What Snov.io actually is

Most tools in this corner of the market pick a lane. Hunter finds and verifies email addresses and stops there. Instantly sends cold email at volume and does little else. Snov.io refuses to choose. It is a B2B sales platform that finds leads, verifies them, warms up your mailbox, runs multi-step outreach sequences, and drops replies into a built-in CRM, all behind one login, and at a price that undercuts almost every specialist it competes with.

That "one tool for the whole funnel" pitch is genuinely useful if you are a solo founder or a three-person sales team. You are not stitching a finder, a verifier, a sending platform and a spreadsheet together with Zapier. The trade-off is that a tool doing five jobs rarely does any one of them as well as the specialist that only does that one, and Snov.io is no exception. It is a competent generalist. Where you sit on the "cheap and integrated" versus "best-in-class per function" question decides almost everything about whether it is right for you.

The credit meter runs the show

Ignore the feature list for a moment, because the credit system is the thing you will actually feel every day. Snov.io meters your work in credits and recipients. Recipients cap how many people your campaigns can email in a month. Credits are spent on everything else: finding an email costs a credit, verifying one costs a credit, enriching a record costs credits. They all draw from the same pool.

This is the single most common complaint in Snov.io reviews, and once you use it you understand why. On the Starter plan you get 1,000 credits a month. Verify a list of 400 imported contacts and you have 600 left to actually find new leads. There is no separate, cheaper allowance for verification, which is the low-value, high-volume task you do most. Run a real prospecting week and the meter hits zero well before month-end, at which point you either wait for the reset or buy a top-up. Budget as if your usable credit count is meaningfully lower than the headline number, because in practice it is.

Finding and verifying emails

The email finder searches a database Snov.io reports at over 50 million company profiles, with roughly 15 filters and a domain-search mode that pulls every address it holds for a company. There is a Chrome extension that scrapes contacts off LinkedIn as you browse, plus a bulk mode where you upload a CSV of names and domains and let it run. I opened the free trial to see the first-run experience: 50 credits and 100 recipients, no credit card asked for, which is enough to test the finder on a handful of real prospects before you commit a cent.

The verifier is the stronger half. It runs a multi-step check (syntax, domain, then mailbox) and its results track well against reality, which is why plenty of people pay for Snov.io mainly to clean lists. The finder is more uneven. Reviewers on G2, where the platform sits around 4.6 out of 5 across 350-plus reviews, repeatedly flag that it returns catch-all or stale addresses on a chunk of searches, especially for smaller companies outside the US. You verify your way around that, which quietly spends more credits. It is a workable loop, just not a free one.

Cold outreach, warm-up and LinkedIn

The outreach side is where "all-in-one" earns its keep. You build multi-step sequences with conditional follow-ups (opened, clicked, replied), connect one or several sending mailboxes, and let the campaign run against your recipient allowance. Every paid plan advertises unlimited campaigns, unlimited follow-up steps and unlimited sender accounts, which is unusual, since most sending tools charge per connected mailbox.

Deliverability tooling is built in. Mailbox warm-up gradually ramps sending from new inboxes to build sender reputation, with three warm-up slots on Starter and unlimited slots from the Pro tiers up. That matters, because the recurring deliverability grumble about Snov.io is not about a cold start. It is about the higher send volumes, where inbox placement slips relative to a dedicated sending platform. If your plan is to send a few hundred well-targeted emails a day, it holds up. If your plan is tens of thousands, read the "where it falls down" section before you buy.

One thing the "everything included" framing glosses over: LinkedIn automation is a paid add-on, not part of the plan. It runs about $69 per slot per month billed monthly, dropping to roughly $62 on annual billing, checked in August 2026. Phone and data enrichment is metered separately again, at around $0.02 per token. The base subscription is cheap; the full stack is less cheap than the landing page implies.

Pricing, checked August 2026

Prices below are from the Snov.io pricing page on 11 August 2026, paying monthly. Annual billing knocks roughly 25 to 40% off the effective monthly rate.

• Trial (free): 50 credits, 100 recipients, 1 warm-up slot. Renewable, no card required. Genuinely usable for a quick test.
• Starter, $39/month: 1,000 credits, 5,000 recipients, 3 warm-up slots, unlimited seats, campaigns and senders. About $29 a month if you pay yearly.
• Pro S, $99/month: 5,000 credits, 25,000 recipients, unlimited warm-up. About $74 a month annual. Several intermediate Pro tiers (M and L) scale credits and recipients above this.
• Ultra: the top self-serve tier, around $554 a month effective on annual billing, with 50,000 credits and 100,000 recipients.
• Custom Ultra (quote only): from 200,000 credits, unlimited seats, and the one feature power users actually want: unused credits roll over instead of vanishing at reset.

The headline is that Snov.io is cheap to start. Starter at $39 undercuts a comparable Hunter or Apollo seat, and the unlimited sender accounts are a real saving if you run multiple inboxes. Just price the whole basket: the plan, plus a LinkedIn slot if you need one, plus the credit top-ups you will buy in a busy month.

Where it falls down

Three things, in order of how much they will bother you.

The shared credit pool is the structural one. Because verification and enrichment eat the same credits as finding, the plan you sized for lead-gen keeps getting drained by list hygiene. Tools that separate a large, cheap verification allowance from a smaller finding allowance simply do not have this problem.

Deliverability at volume is the second. Snov.io is fine for measured, targeted sending. Push it toward high-volume cold email and inbox placement is where users report the pain. If that is your whole business model, a platform built only for sending, whether Instantly or Saleshandy, is engineered for exactly that and will place better.

Third, support and billing. The gap between the well-reviewed onboarding and the slower ticket queue when something breaks mid-campaign is a recurring theme, and refund disputes draw some of the loudest reviews. Nothing unusual for a tool at this price, but worth knowing before you hand over an annual payment.

Verdict

Snov.io is the right call for a solo founder, a small B2B sales team, or a lean agency that wants to find, verify, send and lightly manage leads inside one affordable tool, and whose sending is measured rather than mass. At $39 to start, with unlimited sender accounts and a verifier that genuinely works, it does a lot for the money and saves you wiring four separate subscriptions together.

Skip it in three cases. If you send cold email at real volume and live or die on inbox placement, buy a dedicated sender like Instantly or Saleshandy instead. If you need the largest, freshest contact database and rich firmographic filters, Apollo.io holds more data. And if all you actually want is clean, reliable email lookups without the outreach machinery, Hunter does that one job more cleanly and will not nickel-and-dime your credit balance to do it. Snov.io wins on breadth and price, not on being the best at any single thing. For a lot of small teams, breadth at that price is exactly the trade they want.

Start with the free Snov.io trial and spend the 50 credits testing the finder on your own prospects before you pick a plan.