Comparison
Lead Scorer vs Instantly
Instantly is a strong, genuinely cheap email sender. It is also the widest gap in our 17-tool survey between what the pricing page says and what a month costs — and it has no LinkedIn channel at all.
Verdict
Pick Instantly if email is your only channel, you already own your data, and deliverability engineering is a skill you want to run yourself. Pick Lead Scorer if the list, the qualification and the copy are the part you do not have.
What Instantly really costs one person
500 new prospects a month, one person, a 3-touch email sequence (1,500 emails).
Advertised
$37.60/month billed annually (Growth, sending only) — $47 monthly
Real month, one person
≈ $157/month
4.2× the advertised price — the widest gap in the survey, tied with Reply.io
Lead Scorer, same month
≈ $251/month — Scale at €199 (≈$230) plus your own 3 mailboxes (≈$21). One inbox on Solo (€49) carries about 200 prospects a month at 3 touches, which is the volume we are actually built for.
Billed monthly, cancel anytime. Yearly billing takes 20% off Solo, Pro and Scale: €468, €948 and €1,908 a year (€39, €79 and €159 a month). Optional — monthly still cancels anytime.
Read on Instantly's own pricing page. The mailbox infrastructure price is not published anywhere and is therefore not in the total above.
instantly.aiWhat the advertised price leaves out
- Sending and data are two separate subscriptions. Outreach Growth at $37.60 covers the sending; Credits Growth is another $37.60 for the ~1,500 lookups the scenario needs.
- No LinkedIn at any tier. Add Waalaxy Advanced at €49 ≈ $57/month.
- 3 mailboxes ≈ $21/month, 2 domains ≈ $1.74/month, verification ≈ $2/month.
- Done-for-you mailboxes are sold inside the app and the price is published nowhere on the site.
- There is no overage. The model is upgrade or stop.
- The page contradicts itself: Hypergrowth shows 125,000 emails/month while the Bundles tab shows 100,000 for the equivalent tier, and Supersonic shows $197 monthly against $87.30 annual — arithmetically impossible with its own 20% discount.
How we priced this
- Scenario
- 500 new prospects a month, one person, a 3-touch email sequence (1,500 emails).
- Infrastructure counted in every total
- 3 mailboxes at 30 emails/day (Google Workspace Business Starter, ≈$21/month) and 2 secondary domains (≈$1.74/month) are counted in every stack, because every vendor leaves them out.
- Billing
- Annual commitment wherever one exists — the assumption most favourable to the vendor.
- LinkedIn cap
- LinkedIn's ~100 invitations/week soft cap means a single account cannot physically work 500 new prospects a month. The totals model 500 by email and ~400 on LinkedIn.
- Exchange rate
- €1 = $1.155 (US Federal Reserve H.10, 2026-08-06). Conversions are marked ≈.
- Limits
- No purchase was made. Every official figure comes from a vendor page read on 2026-08-09; third-party figures are labelled as such and never used as prices.
Side by side
| Feature | Lead Scorer | Instantly |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Full CRM, forever | Trial — duration not published |
| Entry price | €0 · €49/mo with the agent | $37.60/mo (Growth, annual, sending only) |
| Real cost, 500 prospects/month | ≈ $251 (Scale €199 + your 3 mailboxes) | ≈ $157 (two subscriptions + LinkedIn tool + mailboxes) |
| Sending and data in one plan | Yes — one subscription | No — two separate subscriptions |
| LinkedIn channel | Included from €99 (Pro) | None at any tier |
| Finds and qualifies for you | Agent sources, scores, rejects off-ICP | Lead finder — you filter and decide |
| Deliverability tooling | None — you bring your own inbox | Warm-up, placement tests, rotation |
| Overage | €0.049/credit, published | None — upgrade or stop |
| Mailbox infrastructure price | Your own Google/Microsoft inbox, ≈$7/mo | Done-for-you mailboxes — price not published |
Where Instantly beats Lead Scorer
Written by us, about our own product.
- Unlimited sending accounts and a mature warm-up network. At high email volume, Instantly is genuinely cheap per send and we are not.
- Deliverability tooling — inbox placement tests, rotation, warm-up — that we do not ship at all. If you send 100,000 emails a month, that is the whole game and Instantly plays it better.
- If you already have a qualified list and only need to send it, nothing in this survey beats $37.60.
- The unified inbox and the lead finder inside one product make it a real one-stop shop for pure email operators.
Where Lead Scorer wins
Same standard of evidence, opposite direction.
- The list, the qualification and the copy are the work. Instantly starts after all of it is done.
- LinkedIn exists in our product from €99. It does not exist in Instantly at any price.
- One subscription, not two: sending and data are the same line on our card.
- We publish an overage rate. Instantly, by design, has none — you upgrade or you stop.
- MCP-native: 104 tools your agent can call, so the motion runs from Claude or Cursor.
Which one is for you
Pick Instantly if…
High-volume cold email operators and agencies who own their data, run dozens of mailboxes and treat deliverability as the core skill.
Pick Lead Scorer if…
Founders who need the right 200 people found, qualified and written to — not 100,000 sends.
Frequently asked questions
Why is Instantly's real cost 4.2× the advertised price?
Because the $37.60 covers sending only. The data you send to is a second subscription at $37.60, LinkedIn does not exist so it needs a third tool at ≈$57, and the three mailboxes the volume requires cost ≈$21 plus ≈$1.74 of domains. Total ≈$157 against an advertised $37.60. Every line of that is on public pages; none of it is on the pricing card.
Does Instantly do LinkedIn outreach?
No, at any tier. Instantly is one of five tools in our 17-tool survey with no LinkedIn channel and no upgrade path to one — alongside Smartlead, Clay, Apollo and Qualified.
What do Instantly's done-for-you mailboxes cost?
Not published. The configurator lives inside the app, so the figure cannot be read from the public site. That is why our ≈$157 total uses Google Workspace mailboxes at $7 each — a price anyone can verify.
Can I use Instantly and Lead Scorer together?
Yes. Let the agent source, score and write, export the approved sequence, and send it through Instantly's infrastructure. You keep their deliverability stack and stop paying for a second data subscription.
Other comparisons
Run your outreach on autopilot with AI agents.
Free CRM forever. The outbound agent from €49/month — it finds the accounts, scores them, writes the messages. Nothing sends until you approve it.