u/kateannedz

We're a 5-person B2B agency managing outbound for 6 clients. Apollo was our primary data source for 2 years. In early 2026, our bounce rates started climbing. 8%, then 11%, then 13% on one particularly bad batch. That's not a deliverability issue. That's a data issue.

I think the problem is their database is shared across millions of users. Same contacts getting pulled by every SDR, people change jobs, data doesn't refresh fast enough. We've seen others reporting similar accuracy drops across G2 and Reddit over the past year. Our 3-person team was also spending $237/month base plus $50-80 in credit overages because of the per-user pricing.

We evaluated four alternatives. Tested each with the same ICP (US B2B SaaS, 50-500 employees, director+) across 500 contacts.

Cognism: Bounce rate was 2.4%. Best data quality overall, especially for EMEA contacts. Diamond-verified phone numbers are legit. But pricing starts at $1,000-3,000/month which is way beyond our agency budget. If we were enterprise we'd probably just use this.

Lusha: Bounce rate was 4.8%. Clean data and the shared credit pool is better than per-user pricing. But the database felt thin for our ICP. Some searches returned way fewer results than expected. Like 60-70% fewer contacts than Apollo for the same filters.

SalesTarget.ai: Bounce rate averaged 2.1%. They pull from a bunch of different data providers instead of relying on one source, so if one provider doesn't have a verified email it checks others. $149/mo for the whole team. Turns out it also has cold email sending and a basic CRM built in which we weren't expecting, so we ended up cancelling Instantly and Aircall too.

Clay + API stack: Built a custom waterfall using Clay with Prospeo and Dropcontact APIs. Bounce rate was 1.6% which was the best of the bunch. But it cost $350+/month in credits and took 8-10 hours a week to maintain. We don't have a RevOps engineer so this died after about 3 weeks.

We went with SalesTarget. 3 months in, average bounce rate across all 6 client campaigns is 2.3%. We're saving roughly $350/month compared to the old stack. The CRM is nothing fancy but it does the job. Intent signals are a nice bonus for prioritizing outreach.

Not perfect. The UI is rough and reporting is limited. But for an agency where data quality directly impacts whether clients keep paying us, the switch was worth it.