Every B2B data vendor sells you a number that is not the number you should be deciding on. Lusha sells credits. What you actually buy is dials, and the exchange rate between the two is the most important line on the pricing page — except it is not on the pricing page.
The rate is simple. A verified email costs 1 credit. A phone number costs 5. Everything downstream of that ratio decides whether Lusha is cheap or expensive for your team, and the answer is genuinely different depending on whether you are an emailer or a caller.
Do the division before you sign anything
Lusha Pro advertises 7,200 credits per year. Read that as 7,200 emails, or 1,440 phone numbers, or any blend in between. Premium advertises 40,800 credits per year — 8,160 phone numbers if you spend it all on dials.
Now price it. Pro is $69.90/month month-to-month, or $52.45/month billed annually, and includes two seats. Take the annual figure: $629 a year for 1,440 phone numbers is about $0.44 per number. That is a defensible price for a direct dial to a decision maker. It is a terrible price for a number that rings a desk phone nobody has sat at since 2020.
The distinction matters because Lusha does not refund a credit when the record is stale. You pay for the miss at the same rate as the hit, which means your real cost per usable number is the list price divided by your own hit rate — not by 1,440.
What the accuracy numbers do and do not tell you
Lusha publishes about 290-300 million verified contacts and more than 26 million companies, and claims roughly 98% email accuracy and around 86% phone accuracy, refreshed daily. Those are vendor figures, and they are aggregate figures, which is the part that catches people out.
An 86% global average is compatible with 93% in the United States and something far worse in a market the crawler barely touches. Experienced SDRs selling into North America and Western Europe report reaching decision makers on roughly 40-50% of Lusha-sourced numbers, which is a strong result for cold outbound. The same teams selling into Asia-Pacific report a materially different experience.
So the honest way to read the claim is: treat 86% as a description of Lusha's strongest markets, and treat your own connect rate on 20 real dials as the only figure that governs your budget.
The three ways teams waste credits
Almost every complaint about credit burn traces back to one of three habits, and all three are avoidable.
- Revealing phones by default. If a contact is going into an email sequence, the phone number is a 5-credit purchase you may never use. Reveal emails in bulk, reveal phones only for accounts you have decided to call.
- Careless bulk uploads. Bulk CSV enrichment draws from the same shared pool as the extension. One 2,000-row upload with phones enabled can spend a small team's entire quarter in a single click.
- No workspace rules. Credits are pooled across seats. Without a stated policy, the most enthusiastic rep on the team spends the quiet ones' budget, and nobody notices until the pool is empty in month eight of a twelve-month allocation.
Where the money is actually well spent
None of this makes Lusha a bad buy. The Chrome extension is genuinely the fastest path from "I found this person on LinkedIn" to "I am dialling them" — no export, no CSV, no tab switch. For a rep who lives in Sales Navigator, that is worth real money in recovered minutes.
The other underused feature is job-change alerts. When a saved contact moves to a new company, you get a warm reason to reach out to someone who already knows your product, at a moment when they are actively rebuilding their stack. It is the highest-converting outbound trigger most teams never turn on, and it costs nothing extra to enable.
The verdict, in the only unit that matters
Our 361 score for Lusha is 8.1/10, and the shape of that score is deliberate: 8.9 for ease of use, 8.2 for features, but 7.6 for value and 7.4 for support. The product is excellent. The commercial terms are where you have to be careful — particularly the annual contract, which is difficult to downgrade mid-term.
Price it in dials, size the plan against your real phone-to-email mix, and get the credit allocation and downgrade terms in writing before you sign. Do that and Lusha is one of the better-value data providers on the market. Skip it and you will discover the exchange rate in month four.