Coresignal Pricing Explained: 8 Tiers, One Credit Cliff

Coresignal sells API access on eight prepaid credit plans, from a 7-day free trial (2,000 credits) to Elite at $5,000/month (10,000,000 credits). A base employee or company record costs 10 credits, a multi-source record 20, and a job posting 1. Effective cost per 1,000 employee records ranges from $196.00 on Mini to $5.00 on Elite.

That range is 39× wide, and it does not shrink smoothly. Almost the entire drop happens at one step. Below is every published number, re-read off Coresignal's live pricing page and docs on 13 August 2026 and re-verified on 14 August 2026, with the arithmetic done for you.

The 8 plans, as published

These are the monthly plans exactly as they appear on coresignal.com/pricing and in the plan comparison on docs.coresignal.com/pricing. The last two columns are mine: price per 1,000 credits, and the same figure expressed as the cost of 1,000 base employee or company records at 10 credits each.

Two things jump out before any workload math.

Mini cannot deliver 1,000 profiles. $49 buys 2,500 credits; a base employee record costs 10; the plan therefore hard-caps at 250 records a month. If you read "$49/month" and mentally budgeted a thousand profiles, you are out by 4×. Anyone comparing entry prices across the best LinkedIn data APIs compared hits this same trap on every credit-based vendor.

Two features are missing below Pro. The comparison table marks Search Preview and the Contact Enrichment API as unavailable on Mini and Starter, and available from Pro upward. The free trial gets Search Preview, and Contact Enrichment on request. That is easy to miss, because the plan cards on the marketing page do not break it out — only the full comparison table does.

What a Coresignal credit actually buys

A credit is not a record, and it is not a request either. Coresignal's docs give a per-endpoint table, and the units differ by an order of magnitude across it.

Three points that matter more than the numbers themselves.

Search is free; collection is not. The pricing page in Coresignal's docs states that credits are deducted for each successful /collect or /enrich request returning a 200, "while /search/es_dsl and /search/filter requests are free." (The companion credits page carries the deduction rule but not that sentence.) Building and refining a target list costs nothing. You pay to pull records, not to look for them. That is a genuinely buyer-friendly design and it is worth saying so plainly — most credit-metered vendors bill the search.

Search Preview is 20× cheaper per record than collecting. A multi-source Search Preview query costs 20 credits and returns up to 20 results — 1 credit per result. Collecting those same 20 records through the multi-source endpoint costs 400 credits. The catch is that a preview returns a preview field set, not the full record, and the pricing page does not enumerate that field set. Treat preview as a qualification step, not a data source.

The price is per record, not per field. A Base Employee record costs 10 credits whether it comes back densely populated or nearly empty. Coresignal publishes no completeness floor tied to the credit price, so field coverage is the variable you have to measure yourself — the same discipline we apply when testing which profile fields actually come back from any provider.

The docs are also unusually explicit about the failure paths, which is more than most vendors publish. Insufficient balance returns HTTP 402 with {"detail": "Insufficient credits"}, and every response carries an x-credits-remaining header. Duplicate bulk search submissions return 409 rather than silently double-charging. That "charged only on a successful 200" rule is the single most important sentence on the page — it is exactly the thing that goes unstated across most of the market, as we found when we surveyed who bills you for failed requests.

The same workload at three volumes

Here is one concrete job priced three ways: pull N Base Employee records per month, at 10 credits each, buying the cheapest single plan that covers the whole month in one purchase.

A 100× increase in volume raises the bill 7.5× and drops the effective unit price 13.3×. Note also the third column: the plan you land on is not the plan you would have guessed from the tier names, and the wasted-credit column is real money on the first two rows.

Now the same three volumes on Multi-source records, which cost 20 credits each:

This is where the ranking reorders. Doubling the credits per record does not double the bill at every volume, because it pushes you across a tier boundary by a different amount each time. At 1,000 records a month, choosing multi-source over base costs 2.5× more ($499 vs $199). At 10,000 records it costs 1.5× more ($1,500 vs $1,000). At 100,000 it costs 2× more ($3,000 vs $1,500). The premium you pay for richer records is not a fixed multiplier — it is a function of where the tier ceilings happen to fall relative to your volume.

