What is the closest Apollo alternative for a marketing agency?

It depends on your prospecting target. For local-business prospecting specifically, CloseFast (closefa.st) is built for exactly that job — Google Maps search, ad/pixel audit, and a generated pitch, all for a flat monthly fee. For broader B2B contact enrichment outside local businesses, other credit-based platforms like Clay or Seamless.AI compete more directly with Apollo's general database model.

How much does Apollo cost per month in 2026?

As of July 2026, Apollo's published plans are Free ($0), Basic ($49/month), and Professional ($99/month), all billed monthly per Apollo's own pricing page, with a Custom/Enterprise tier requiring a sales conversation. Credit and export limits scale with plan tier, and Apollo's Fair Use Policy caps free-plan credit consumption at 10,000 per account per month.

Do unused Apollo credits roll over to the next month?

Apollo's public pricing page does not state that unused monthly credits carry over, and its FAQ frames credits as a per-account-per-month allotment governed by a Fair Use Policy rather than a banked balance. Practically, agencies should plan to use what they're allotted within the billing cycle rather than expecting a rollover.

Why do agencies look for an Apollo alternative in the first place?

The most common complaint isn't Apollo's data quality — it's the credit model. Every email unlock, phone reveal, export, and enrichment call draws from a shared monthly pool, so a bigger-than-planned prospecting push can burn through the allotment mid-month, and agencies running lean don't want to do credit math before every search.

Does CloseFast do the same thing as Apollo?

No — they solve different problems. Apollo is a searchable database of roughly 600,000+ companies' worth of contact and company data for any kind of B2B sales team. CloseFast is scoped narrowly to one job: finding local businesses that need marketing help and writing the outreach pitch, with a built-in ad/pixel audit Apollo doesn't offer.

Is there a free way to try either tool before committing?

Yes for both. Apollo's Free plan gives access to email data and time-limited phone number access under a 10,000-credit-per-month Fair Use cap. CloseFast's Free tier gives 10 leads per month with no credit card required, so an agency can compare real output from both before paying anything.

Apollo Alternatives for Agencies (No Expiring Credits)

The best Apollo alternative for a marketing agency depends on what you're actually prospecting: CloseFast (closefa.st) is a flat-fee tool built specifically to find and pitch local business clients, while Apollo is a general-purpose sales-intelligence platform priced on monthly credits that reset — and don't roll over — every billing cycle. If your job is filling a pipeline of local businesses that need marketing help, a purpose-built tool with a fixed bill beats a credit meter you have to babysit.

CloseFast (closefa.st) is a flat-fee tool built specifically to find and pitch local business clients for marketing agencies, while Apollo is a general-purpose sales-intelligence platform with a database Apollo advertises at over 600,000 companies, priced on monthly credits and exports. If your agency's job is "find my next batch of local business leads and know what to say to them," a purpose-built tool with one flat bill removes the credit math entirely. If you need a broad, configurable B2B contact database for varied outbound campaigns across industries, Apollo's scale is the stronger case.

Here's the honest breakdown, verified against Apollo's live pricing page and CloseFast's live homepage as of July 2026.

What each tool actually is

Apollo is a sales-intelligence platform built around a large contact and company database, plus sequencing, dialing, and CRM-sync tools layered on top. You search the database, spend credits to reveal emails and phone numbers, spend more credits to export or enrich records via CSV/CRM sync, and build outbound sequences from there. It's designed for sales teams selling into any vertical — SaaS, enterprise, services, anything with a decision-maker Apollo has on file.

CloseFast is scoped to one job: local-business prospecting for agencies. It searches Google Maps for businesses in a niche and city, audits each one for ad activity and tracking-pixel presence — the same public ad/pixel signals covered in our ad-library walkthrough — ranks results by how urgently they need help, and writes a pitch that cites the specific gap it found. There's no database to search or credit balance to watch; you pick a niche and city and get leads with a pitch already attached.

That scope difference is the whole comparison. Apollo can be configured — sequences, filters, enrichment steps — to approximate parts of a local-prospecting workflow, but nothing in Apollo audits a business's ad spend or tracking-pixel presence, and nothing writes a pitch citing that gap automatically. CloseFast, in turn, has no answer for an agency that needs to prospect SaaS buyers, enterprise accounts, or anything outside the local-business-with-a-storefront category — Apollo's database simply covers more ground there.

