Smartlead Pricing: Full Breakdown of Plans, Features, and Hidden Costs

Looking at Smartlead for your cold email outreach? Let's cut through the marketing fluff and look at what you'll actually pay—and what you'll get for your money.

Smartlead has become one of the go-to cold email tools for agencies and sales teams who need to scale their outreach. The pricing looks straightforward on the surface, but there are a few things you need to know before committing.

Smartlead Pricing Plans at a Glance

Smartlead offers three main pricing tiers:

The good news: every plan includes unlimited email accounts and unlimited email warm-up. That's a significant differentiator from competitors who charge per mailbox.

Basic Plan ($39/month): What's Included

The Basic plan is positioned for solopreneurs and people just testing out cold email. Here's what you get:

• 2,000 active leads — this means 2,000 unique email addresses in your account at any time
• 6,000 emails per month — resets monthly
• Unlimited email accounts — connect as many sending accounts as you want
• Unlimited email warm-up — no extra cost for warming up all your inboxes
• Dynamic IP addresses — helps with deliverability
• Centralized master inbox — see all replies in one place
• Dynamic sequences — conditional follow-ups based on recipient behavior
• Detailed analytics — track opens, replies, and campaign performance
• 24-hour support response time

What's missing from Basic: No API access, no webhooks, no integrations with external tools, and no CRM functionality. If you need to connect Smartlead to your tech stack, you'll need to upgrade.

Pro Plan ($94/month): The Sweet Spot for Most Teams

The Pro plan is where Smartlead gets interesting for serious outreach operations:

• 30,000 active leads
• 150,000 emails per month
• Everything in Basic, plus:
• Custom CRM — built-in lead management
• Email guide assistance — help optimizing your campaigns
• Active support — faster response times
• Global block list — protect your sender reputation
• Webhooks & integrations — connect to Zapier, HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, and more
• API access — build custom workflows
• Unlimited seats — add your whole team at no extra cost
• 1 free whitelabel client — agencies can brand it as their own

For agencies, the Pro plan also unlocks client management features. You get one client included free, and additional clients are $29/month each.

Custom Plan ($174/month): Enterprise Scale

The Custom plan is built for high-volume operations and large agencies:

• Up to 12 million active leads
• Up to 60 million emails per month
• Advanced CRM integrations
• Custom onboarding and support

Note: The Custom plan is only available with monthly billing—no annual discount here.

Hidden Costs to Watch Out For

Here's where Smartlead pricing gets a bit tricky:

Client Add-Ons for Agencies ($29/month per client)

If you're running an agency and managing multiple clients, you'll pay $29/month for each additional client beyond the one included in the Pro plan. Managing 10 clients? That's an extra $261/month on top of your base subscription.

This can add up fast. Some competitors like Saleshandy let you add clients at no extra cost, so factor this into your decision if you're agency-side.

SmartDelivery & SmartServer Add-Ons

Smartlead offers additional deliverability tools:

• SmartDelivery — monitors actual inbox placement rates across your domains
• SmartServer — dedicated IP servers for better deliverability

These are separate add-ons with their own pricing, not included in the base plans.

Lead Limits Are Hard Caps

The "active leads" limit is a hard cap. If you hit 30,000 leads on the Pro plan, you can't add more without deleting existing contacts—and deleting a lead also removes all email history with that contact. For high-volume operations, this can become a real limitation.

What Smartlead Does Well

Let's be fair—Smartlead has earned its reputation for a few reasons:

• Unlimited mailboxes at every tier — You can connect hundreds of email accounts without paying per seat. This is huge for agencies and teams scaling outreach.
• Solid deliverability features — The built-in warm-up, dynamic IPs, and inbox rotation help keep your emails out of spam.
• Centralized inbox (Unibox) — Managing replies across dozens of sending accounts from one dashboard is genuinely useful.
• Active development — The team ships updates frequently. Users consistently praise their responsiveness to feature requests.
• Whitelabeling for agencies — Brand the platform as your own for client-facing work.

Where Smartlead Falls Short

No tool is perfect. Here's what users complain about:

• No built-in lead database — Unlike Instantly, which has a 280+ million contact database, Smartlead requires you to bring your own leads. You'll need a separate tool like Clay or RocketReach for prospecting.
• Basic plan is limiting — No API access or integrations on Basic means you're stuck with manual workflows unless you upgrade.
• Agency costs compound — That $29/client fee adds up quickly for agencies with multiple accounts.
• UI can be slow — Some users report the interface lags, especially when managing high volumes of inboxes.
• Analytics aren't the deepest — While you get the basics, competitors offer more granular reporting.

Smartlead vs. Instantly: Quick Comparison

The most common comparison is Instantly, another popular cold email tool. Here's how they stack up:

For agencies managing multiple clients under one roof, Smartlead's flat $29/client model can actually be cheaper than Instantly's separate workspace approach. For solopreneurs who need prospecting built-in, Instantly might be the better call.

If you're primarily focused on cold email deliverability and already have a lead source, check our breakdown of Instantly's pricing to compare.

Is Smartlead Worth It?

Smartlead makes sense if:

• You're scaling cold email with multiple sending accounts
• You're an agency managing client campaigns
• Deliverability is your top priority
• You have a separate lead generation tool (Clay, Apollo, etc.)
• You need whitelabeling capabilities

Look elsewhere if:

• You need a built-in prospecting database
• You're on a tight budget and need full features
• You want multichannel outreach (LinkedIn, SMS) in one tool
• You're a solo user who needs API access

Try Smartlead

Smartlead offers a 14-day free trial, so you can test the platform before committing. No credit card required to start.

Start your free Smartlead trial →

For teams serious about cold email at scale, Smartlead is one of the better options out there. Just go in with clear expectations about the lead limits and agency costs.

Related Tools Worth Considering

Building out your cold email stack? Here are some tools that pair well with Smartlead:

• Clay — Lead enrichment and data automation (integrates directly with Smartlead)
• Findymail — Email verification to reduce bounces
• Close CRM — Sales CRM built for outbound teams