04 Apollo.io Alternatives for Exporters: Real Prices Compared (2026)

Apollo.io is a contact database. If you sell software, that is the whole job. If you export cashews, steel fittings or textiles, it answers the wrong half of the question: it can find you a procurement manager, but it cannot tell you whether that company has ever imported your product. This is a comparison of four tools exporters use instead — TradeAtlas, Snov.io, Cognism and EximAgent — with the prices each vendor publishes, the date I checked them, and an honest note wherever the answer is still unknown.

How I compared these five tools

On 17 and 18 August 2026 I read the public pricing page of every tool in this article and recorded six things for each: entry price, whether a free tier exists, the billing cycle, how many users a plan covers, what an extra unit of usage costs, and what the vendor says its data covers. Where a vendor publishes structured pricing data — Apollo does, inside its own page markup — I took the numbers from there rather than from a screenshot that could be a regional test. Where a vendor publishes nothing, that is reported as a finding, not filled in with a guess.

Two things I could not settle, and I would rather say so than write a number that looks confident:

• Whether Apollo's $49 plan is billed per seat. Apollo sells by seat in practice, but the pricing data on its own page does not say "per user" anywhere I could read it. So the table below says $49/month, not $49/user/month.
• Whether TradeAtlas offers a free trial. Its pricing page lists no trial and no free tier, and the page returned a 403 when I re-checked on 18 August. Absence of a listed trial is not proof there is none — ask their sales team.

One thing this article does not contain, and I would rather name it than let you assume otherwise: a side-by-side run of the same buyer search in all five tools on the same day, counting how many companies each returned and how many of those came with a verified email. That test is worth doing and it has not been done here. Everything below is what each vendor publishes about itself, checked and dated, plus the structural conclusions that follow from it.

What the five tools cost

Every price below was read on the vendor's own pricing page on 17–18 August 2026.

Prices checked 18 August 2026. They change; check the source links before you budget.

Two contrasts do most of the work in this table. The first is that TradeAtlas costs $2,950 a year before you have sent a single email, has no monthly option and lists no free tier, while Apollo, Snov.io and EximAgent all let you start at $0 and pay by the month. For an exporter testing whether outbound works at all, that is the difference between a decision and an experiment. The second is that Apollo's Basic at $49/month and EximAgent's Starter at $50/month sit within a dollar of each other, which makes them genuinely comparable — and comparable at the same price is a more useful comparison than a feature list.

Where Apollo runs out of road for exporters

Apollo's search is firmographic. You filter by industry, job title, company size, location, technology used. Every one of those describes a company as an organisation, and none of them describes a company as a trade counterparty. There is no filter for "imported HS 0801.32 into the United States in the last twelve months", because that fact does not live in a contact database — it lives in customs records, which is a different product bought from different suppliers.

That is why the honest framing is not "Apollo has bad international data". It is that Apollo has a different kind of data. The gap shows up in three specific places for an export team:

• Intent. A procurement manager at a food importer is a plausible lead. A company whose bills of lading show six containers of your product last quarter is a qualified one. Apollo can produce the first and not the second.
• Cost of being wrong. Apollo meters exports — its own documentation describes export credits as applying "when exporting contacts outside of Apollo, such as CSV files, CRM syncs, or API enrichment". Every unqualified company you push into your CRM costs credits as well as reply rate.
• Coverage outside the US and EU. This is the complaint that shows up most often when exporters discuss Apollo alternatives — and it is the one claim here I will not put a number on, because I have not measured it myself and a borrowed number is worth nothing to you.

The practical test costs you nothing: Apollo's free tier and EximAgent's free tier both exist, so run your own product and your own target market through each before you pay either of them.

Apollo.io — the baseline you are comparing against

Apollo publishes four tiers: Free at $0, Basic at $49/month, Professional at $99/month, and Enterprise at contact-for-pricing, which its own description ties to dedicated support, advanced analytics and API access. The free tier is real rather than decorative — enough credits to see whether the database has your market in it before you pay.

What Apollo is genuinely best at is breadth of people and the machinery to contact them: sequences, tracking, a mature integration surface, and a database large enough that most industries are represented somewhere in it. If your buyers are identifiable by job title and industry, Apollo is hard to beat at $49 a month.

Its weakness for exporters is the one above: no customs dimension, and a cost model where pulling contacts out of the system is metered. Budget by how many contacts you will export, not by the sticker price. Check the current numbers on Apollo's pricing page — the tiers above were read on 17 August 2026, and note again that the published data does not state whether the price is per seat.

1. TradeAtlas — the deepest customs data, at an annual-only price

TradeAtlas sells the thing Apollo does not have: shipment records. Its pricing page is organised by how many HS codes you are allowed to watch — Professional covers 15 codes at $2,950 a year, Advanced 25 codes at $4,450, Deluxe 60 codes at $9,950. A second ladder adds AI features at $3,850, $5,750 and $11,000 for the same code counts. Outreach is a separate add-on called Atlas B2B Mail, from $1,500 a year for 20,000 compliance checks and 2,500 emails.

The feature list is where it earns its price. TradeAtlas advertises coverage of all countries and search by HS code, product name, exporter, importer, brand, port of arrival and port of departure — each of those marked "Limitless" on its own page. This is the category where TradeAtlas beats everything else in this article, EximAgent included. If your question is which port your competitor's goods left from and at what average price, no contact database will answer it and TradeAtlas will.

