Compare cold email and sales tools — on verified pricing, not marketing claims.
Every price here was read from the vendor's own pricing page and dated. Where we haven't measured something ourselves — deliverability, reply rates — we say so instead of repeating someone else's number.
Pricing verified per tool between 2026-08-04 and 2026-08-25 · how we check · how we make money
Free tools
No signup, no email wall.
Cold Email Tool Finder
Answer five questions, get a matched platform recommendation.
OpenSpam Word Checker
Paste your cold email, see what trips spam filters.
OpenSPF / DKIM / DMARC Checker
Audit the DNS records that decide whether you land in inbox or spam.
OpenMailbox Volume Planner
Work out how many mailboxes and domains your send volume needs.
OpenEmail Permutator
A name and a company domain into every likely address format.
OpenCold Email ROI Calculator
What outbound returns, and the reply rate you need to break even.
Open15 tools
Instantly
High-volume cold email with unlimited mailboxes and strong deliverability tooling.
Smartlead
Scalable cold email with unlimited mailboxes, warmup, and an API-first design.
Clay
Data enrichment and automation that chains 100+ providers into one workflow.
Lemlist
Multichannel outreach with best-in-class personalisation and a built-in lead database.
Hunter.io
Email finding and verification with a genuinely usable free tier.
Apollo.io
All-in-one sales intelligence database with built-in sequencing.
Saleshandy
Unlimited mailboxes on every tier, with a B2B lead database bundled in rather than sold separately.
QuickMail
Cold email built around inbox rotation, aimed squarely at agencies.
Reply.io
Multichannel sales engagement with an AI SDR, priced well above the cold-email field.
Woodpecker
Usage-based cold email priced on contacted prospects, with unlimited mailboxes.
Snov.io
Lead database, email finder and sending in one, at the low end of the market.
GMass
Mail merge and cold email inside Gmail, as a Chrome extension.
Lusha
B2B contact data with a real free tier, priced per credit rather than per lookup.
RocketReach
Contact lookups across 700M professionals, with unlimited lookups on annual plans.
Mailshake
Email plus a built-in power dialer, aimed at small teams doing multi-touch outbound.
Guides
Half of MTA-STS Deployments Enforce Nothing (2026 Study)
MTA-STS needs a DNS record and a policy file served over HTTPS. Checkers look at the DNS half. We measured both across 5,000 domains: 133 announce MTA-STS, only 70 enforce it. 51 sit in testing mode — Facebook, Yahoo, IKEA, the World Bank — and 9 announce a policy they never serve, Cloudflare among them. Method and script included.
"No DKIM Found" Means Nothing Until You Know Who Runs Your Mail (2026 Study)
DKIM selectors cannot be enumerated from DNS, so every checker guesses. We probed 48 selectors against 4,879 domains: 46.1% expose a guessable one, but that ranges from 3.8% on Amazon SES to 97.2% on Cloudflare. A negative result is worth almost nothing on some providers. Method and script included.
GitHub, eBay and Oracle Are One Tool Away From Breaking SPF (2026 Study)
SPF fails permanently past 10 DNS lookups, and the record still looks healthy. We measured 3,708 domains: 3% are already over, 12.7% are within two, and 139 sit at exactly 10 — including GitHub, eBay, Oracle, Intuit and MIT. One of them, Reddit, has since flattened its record and escaped. Method and script included.
Who Hosts the Web's Email — and Which Providers Authenticate It (2026 Study)
We resolved MX for the top 30,000 domains. Google and Microsoft host 48% of them. But DMARC enforcement ranges from 77% to 5% depending on who you host with — a 15x spread nobody publishes.
46% of the Web's Top Domains Don't Enforce DMARC (2026 Study)
We checked SPF and DMARC across the top 30,000 domains. 21% publish no DMARC at all, and enforcement falls by a third down the rankings while SPF stays flat. Full method included.
Cold Email Templates That Aren't Filler (2026)
Eight cold email templates with the reasoning behind each one — what job it does, when it works, and why. No invented reply rates.
Best Email Finder & Lead Data Tools (2026)
Hunter, Snov.io, Apollo and Clay compared on verified pricing and credit models — plus why nobody should trust published match rates.
Cold Email Deliverability Guide (2026)
Why cold email lands in spam and how to fix it — authentication, domains, warmup, volume and list hygiene, in the order that actually matters.
Best AI Cold Email Software (2026)
The best cold email platforms for deliverability, scale, and personalisation in 2026 — compared on real pricing, features, and who each one is for.