Hunter Prices Credits, Not Seats

Hunter's pricing page, checked on November 9, 2026, says "Unlimited users" on every plan, including Free. That one line changes how a recruiting desk should budget it. You are not buying seats. You are buying a pool of credits that every recruiter on the account draws from. The yearly toggle hands you the whole year's credits up front. The monthly toggle resets them every month, and unused credits do not roll over. Pick the wrong billing mode for your search rhythm and you will either run dry mid-search or throw credits away.

Primary source: Hunter pricing page, yearly and monthly views, accessed November 9, 2026.

The plans in dollars and credits

On yearly billing, which the page labels "-30%":

1. Starter: $34 a month, billed $408 a year, with 24,000 credits per year.
2. Growth: $104 a month, billed $1,248 a year, with 120,000 credits per year.
3. Scale: $209 a month, billed $2,508 a year, with 300,000 credits per year.

On monthly billing:

1. Starter: $49 a month with 2,000 credits a month.
2. Growth: $149 a month with 10,000 credits a month.
3. Scale: $299 a month with 25,000 credits a month.

Free gives 50 credits a month. Enterprise is custom. The yearly discount checks out against the monthly prices. Starter yearly is $408 against $588 for twelve monthly payments, a 30.6% saving. Growth and Scale land at about 30% as well. Those percentages are our arithmetic from the page.

What a credit buys

A tooltip on the page spells out the credit cost: "Email found · 1 credit. Email verified · 0.5 credit." The comparison table says credits are "used for Email Finder, Email Verifier, and Domain Search." We did not see a phone lookup listed anywhere on the page. If your desk needs mobile numbers for candidates, Hunter's plans are not priced for that.

For a recruiter, the practical unit is a found and verified email. At the stated rates that is 1.5 credits if you verify every address you find. Starter monthly, at 2,000 credits, covers roughly 1,333 found-and-verified emails a month. Starter yearly, at 24,000 credits, covers about 16,000 over the year. Again, our arithmetic.

Hunter charges 1 credit for a found email and 0.5 for a verification, and every plan allows unlimited users. Budget the credit pool, not the headcount.

Yearly versus monthly for a search desk

Recruiting volume is lumpy. A retained search can burn through hundreds of lookups in a week, then go quiet while you interview. The monthly plan punishes that pattern: credits reset each month and do not roll over, so a quiet month wastes them and a busy month caps you.

The yearly plan suits it better. The page says, "All credits are available upfront for the whole year." You can spend 8,000 credits in March and 500 in April without losing anything. The trade is commitment: you pay for twelve months at once.

If you are testing Hunter, start monthly for one month on a live search, measure how many credits a search actually uses, then decide. If you already know your volume, yearly is cheaper and more flexible.

Unlimited users cuts both ways

Unlimited users means a five-person desk pays the same plan price as a solo recruiter. That is generous. It also means one heavy user can drain the shared pool for everyone. The page does not mention per-user caps on the self-serve plans. If you add colleagues, agree on who spends credits on what, or the person who needs them on day 25 will find the pool empty.

What else changes between tiers

Connected email accounts go from 1 on Free to 3 on Starter, 10 on Growth, and 20 on Scale. Saved leads go from 100,000 on Free to 2,000,000, 10,000,000, and 30,000,000. Included AI searches in Discover go from 30 a month on Free to 150, 450, and 900. Support moves from regular to priority, with an account manager on Scale. For most recruiting desks, credits and connected mailboxes will decide the tier before anything else does.

Domain Search is the recruiter's shortcut

Domain Search draws from the same credit pool. For recruiters, it is useful when you know the target company but not the person: it shows which email patterns a company uses, so you can work out an address for a hiring manager you found elsewhere. Spend those credits on companies you are actively pitching. Running Domain Search across a long target list will drain a Starter pool fast, and the page does not show a separate allowance for it.

Who should skip this

If phone numbers matter more than email for your candidates, look elsewhere first. If you need native ATS integration for candidate records, the page we read is built around outreach and lead lists, not recruiting workflows. Confirm what syncs with your ATS before buying. If you send fewer than 50 lookups a month, the Free plan may be all you need.

Budget fields

Record the plan, the billing mode, the credit pool and whether it resets, the cost per found-and-verified email at 1.5 credits, the number of users sharing the pool, and the access date. Compare Hunter with other tools on cost per usable email, not on the headline monthly price.