What a Lusha credit actually buys

Lusha prices everything in credits, and the plan card leaves out the exchange rate. An email costs 1 credit. A phone number costs 5. Ask for both on one contact and it costs up to 6, while re-opening a contact you already revealed is free. Lusha's docs say those rates are the same on every plan, so a bigger plan buys more credits, not cheaper phone numbers.

The Free plan's 40 monthly credits buy 8 phone numbers. Starter's 400 buy 80, Pro's 600 buy 120 and Premium's 3,400 buy 680. At Starter's monthly price of $49.90, each direct dial costs about $0.62, and that is before anything goes wrong.

The second bill arrives in the Workspace, the table view where lists get built. CSV export costs 1 credit per 25 rows, and the docs state plainly that exporting a table you have already revealed still costs 1 credit per 25 rows. A 2,000-row list you paid to reveal costs another 80 credits to download. The Data Waterfall, which asks third-party providers when Lusha has nothing, charges 8 credits for a confirmed phone and 2 for a confirmed work email (unmatched rows are free). Every API request costs at least 1 credit, even one that returns nothing.

Plans and pricing

The prices below come from the structured data on Lusha's pricing page (last modified 11 October 2026), checked on 15 November 2026. The page does not say whether a price is per user or per account, and anyone with more than five users is sent to sales. The middle plan is "Professional" on the pricing page and "Pro" in the docs.

The plan decides more than the credit count. The API exists on every plan, but Free and Starter get strict rate limits and full access starts at Pro. The Data Waterfall is Pro and above. SSO is Scale-only, and so is the full unredacted SOC 2 report unless your account has spent over $10,000. HubSpot and Salesforce connect on every plan, Free included. For a team that wants the waterfall and an API it can actually script against, the real entry price is Pro at $69.90, not Starter.

Signing up for Free needs no card, but it does need a company address: Lusha rejects Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and other public domains. One seat, no CSV export.

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Rollover, renewals and the credits you lose

Monthly plans are the forgiving ones. Unused credits roll over to the next month, up to twice your monthly allowance, and a monthly plan can be frozen for one or two months, up to twice a year.

Annual plans pay for their discount here. Credits "do not roll over under any circumstances", in the FAQ's words, and unused credits are forfeited even if you renew. Cancel any plan and, when the cycle ends and the account drops to Free, every remaining credit is gone. Renewal is automatic and the cancellation cut-off is 24 hours before the renewal date. Scale and Enterprise customers cannot cancel or switch off auto-renewal themselves at all - only their account manager can.

Bad data is your loss too: credits go at the moment of reveal, so a dead number is not refunded automatically, only case by case - and using credits while a refund is pending cancels the refund.

Trustpilot reflects this. Lusha scored 1.1 out of 5 from 783 reviews when checked on 15 November 2026, 57% of them one-star. Customers mostly complain about credits vanishing after cancellation or renewal and unexpected auto-renewal charges of several hundred dollars. Many other one-star reviews come from people who found their own phone number in Lusha, not from customers.

The new part: scores, buying groups and an MCP server

Lusha spent August to November 2026 turning a contact lookup into a prospecting layer. Its release log lists Signal Score and an Opportunity Conversion Score on 10 August (a 0-100 score trained on your own CRM data, still in beta), Buying Group on 17 August, ICP Fit Score on 12 October and CRM AutoSync on 26 October. AutoSync updates Salesforce and HubSpot records but writes only the changes a user approves. Intent signals on about 18,000 topics followed on 14 October.

The part that matters for AI workflows is the MCP server, which Lusha offers on every plan, Free included. Claude and ChatGPT connect through the official connector with OAuth; n8n, Cursor and other clients use the remote server at mcp.lusha.com with an API key. There is also an "Anthropic verified" Lusha plugin in Claude's directory, which had 275 installs on 15 November 2026.

The catch is the same exchange rate. MCP calls draw from the same credit pool, so an agent asked to "find the VP of Sales and their mobile" at ten accounts spends 60 credits - more than the Free plan's entire month. The MCP server is a cheap way to see whether an agent workflow suits you. It is not a cheap way to run one.

For sending, the web app has Engage: email sequences capped at 1,000 emails per user per day and 10 active sequences. The MCP server and API do not send anything.

Where the data comes from, and the Italian fine

Lusha's own figures, as of October 11, 2026: 515 million-plus business contacts, 29 million-plus companies, 165 million verified emails and 117 million verified phone numbers. It claims 98% email accuracy and 85% (US) or 86% (global) phone accuracy. It publishes regional email accuracy (97% EMEA, 96% APAC) but no regional phone figure, which is the number a European team most needs. One third-party test on dev.to, comparing Lusha with Kaspr across DACH, Benelux and the Nordics, reported spending roughly 22% of its credit budget on numbers that did not work. One test, but the only European one we found.

On sourcing, Lusha lists four channels: the opt-in Lusha Community, licensed partner directories, publicly available business information and its own pattern analysis. It says it does not scrape professional networks or social platforms and does not buy from data brokers. The Community is the unusual one: free users connect their Gmail or Outlook and share their network's contact details in exchange for a one-time 200 credits plus 150 a month. Only free users can join. That is how people land in the database without ever hearing of Lusha.

Italy's data protection authority, the Garante, came to a different conclusion. According to reports of its decision dated 14 July 2026, it fined Lusha Systems Inc. EUR 2 million (about $2.3 million) and found that the data was gathered by web scraping of social media and by purchases from other data brokers. It rejected legitimate interest as a legal basis, held that the GDPR applied despite Lusha having no EU establishment because continuously updating records amounts to monitoring, and noted the database held senior officials, police staff and judges. Lusha was ordered to stop processing data on people in Italy and to delete it. Its own facts page now says Italian contact data is not currently available, and we found no public response from the company.

Lusha's SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and ePrivacyseal GDPR certificates cover how data is secured and handled, not whether a regulator accepts how it was collected. With European lists, expect your privacy lead to ask about the legitimate-interest finding. Anyone who wants out can use the removal form at lusha.com/privacy-center/request-removal or email [email protected], one person at a time - there is no bulk removal.

Lusha vs Apollo, Clay, Hunter and ZoomInfo

Apollo.io is the obvious comparison for volume. For hundreds of dials a month, Lusha's 5-credit phone reveal is the expensive route, and Apollo bundles its own sequencer.

Clay has carried Lusha as a verified data provider since March 2026, Lookalike Prospecting included. If you want Lusha's phone numbers but also want a second and third provider checked when Lusha misses, buy the waterfall in Clay instead of stacking Lusha's own 8-credit one. Hunter.io is the answer for a team that never picks up the phone: email is all it does, and Lusha's pricing makes most sense when you need phones. ZoomInfo sits above all of them on depth and contract size; Lusha is what a five-person SDR team buys instead. The wider field is in our B2B lead generation roundup.

Verdict: who should buy Lusha, and who should skip it

Buy it if you run a small SDR team selling into the US or UK, you need direct dials in the tens a month rather than the hundreds, and you want to try an MCP or Claude workflow against real contact data without a sales call. Start monthly, freeze it in quiet months, and diary the renewal date.

Skip it if phone volume is the job - Apollo gives you more to dial for the money. Skip it if your lists are European or your buyers' legal teams read GDPR decisions; Hunter for email-only, or Clay to compare several providers, leaves you less exposed to one vendor's sourcing. And skip the annual discount unless you are sure you will spend every credit, because Lusha keeps the ones you do not.

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