Cuvy vs Apollo: a platform, or a list
Apollo is a sales platform: a searchable contact database with a sequencer attached, sold as a seat per user each month. Cuvy is neither. It reads the LinkedIn or Sales Navigator search you already ran, hands back work emails, and charges one credit for each person it hands you an address for. Pick Apollo if you want one tool that also sends the email.
- Apollo sells
- A platform, per seat
- Cuvy sells
- A person found, per credit
- Sequencer
- Apollo has one, Cuvy does not
- A miss on Cuvy
- Free
50 addresses free every month · no card
Whose index is your ICP a query against?
Not features. The question is where the list of people comes from before anybody looks for an address.
With a platform, your ideal customer profile has to be expressible in that platform's filters. That is fine when your ICP is industry, headcount and title, and awkward when it is "people who mention procurement in their headline" or "anyone who moved into this role since the spring". You get the filters the vendor built.
With Cuvy, the index is LinkedIn and the filters are the ones you were already using, plus your own reading of the results page before you start the run. Anything you can get on screen, Cuvy will work down. That is a narrower product and a wider net.
There is a second, quieter difference. A record in a database was true on the day it was written; a search result reflects what the person currently says they do. Neither is perfect — profiles go stale too — but the failure modes are different, and if your outbound keeps landing on people who left, it is worth knowing which of the two you are reading.
Two different shapes of purchase
Rows about the model rather than the price. Where a cell points at their documentation, that is deliberate.
| Row | Cuvy | Apollo |
|---|---|---|
| What you buy | Credits, on a plan that includes its seats | A seat per user, with data allowances attached |
| Where the people come from | The search page you opened | A contact database you search inside |
| A lookup that finds nothing | Free, and not on the invoice | Governed by their credit rules — published on their site |
| One person, several addresses | One credit, personal address included | Governed by their credit rules |
| Running past the plan | The run pauses and asks; nothing is auto-billed | Stated in their plan terms |
| Unused allowance at month end | Rolls over to twice the monthly allowance; bought packs never expire | Stated in their billing terms |
| Sending the email | Not included — export to whatever you send with | Included; sequencing is core to the platform |
| What the product is primarily for | Getting addresses out of a search you ran | Running the whole outbound motion in one place |
Three reasons to buy the platform instead
Written by us, about us. If one of these is your situation, the cheaper address is not the better purchase.
You want one tool that also sends
Cuvy stops at the list. If you would rather not run a separate sequencer, reply tracking and inbox rotation, a platform that owns the whole motion is worth more than a cheaper address.
You want to browse rather than search
Sometimes the job is "show me every company in this segment with this headcount and tell me who works there". That is a query against a database, and Cuvy has no database for you to query.
Your team is already trained on it
Sequences, snippets, dashboards and reporting all live inside a platform. Moving addresses out of a new tool into an old one is cheap; moving a team off a workflow it knows is not.
Three numbers on the Cuvy side
The part of the comparison that is arithmetic rather than judgement.
- 3
- seats on Pro, all drawing one balance
- 74%
- of a typical B2B search comes back with an address
- $0.0098
- per address at the Pro allowance
A colleague who needs twenty addresses a month costs twenty credits, not another subscription.
Measured on the people in front of you, not on records held somewhere.
Pro is $49 a month for 5,000 addresses. Every price here is monthly.
You do not have to pick one
The arrangement this page is written for is not a migration. The platform keeps doing the sequencing and the reporting, and Cuvy runs on the searches you did not get enough rows out of — a niche vertical, a non-English market, a set of companies too small to be well covered anywhere, including here.
That works because there is no seat to justify. A tool used twice a week costs what those two searches cost, and a month where nobody opens it rolls its credits into the next one.
What people ask when they already pay for a platform
Does Cuvy push a finished list straight into Apollo?
Not directly. The one direct push is HubSpot; everything else goes out as a CSV or through the API. The route is to export the finished file and import it as a list on the platform side.
Does Cuvy have a contact database I can search?
No, and it is the main structural difference between the two. Cuvy has no browsable directory of people. It works from a search you ran on LinkedIn, Sales Navigator or Recruiter, or from a CSV of names and companies you already own, and finds addresses for the people in it.
Does Cuvy send sequences or track replies?
No. Nothing is ever sent from your account — not a message, not a connection request — and there is no mailbox connected to Cuvy at all. The output is a file and a set of rows in the web app. What sends them is whatever you already send with.
Do I need to buy a seat for everybody who wants a list?
No. Seats come with the plan — Pro includes 3 — and every seat draws on the same credit balance rather than having one of its own. Somebody who runs one search a fortnight costs you the credits those people cost and nothing more.
If a platform already has the contact, will Cuvy charge me for them again?
Not if you tell it. Import the addresses you already hold and a lookup that merely agrees with one of them is free — you are only charged for an address you did not have. Exports can also be deduplicated against what is already in your CRM on the way out.
Is Cuvy coverage as broad as a large contact database?
It is not the same measurement, so the honest answer is that the two numbers do not compare. A database is counted in records held. Cuvy is counted in how many people on the search in front of you come back with an address. A large database does not guarantee that the person you are looking at is in it, and a high hit rate does not mean anyone can browse.
Which is cheaper for one founder doing their own outbound?
It depends on whether you need sequencing. If you do, you are paying for a sender somewhere regardless, and the platform bundle may well be the cheaper total. If you already send from your own inbox or a tool you have, paying per person found is a smaller number than paying for a seat you use twice a week.
50 addresses free every month · no card