMTP handshake on every contact.
Real handshake to the recipient MX. No catch-all hedging. Verified status returned with the profile, no separate charge.
Catch-all-aware confidence score, separate credits on send.
Confidence percentage at lookup time. Verified send is a separate per-message credit on Pro tier and above.
Targeted Outreach · 5-phase prospect on demand.
One prospect, profile + warm-cause + draft + verified contact. Designed for 16 a week, not 8,000 a month.
Multi-channel sequences with dialer.
High-volume sequencing, A/B steps, mailbox warm-up, dialer. The reason most teams pay the seat fee.
Founders and 2-10 person GTM teams.
"Which 50 accounts this quarter" workflows. Per-account intelligence, not per-contact volume.
SDR teams running volume outbound.
10+ seat motions where contact universe access and sequencing tools are the core spend.
§4What Kustiq has, today
§5Kustiq pricing in full
- Free $0
- 3 profiles a week, signed in. No card. Anonymous: 1 per week. Outreach not included.
- Insight $39 / mo
- 200 credits. ~ 12 weeks of solo prospecting at the typical 16-profile-a-week pace.
$0.20effective per profile. - Pro $119 / mo
- 800 credits. Targeted Outreach included. HubSpot 2-way sync.
$0.15effective per profile at full use. - Extra credits $0.30 ea
- Top-up at any time, no expiry. Counts toward the same monthly cap as plan credits. No seat fees, ever.
§6Other Apollo alternatives we compete with
§7Six questions, six intents
01 · Real?Is Kustiq a real Apollo alternative?
Kustiq replaces the workflow most teams actually use Apollo for: pulling a shortlist of accounts, scoring them by ICP fit, and getting one good contact per account. Outbound at 8,000+ emails a month is not a Kustiq use case. For company-level prioritization, Kustiq returns the same answer in 60 seconds for a fraction of the seat fee.
02 · Catch?What is the catch · why is Kustiq cheaper?
No rented 275M-row contact database. We charge per profile, $0.15 to $0.30. If you need to browse a contact universe at will, we're not it.
Kustiq runs on Anthropic, Supabase, and a small set of public-data primitives. The spread between $0.30 and a $59 seat fee is mostly the absence of database licensing and a sales team.
03 · MigrateCan I migrate my Apollo data to Kustiq?
Export domains from Apollo to CSV, then drop the file into Targeted Outreach. Kustiq re-profiles each company with a fresh ICP score, churn-risk signal, and SMTP-verified contact. Most migrations finish inside an hour for a list of a few hundred accounts. HubSpot pipelines that already point at Apollo can keep their schema; the Kustiq HubSpot integration writes into the same fields.
04 · MissingIs Kustiq missing anything Apollo has?
Apollo's database, sequencer, and dialer are real products in their own right. The 275M-row contact universe, the multi-channel sequence engine with the built-in dialer, the native LinkedIn extension scraping — those are what the seat fee buys, and Kustiq doesn't try to compete with any of them. Most teams keep Apollo for the volume side and use Kustiq for ICP scoring and account-tier intelligence.
05 · PricingHow does Kustiq pricing compare to Apollo at 5 seats?
5 seats on Apollo Basic, billed annually, is $3,540 / yr before usage. 5 users on Kustiq Pro is $119 / mo · $1,428 / yr, with no seat fee on top. The break-even between Pro and Apollo Basic is roughly 176 profiles per month. Typical 2-10 person GTM teams profile 60 to 120.
For volume outbound (8,000+ contacts a month), the math flips. Apollo's per-record cost amortizes lower than Kustiq's per-profile cost. The right answer is usually both, sized to the workflow.
06 · Both?Can I use Kustiq and Apollo together?
This is the most common pattern in our customer base. Kustiq scores accounts and writes ICP-fit + churn-risk back to HubSpot. Apollo runs the contact-discovery and sequencing layer for the accounts that pass the score. Both write to the same HubSpot company and contact records, so SDRs see one view, not two.
Profile a company free. No card, no scheduled call.
Profile your top 50 accounts in /try, score them by ICP, see what your seat-fee bill is actually paying for. Less than ten minutes. Free tier is 3 profiles a week, no card up front.