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.

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.

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 $49 seat fee is mostly the absence of database licensing and a sales team.

Export domains from Apollo to CSV, then paste the list or upload the file into Contact Finder. Kustiq returns up to 3 SMTP-verified contacts per company, 1.00 credit per company. A list of a few hundred accounts finishes in minutes. HubSpot pipelines that already point at Apollo can keep their schema; the Kustiq HubSpot integration writes into the same fields.

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.

5 seats on Apollo Basic, billed annually, is $2,940 / 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 126 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.

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.

Three reasons come up over and over in the accounts that land on this page.

The seat fee compounds. Apollo Basic is $49/seat/mo billed annually, so a 5-person team commits $2,940 a year before anyone runs a search, and the bill rises with every hire whether or not the new person uses the tool.

Credits are seat-based. Basic grants 30,000 unified credits per seat per year upfront. Emails cost 1 credit and phone numbers cost 8, so phone-heavy workflows consume the same pool faster.

Bounce shows up after you paid. Apollo verifies with a confidence score at lookup time; Sparkle's 450-lead test measured a 13.3% verifier bounce on Apollo output. A bounced send costs sender reputation on top of the wasted credit, which is why Kustiq runs a live SMTP handshake before a contact is ever returned.

If your motion is genuine volume outbound (8,000+ emails a month across a real SDR team), those trade-offs can still be worth it, and we say so in the FAQ above. The teams that leave are the ones paying volume prices for a shortlist workflow.