Jobs are the cheapest thing on the whole price list, at 1 credit per posting. Same three volumes:

At the top of the ladder a job posting costs $0.50 per 1,000 on Elite. If jobs data is your workload rather than profiles, Coresignal's ladder looks completely different from how it looks to a profile buyer — a point worth holding onto if you are sizing a build like a job board on a jobs API or a hiring-trends tracker, where volumes are high and per-record richness matters less.

The credit cliff — and the 6.7× band with no plan in it

Look again at the per-credit column. From Mini to Pro the price falls gently: $19.60 → $16.58 → $14.26 per 1,000 credits, a 27% improvement over 10× the spend. Then:

• Pro → Growth: 2.0× the money, 4.3× the credits.
• Growth → Premium: 1.5× the money, 6.67× the credits.

Premium is 4.4× cheaper per credit than Growth and 9.5× cheaper per credit than Pro, for 3× Pro's price. Across the whole ladder the fee rises 102× from Mini to Elite while the per-credit price falls 39×. Almost all of that is one step.

The practical consequence is a dead band. Growth tops out at 150,000 credits. Premium starts at 1,000,000. Between those two numbers — a 6.7×-wide range, or 15,001 to 100,000 base employee records a month — there is no intermediate plan.

And the obvious workaround is worse than the upgrade. Coresignal's FAQ offers "renew" as the answer to running out mid-cycle, so buying Growth twice in a month is a supported path. It costs $2,000 for 300,000 credits. Premium costs $1,500 for 1,000,000 credits. That is $500 more money for 70% fewer credits.

When renewing beats upgrading

Lower down the ladder the arithmetic runs the other way, and this is the one place Coresignal's own advice is genuinely the cheaper option.

Starter is $199 for 12,000 credits. Pro is $499 for 35,000. Buying Starter twice gives you 24,000 credits for $398 — $101 less than Pro. So for a one-off month needing 12,001–24,000 credits, renewing Starter is cheaper than upgrading. Above 24,000 credits it flips: Pro's $499 beats a third Starter purchase at $597.

Two caveats keep this from being free money. First, renewing or upgrading "will reset your billing cycle to the day of the purchase" — your renewal date moves, which matters if you are reconciling against a calendar month. Second, Starter has neither Search Preview nor the Contact Enrichment API, both of which arrive at Pro; if you need either, the $101 is not a saving, it is a different product.

Coresignal's own framing is fair here: renewing "is a good option for situations when your usage increases temporarily or for one-time projects." That is accurate advice, and the band where it is also the cheaper advice is 12,001–24,000 credits wide.

Annual plans: exactly 10%, no credit bonus

Annual pricing is unusually clean, and worth stating precisely because "annual discount" often hides a different credit allocation. It does not here. Every annual plan is exactly twelve monthly payments minus 10%, with exactly twelve months of credits issued up front.

Three things the table does not say out loud:

• There is no annual Mini. The docs state annual plans are "offered starting from the Starter plan and higher tiers," so the cheapest annual entry point is $2,149 paid up front — a 44× jump from the cheapest monthly plan.
• Annual removes the rollover, and replaces it with something better. Monthly Premium, Scale and Elite carry a 3-month rollover; annual plans carry none. But annual credits are issued in one block valid 12 months, which is a longer runway than any rollover gives you. For predictable usage, annual wins on both price and flexibility.
• It auto-renews. The docs say the plan "automatically renews at the current annual plan price unless you cancel before the renewal date." At Elite that is a $54,000 auto-renewal — worth a calendar reminder.

Two places Coresignal's own pages disagree

Both of these are live as of 13 August 2026, and both will cost you money if you budget from the wrong page.

1. Credit rollover

The FAQ on the marketing pricing page says, flatly: "If you have a monthly subscription plan, credits are valid for one billing cycle and your credit balance is reset every month. Your unused credits will not roll over to the next month."

The plan comparison table on the same page shows a "Credit rollover" row reading 3-month for Premium, Scale and Elite. The docs resolve it in the same direction: "Premium, Scale, and Elite monthly plans include a 3-month rollover, meaning unused credits remain valid for up to 3 months before expiring."

Trust the docs and the table, not the marketing FAQ. The blanket sentence is correct for Mini through Growth and wrong for the top three plans. If you are on Premium and you believed the FAQ, you have been sizing your monthly pull against a ceiling that does not exist. Credit expiry is one of the most consistently misdescribed things in this market — we found the same pattern across eight providers' expiry policies.

