ListarProductsPricingToolsSign in

Cost per usable contact: what B2B mobile data really costs

Updated

Published prices for a thousand B2B mobile numbers run from roughly $102 to $936 depending on the vendor, and several of the largest publish no price at all. Neither end of that range tells you what you are spending.

The number that matters is price divided by your right-person rate. On the best-documented public benchmark available, the strongest single provider reached the right person on 51% of contacts. At that rate, a number advertised at $0.50 costs you $1.00. Your real unit is cost per usable contact, and almost nobody sells on it.

The published prices, and what they are

The most transparent public comparison recomputes vendor pricing on a single basis: cheapest publicly purchasable annual plan, divided by credits granted, multiplied by credits charged per phone number.

Vendor Cost per 1,000 mobiles Credits charged per number
LeadMagic $102.08 5
Apollo $156.80 8
Findymail $165.00 10
Prospeo $185.00 10
Cleanlist AI $493.33 10
Lusha $935.63 10

Read that table with three caveats, all of which the publisher discloses and most people who quote it drop.

It is published by Cleanlist AI, whose own product appears in it. Eight vendors in the wider index are companies Cleanlist pays for data. And the Lusha figure was corrected on the day of publication from $468.12 to $935.63, a factor of two, which tells you how much of this depends on reading credit definitions correctly rather than on the prices themselves.

Two of its credit counts differ from the vendors' own documentation, checked on 10 November 2026. Apollo charges 8 credits for a returned mobile on top of 1 for the record, so 9 per person. Lusha lists 5 credits per phone reveal in its app and extension, which is the basis of the original $468.12 figure: the two Lusha numbers come from two credit rules, not two prices.

We cite it anyway, because it does the one thing almost no vendor roundup does: it publishes the formula, so you can check the arithmetic. That is a higher standard than the unsourced percentages circulating elsewhere.

ZoomInfo, Cognism and SalesIntel are absent from any computable table because they publish no self-serve price. Buyers report entry points around $15,000 a year, and quotes near $24,000 for two seats. Treat those as reported, not published.

Why the advertised price is not the price

Because a number delivered is not a number that reaches the person you meant to reach.

The best-documented public test on this ran in June 2026: 1,400 US contacts pushed through 10 providers, 3,446 numbers returned, line type checked with Trestle, line holder checked with IPQS, and an exact name match required before a number counted as the right person.

What was measured Result
Best single provider, right-person reach 51% of contacts
Two providers combined 60% of contacts
All ten providers combined 68% of contacts
Cost per right-person number, lowest $0.11
Cost per right-person number, median around $0.40
Cost per right-person number, highest $1.27

The highest figure, ZoomInfo at $1.27, is described by the author as an estimate obtained through a borrowed account rather than a billed rate. Take it as an order of magnitude, not a quotable price.

Its limits are worth stating: a US sample, a single pass, and subgroups of 100 to 200 contacts the author himself calls small. It gives you a solid order of magnitude, not a truth about your market.

The calculation

cost per usable contact  =  price per number  /  right-person rate

That is the whole thing. It reorders the market immediately.

Scenario Price per number Right-person rate Cost per usable contact
Cheap vendor, market-average quality $0.15 50% $0.30
Mid-price vendor, strong quality $0.50 90% $0.56
Premium vendor, market-average quality $1.00 55% $1.82

A vendor three times more expensive per number can come out cheaper per conversation. The ranking flips the moment you change the denominator, and it is the only ranking that predicts meetings booked.

The cost nobody invoices

Wrong numbers do not just waste credits, they waste the most expensive hour in the company.

A benchmark of more than 175,000 logged calls in 2025 attributes 13.5% of no-meeting call outcomes to a wrong person or wrong number. The author of the June benchmark models what that costs: roughly $53,000 a year for a team of ten reps, about $5,300 per rep, on published assumptions of 50 calls a day, one number in four reaching the wrong person, and an $85,000 salary.

That is a model, not a field measurement. But the one assumption that could be wrong, the error rate, is the one he measured himself.