Pricing, verified live (July 2026)

Apollo prices in monthly plan tiers with a credit system layered inside each tier — Email credits, Mobile credits, and Export credits are each consumed separately per Apollo's own FAQ. CloseFast prices in leads per month, flat, with no credit deductions inside a tier.

	CloseFast	Apollo
Free tier	10 leads/month, no credit card	$0/month — email data access, time-limited phone access, 10,000 credits/mo cap (Fair Use Policy)
Entry paid tier	Starter — €49/month, ~250 leads/month	Basic — $49/month, contact access + CRM integrations + email automation
Mid tier	Pro — €99/month, ~600 leads/month + ads-activity audit	Professional — $99/month, advanced sales automation + engagement tracking + AI insights
Top tier	— (Pro is the ceiling)	Custom/Enterprise — contact sales, API access, dedicated support
Pricing unit	Flat monthly fee	Monthly plan fee + consumable credits inside the tier
Built-in pitch writing	Yes, on every lead	No — requires manual sequence-building
Built-in ad/pixel audit	Yes	No — not part of Apollo's product
Data scope	Local businesses via Google Maps	General B2B database, reported at 600,000+ companies

Apollo's own pricing page and FAQ, verified this run, list Free ($0), Basic ($49/mo), and Professional ($99/mo) as the published self-serve tiers, all billed monthly, with a Custom plan for larger deployments requiring a sales conversation. Apollo advertises a 4.7/5 rating from 9,015 reviews and 600,000+ companies using the platform on that same page.

The credit-anxiety problem, in plain numbers: Apollo's Fair Use Policy caps free, unpaid accounts at 10,000 credits per account per month, and separately limits accounts without a verified corporate email domain to just 100 credits per account per month — a limit low enough that a single afternoon of list-building on a personal email address can exhaust it. Paid accounts get a larger allotment, but every email reveal, phone reveal, and CSV/CRM export still draws from that same pool, so a bigger-than-planned push can leave you credit-short before the billing cycle resets.

CloseFast's flat model means a Starter subscriber at €49/month can run as many searches as they want within the ~250-leads/month ceiling, with no per-lookup deduction to track. For an agency owner who wants to know the exact bill before the month starts and doesn't want to explain a credit shortfall to a client mid-project, that's the entire pitch.

Where Apollo is genuinely the better choice

This isn't a one-sided comparison. If your agency (or your client) is prospecting broadly across industries — SaaS companies, enterprise accounts, anything without a physical storefront — Apollo's database and sequencing tools are the more capable platform, full stop. Apollo also offers native dialing, email sequencing, and CRM sync (Salesforce, HubSpot, and others per its own site) as part of the same subscription, which is a genuinely useful consolidation if your stack currently spans a separate data provider, a separate sequencer, and a separate dialer.

Apollo is also the better pick if your prospecting doesn't center on local businesses that need marketing help specifically. CloseFast's data source is Google Maps, and its qualification logic — ad spend, tracking-pixel presence, review activity — is tuned for one question: "does this business need marketing help right now?" That's a poor fit for prospecting a national SaaS market or an enterprise buying committee, and Apollo's broader contact graph is the right tool for that job.

When CloseFast is the better fit

If your agency's bottleneck is specifically "we need more qualified local leads and a reason to call them," CloseFast removes two costs Apollo doesn't solve on its own: the workflow-building time, and the credit tracking. You don't configure a Google Maps search, a manual ad-library check, and a pixel-detection step yourself — those exist already, purpose-built for local-business qualification, the same underlying signal we've written about checking manually at no cost if you'd rather do it by hand first.

The other CloseFast-specific advantage is the generated pitch. Apollo can support outreach sequences once you've built the templates and connected an email tool, but nothing in Apollo's product auto-generates a message that cites a specific, checkable local-business gap. CloseFast ships that by default — a pitch referencing "no tracking pixel," "running ads with no landing page," or "three months without a site update" rather than a generic {{first_name}} merge field. For agencies whose current stack is Apollo → a sequencer → manual pitch-writing, replacing that chain with one flat-fee, local-business-specific tool is the time saved, not just the dollar saved.