2. Agentic Search cost

The marketing pricing page gives a formula: "/fast — 20 credits base cost + 20 credits for every 20 results" and "/reasoning — 100 credits base cost + 20 credits for every 20 results." Read literally, 100 results on /fast costs 20 + (5 × 20) = 120 credits.

The docs pricing page publishes an actual table — not the Agentic Search API reference, which carries the rate limit but no credit costs — and it disagrees:

The docs explain why: "the base cost applies to the first 20 results," so the base is not additive on top of the first batch. At 100 results the marketing formula overstates /fast by 20 credits (20%) and /reasoning by 20 credits (11%). Budget from the table.

One more operational limit that does not appear on the pricing page at all: /reasoning is capped at 10 requests per hour. At a maximum of 100 results per call, that is a hard ceiling of 1,000 results an hour on the reasoning endpoint, on every plan including Elite. No amount of credits raises it.

What Coresignal does not publish

Everything above is a published number. The following are genuinely absent, and I am listing them rather than interpolating between tiers, because a guessed number in a budget is worse than a blank.

• Dataset pricing. The bulk flat-file product starts from $1,000 and is "determined by contract length, dataset locations, and source tier." No volume-to-price route is published. This one requires sales, and that is itself the finding: if your use case is a full dataset drop rather than API calls, you cannot price it from the website at all.
• Credit top-ups. There is no published price for buying extra credits on their own. The only two documented routes when you run out are renew or upgrade, both of which reset your billing cycle. A la carte credits are not offered at any published rate.
• Anything above Elite. Elite is $5,000/month for 10,000,000 credits and the ladder stops there. Volumes beyond it are not priced publicly.
• Contact Enrichment match rate. An enrich request costs 20 credits and is charged on a successful 200. Coresignal publishes no match or hit rate, so the cost per matched contact — the only number that matters for a lead-gen budget — cannot be computed from public information. You have to measure it on the trial.
• Record completeness per credit. 10 credits buys a Base Employee record; there is no published floor on how many of its fields are populated.
• Mid-term top-ups on an annual plan. Whether you can add credits to a running annual subscription at the annual per-credit rate is not stated anywhere I could find.

For context on the free end: the trial is 7 days and 2,000 credits — 200 base employee records, 100 multi-source records, or 2,000 job postings — and is "available only for the first user from the first team or domain created under your account." That is enough to measure field coverage and match rates. It is not enough to run a pilot.

If you only need per-record lookups

Coresignal is a database company. It sells a queryable, normalized archive: 895M+ employee records and 70M+ company records going back to July 2016, 468M+ job records since August 2020, filterable with Elasticsearch DSL at no credit cost, with multi-source merging across inputs. It collects "exclusively from publicly available online sources" and states that it "never aggregates any private data from within the secured login areas" — a distinction that matters a great deal given how the legal line has actually been drawn, and one reason it survived the shakeout that removed Proxycurl from the market.

If your job is "find every VP of Engineering in Berlin at companies with 200–1,000 employees, and show me how their headcount moved since 2019," that is a database query over a historical archive. Coresignal does it and a per-call API does not. Buy the database.

If your job is "I already have 40,000 profile URLs and I want current public data for each," you are paying database prices for a lookup. That is where a per-request API is a different shape of purchase — and where our own numbers sit, for comparison rather than as a claim of superiority:

Our LinkedIn endpoints are /api/linkedin/profile, /profile/full, /company, /jobs, /job, /search and /posts — documented on the LinkedIn API page. They return current public data for identifiers you supply. They are not a searchable archive, they carry no firmographic joins, and they will not answer the Berlin query above. Those are real limitations, not modesty: the two products overlap on one row of that table and diverge on every other.

Read the honest version of that trade-off in the official LinkedIn API versus third-party data comparison, and if you are building enrichment on top of either, the firmographic enrichment walkthrough and employee-count tracking both show what the record shapes look like in practice. For company-level pulls specifically, company data by API covers the field differences, and jobs filter parameters covers the jobs side.