Credits, contracts and the two policies that move your real price

Two line items in a contract change cost per usable contact more than the headline rate does.

Whether you are charged for misses. A vendor that charges a credit whether or not it finds a number, or whether or not the number is right, is quietly raising your unit cost by the inverse of its hit rate. Ask for the policy in writing: no find, no charge is common; wrong person, no charge is rare and is a real signal about how confident the vendor is in its own verification.

Whether you can leave. Annual commitments with 60-day cancellation notice, automatic renewal without a reminder, and renewal uplifts in the 10 to 15% range are standard in this market and are the single most common complaint from buyers who have been through one cycle. A month-to-month vendor at a higher sticker price can be cheaper over two years than an annual contract you cannot exit.

Neither of these shows up in any pricing comparison, including the one above.

Market figures you should not reuse

While researching this page we found four widely quoted numbers that do not survive a source check. If a vendor quotes one at you, ask where it comes from.

Figure Attributed to Problem
Connect rate benchmark of 15 to 25% A widely cited enrichment vendor's guide The page attributes it only to "many outbound teams". No study, no sample, no method
Data decay of 25 to 35% a year The same page Attributed to "vendor and analyst commentary" without naming a source
25 to 30% decay a year ZoomInfo Presented as an industry benchmark with no source or method
44.63% answer rate Saleshandy Four to five times every benchmark with a described sample. Composition undisclosed

One more worth flagging because it is the most quoted claim in the category: a leading vendor reports that human-verified numbers reach the right person 45% of the time against 18% for standard mobiles, and describes that as a 3x improvement. An 18 to 45 point move is 2.5x. The direction is almost certainly right. The arithmetic is not.

Where Listar stands

Our published rate is €0.50 excluding VAT per mobile number, falling to €0.20 at volume.

On our own data, 95% of delivered mobiles were confirmed as attached to the right person: 10,000 real calls across 100 separate files of 100 numbers each, between May and September 2026, internal and not audited, with numbers delivered as the denominator.

That puts our cost per usable contact at €0.53 excluding VAT. At the 60% right-person rate the June benchmark measures for a two-provider setup, the same €0.50 list price would cost €0.83 per usable contact.

We are not the cheapest number on the market. The June benchmark measures LeadMagic at $0.11 per right-person number, which is below us. What we are selling is the gap between the advertised price and the real one: 5% in our case against 67% at the market rate.

Two comparability caveats. That benchmark is a US sample, ours is French. And it verifies the line holder by querying a third-party database, where we verify by calling. Both measure the same attachment, by different methods, on different markets.

The four questions to put on any quote

  1. What is your right-person rate, measured how, on what denominator, and on what date?
  2. Am I charged when nothing is found, and when the number reaches the wrong person?
  3. What is the commitment term, the notice period and the renewal uplift?
  4. Will you run your own method against a sample I choose, before I sign?

FAQ

What should I expect to pay per usable mobile number? The best public measurement puts the median around $0.40 per right-person number, with a spread from $0.11 to $1.27 across ten providers. Compute your own figure from your own test rather than adopting a market median.

Is it worth paying for a second provider? Per number, often yes. The June benchmark shows a second provider lifting right-person reach from 51% to 60%, with ten providers plateauing at 68%. Where that stops paying depends on your average deal size.

Does a no-find-no-charge policy protect me? It protects you when nothing is found. It does not protect you when a number is found and belongs to someone else, which the benchmark puts at roughly a quarter of cases.

Why do vendor price comparisons disagree so much? Because credits charged per phone number vary from 5 to 10 between vendors, and because most comparisons mix self-serve rates with negotiated enterprise pricing. The Lusha figure in the table above was corrected by a factor of two on its publication day for exactly this reason.

How do I compare a credit-based vendor to a per-seat one? Convert both to cost per usable contact at your own volume. A per-seat licence divided by the usable numbers your team actually works through in a year is the only basis on which the two are comparable.

Sources

All guides

Listar AI