The catch is the shape of the commitment. There is no monthly plan and no free tier listed, so the smallest possible commitment is $2,950 for a year, tied to fifteen HS codes chosen in advance. For a trading company with a fixed product line that is fine. For an exporter still deciding which product to push into which market, choosing your fifteen codes upfront is exactly the decision you cannot yet make. One oddity worth knowing before you read their table: the site uses the European thousands separator, so "2.950 USD" means $2,950.

2. Snov.io — the cheapest way to put a whole team on outreach

Snov.io is an email-finding and campaign tool rather than a trade-data tool, and it competes with Apollo on the outreach half of the job. Its published tiers are Starter, Pro S, Pro M, Pro L and Ultra. The prices displayed on the page — $29.25, $74.25, $141.75, $276.75 and $553.50 a month — are annual-billing prices with a 25% discount applied; the standard monthly equivalents work out to $39, $99, $189, $369 and $738. That distinction matters when you compare it against a competitor's undiscounted price, and the pricing page shows the discount banner plainly.

The genuinely different thing here is seats. Snov.io prices per account with unlimited team seats on paid plans, while EximAgent's agent plans cover one user and Cognism sells in blocks of five. If you have six people who all need access, Snov.io is structurally cheaper than anything else in this comparison, and that is a category EximAgent loses. The free trial gives 50 credits, 100 recipients and one email warm-up slot — enough to test deliverability, not enough to run a campaign.

Two costs sit outside the plan price: LinkedIn automation slots at $69/month each, and sending domains from about $12 a year. Snov.io will not tell you who imports your product; pair it with a data source, or accept that you are prospecting by job title.

3. Cognism — the one that will not tell you the price

Cognism publishes two tiers, Standard and Pro, each including five seats, plus add-ons for CRM enrichment and data-as-a-service delivery. Pro adds mobile numbers, on-demand verification and buying intent. Its credit model is stated simply: one credit reveals one contact.

What it does not publish is a price. I checked the whole pricing page on 17 August 2026 for any currency figure — dollar, pound or euro — and there is none. Every path ends at "talk to sales". That is not a criticism of the data, which has a strong reputation for verified mobile numbers and European coverage; it is a fact about the buying process, and for a small exporter it usually settles the question. If your evaluation has to finish this week without a sales call, Cognism cannot be part of it.

Where it does fit: teams of five or more, in markets where phone-verified contact data is worth paying for, with the patience for a procurement cycle.

4. EximAgent — trade research and outreach on one bill

EximAgent packages the same engine two ways. You can hire an agent — Intern at $29/month or Junior at $249/month, each covering one user, with extra markets at $69/month — or buy credits directly: Free at $0 with 100 credits a month, Starter at $50 with 500, Growth at $150 with 2,500, and Pro at $250 with 5,000. Bulk research is capped by tier at 250, 1,000 and 5,000 companies. Top-up credits run about $0.12 each, annual billing gives two months free, and billing in VND is available.

The design assumption is that buyer research and the email that follows it are the same workflow rather than two purchases. Practically, that means the free tier is where an exporter should start: 100 credits is enough to see whether your product and market are covered before any money moves.

Two add-ons matter for the comparison. Market Pulse is $29/month per HS heading for a monthly brief and top-20 buyer rankings. Market Desk is $99/month alongside a paid plan, or $150 standalone, and it is what unlocks full shipment records, complete buyer and supplier tables, and three named seats.

When not to use EximAgent

That last add-on is also the clearest limit. Full shipment records are not in the base plans — if raw customs depth is the job, you are paying $99–150/month on top, and TradeAtlas is purpose-built for exactly that. Two more real constraints: the agent plans cover one user, so a five-person sales team either buys Market Desk for three named seats or looks at Snov.io's unlimited-seat model; and API access starts at Growth ($150/month), not before. Extra markets are $69/month each, so covering four corridors costs meaningfully more than a flat database subscription that includes every country by default.

And the plain version: if your buyers are not importers — if you sell software, services, or domestically — none of the trade context you are paying for applies, and Apollo at $49 does the job better.

Which one should you pick?

• A Vietnamese SME testing export outbound for the first time: start on a free tier — EximAgent's or Apollo's — and spend nothing until you know your buyers are in the data.
• A trading company with a fixed product line and budget: TradeAtlas, if you can name your fifteen HS codes and can commit annually.
• A SaaS or tech sales team: Apollo. The trade dimension you would be paying for elsewhere is not part of your job.
• A team of five or more running high-volume email: Snov.io, on seat economics alone.
• A logistics or market analyst chasing port-level detail: TradeAtlas, or EximAgent with Market Desk if you also need the outreach half.
• An enterprise that needs phone-verified contacts and has time for procurement: Cognism.

FAQ

Is there a free alternative to Apollo.io?

Yes. EximAgent has a free plan with 100 credits a month, and Snov.io offers a free trial with 50 credits, 100 recipients and one warm-up slot. TradeAtlas lists no free tier, and Cognism publishes no pricing at all. Checked 18 August 2026.

How much does TradeAtlas cost?

From $2,950 a year for the Professional data plan covering 15 HS codes, rising to $9,950 for 60 codes. Adding the AI package moves the same tiers to $3,850–$11,000. Email outreach is a separate add-on from $1,500 a year. There is no monthly plan.

Can Apollo.io search buyers by HS code?

Not through any filter Apollo documents publicly. Its search is built on firmographic attributes — industry, title, location, company size — rather than customs records, so it can tell you who works at a company but not what that company has imported.

Which tool has the best data for Vietnamese exporters?

That depends on your product, and it is a question you should answer with your own product on a free tier rather than take from a comparison table. On structure alone: TradeAtlas for the deepest customs records, EximAgent for trade context plus outreach in one place at a much lower entry price, Apollo for reach outside trade-specific use.