How I verified this

Every figure on this page was read on 13 August 2026 and re-verified on 14 August 2026, from five sources, all of which are Coresignal's own:

• coresignal.com/pricing — plan prices, credit counts, rate limits, rollover row, FAQ.
• docs.coresignal.com/pricing — the per-endpoint credit table, Search Preview costs, annual terms, trial terms.
• docs.coresignal.com/api-introduction/credits — the deduction rule, the x-credits-remaining header, the 402 and 409 responses. (The free-search sentence, the Search Preview costs and the Agentic Search credit table are all on docs.coresignal.com/pricing.)
• docs.coresignal.com/introduction/product-comparison — record counts, "scraping since" dates and processing levels.
• coresignal.com/data-transparency — the two data-collection statements quoted above.

Nothing here is extrapolated. Where the two Coresignal pages conflict, I have shown both and said which to trust and why. Where a price is not published, it is listed as not published rather than estimated from the tiers around it. Serpent API figures come from our own live rate card.

Re-check cadence: vendor pricing in this category moved substantially in the last twelve months — the previous three-tier structure is gone entirely — so treat anything older than a quarter as unverified. If you are building a budget from this page after November 2026, re-read the two pricing URLs first. The same warning applies to every pricing explainer we publish, including Serper's credit model and DataForSEO's, and to the line items people routinely forget in the hidden costs of a data API.

FAQ

How much does Coresignal cost?

Coresignal's API plans run from $49/month (Mini, 2,500 credits) to $5,000/month (Elite, 10,000,000 credits), with Starter at $199, Pro at $499, Growth at $1,000, Premium at $1,500 and Scale at $3,000. A 7-day free trial gives 2,000 credits. Annual plans are 10% cheaper and start at $2,149/year for Starter. Datasets are a separate product starting from $1,000 with pricing set by agreement. All figures read from Coresignal's pricing page on 13 August 2026.

What is a Coresignal credit worth?

It depends entirely on the endpoint. A job posting, employee post or company post costs 1 credit. A Base or Clean company or employee record costs 10. A Multi-source company or employee record costs 20, as does a Contact Enrichment call. Search Preview costs 10 or 20 per query returning up to 20 results, and plain search via /search/es_dsl or /search/filter is free. In dollars, a credit runs from $0.0196 on Mini down to $0.0005 on Elite.

Do Coresignal credits roll over?

On monthly plans, Premium, Scale and Elite include a 3-month rollover; Mini, Starter, Pro and Growth do not, and unused credits are lost at the end of the billing cycle. Coresignal's marketing FAQ states that credits never roll over, which contradicts both the comparison table on the same page and the documentation. The documentation is the one to trust. Annual plans issue all credits up front, valid for 12 months, with no rollover beyond the term.

What is the cheapest Coresignal plan that delivers 1,000 employee profiles?

Starter, at $199/month. A base employee record costs 10 credits, so 1,000 records needs 10,000 credits and Mini's 2,500-credit allowance caps out at 250 records. That works out to $199.00 per 1,000 records. For multi-source records at 20 credits each you need 20,000 credits, which means Pro at $499/month, or $499.00 per 1,000 records.

Can I buy extra Coresignal credits without upgrading?

Not at any published price. Coresignal documents exactly two routes when you exhaust a plan: renew the same plan or upgrade to a higher one, and both reset your billing cycle to the purchase date. There is no advertised a la carte credit top-up. Below roughly 24,000 credits, renewing Starter twice at $398 is cheaper than upgrading to Pro at $499. Above 150,000 credits, repeat purchases of the same plan never beat Premium: a second Growth is $2,000 for 300,000 credits against Premium's $1,500 for 1,000,000. If two different plans can be held at once, Growth plus Pro covers 185,000 credits for $1,499 and Premium only pulls ahead beyond that, but Coresignal does not document whether stacking is allowed. Checked 14 August 2026.

Is there a cheaper option than Coresignal for simple profile lookups?

If you need a searchable historical database with multi-source merging and firmographic filters, Coresignal is the right shape of product and per-record price comparisons miss the point. If you already hold the identifiers and only need current public data per record, a per-request API is a different purchase: Serpent API bills LinkedIn profile calls at $0.50 per 1,000 on the Default tier from a prepaid balance with no monthly plan, but offers no archive, no Elasticsearch filtering and no multi-source merging. Compare on the workload, not the headline rate.