Migrate from Apollo to Cargo, with a Side-by-Side Price

To migrate a go-to-market list from Apollo to Cargo, run 20 rows of your Apollo export through Apollo inside Cargo and through a multi-provider waterfall, verify both sets of emails, and compare the credits spent per verified email. Apollo prices per seat with a credit allowance; Cargo prices per action, and a lookup that finds nothing costs 0 credits.

Apollo does not have to go: apolloio is one of the providers Cargo calls, so a migration can keep Apollo as one source among several. The steps below are the apollo-to-cargo skill, end to end.

The two price lists, side by side #

Apollo’s plans, from apollo.io/pricing, fetched Oct 16 2026:

On the same page, an email costs 1 Apollo credit and a phone number 8. Credits are pooled across the team and do not roll over.

Cargo’s prices are per action, from each action’s credit definition in Cargo’s code:

Cargo plans sell credits, not seats: 1,500 credits for $165/mo, 2,500 for$250/mo and 10,000 for $800/mo on monthly billing (pricing).

The honest read: for one rep looking up emails, Apollo is cheaper. Basic at $65 a month buys 2,500 email credits. The same 2,500 found emails on `prospeo.findEmail` are 1,250 Cargo credits, which needs the$165 plan. Cargo’s price closes the gap when lookups miss (a miss is free), when the volume is concentrated in a few people or a scheduled job rather than spread over seats, and on phones (6 credits on FullEnrich.findPhone against 8 Apollo credits, though the two credits are not the same unit).

What the same rows tell you #

Cargo platform data, 90 days to Oct 16 2026: work-email lookups returned an email in 63.6% of 1.85M runs, and 100% of the runs that found nothing were charged 0 credits.

How the waterfall chains providers is in Find and Verify Work Emails at Scale; the same test for a seat-priced database is Migrate from ZoomInfo to Cargo.

So the number that compares the two tools is not the price per credit but the cost per verified email on your own rows. A cheaper source with a worse hit rate is not cheaper, it is smaller.

Run it #

1. Install and sign in

npm install -g @cargo-ai/cli
cargo-ai login --email you@company.com                 # sends a code
cargo-ai login --email you@company.com --code 123456   # creates the account on first use

A new account starts with 100 free credits and needs no card. The full 20-row comparison below is about 64 credits.

2. Run the sample through Apollo, from inside Cargo

Export 20 rows from Apollo. Running them through Apollo again is the control: same vendor, same data.

cargo-ai orchestration action execute-batch \
  --action '{"kind":"connector","integrationSlug":"apolloio","actionSlug":"enrichPerson"}' \
  --records '[{"parameters":{"first_name":"Ada","last_name":"Lovelace","domain":"example.com"}}]' \
  --wait-until-finished

Leave revealPhoneNumber off unless phones are the reason for the move: it raises the action from 1 credit to 9.

3. Run the same rows through the waterfall

cargo-ai orchestration action execute-batch \
  --action '{"kind":"connector","integrationSlug":"waterfall","actionSlug":"enrichContact"}' \
  --records '[{"first_name":"Ada","last_name":"Lovelace","domain":"example.com"}]' \
  --wait-until-finished

The person comes back under person, with professional_email, title, company_domain and, when found, mobile_phone. A row with no match returns no data and is not charged.

4. Verify both sets

cargo-ai orchestration action execute-batch \
  --action '{"kind":"connector","integrationSlug":"waterfall","actionSlug":"verifyEmail"}' \
  --records '[{"email":"ada@example.com"}]' \
  --wait-until-finished

email_status reads valid when the address is deliverable. Verify Apollo’s emails too: a match rate counted on unverified addresses flatters whichever source guessed more.

5. Report two numbers per source

20 rows × (1 + 2) credits, plus 0.1 per address verified on each side, is about 64 credits. Check the export date first: an Apollo export from months ago carries stale titles and companies, and a low hit rate on it measures staleness, not either vendor.

Where Apollo is still the better fit #

• Prospecting and sequencing in one seat. Apollo includes database search, sequences, a dialer and a Chrome extension. Cargo has no contact database of its own and does not replace a sequencer UI; it calls providers and pushes to the tools you send from.
• Low volume per rep. As above, a single Basic seat is cheaper per email found than Cargo’s smallest paid plan.
• Segments where Apollo already covers you. If the 20-row sample shows Apollo verifying as many emails as the waterfall in your segment, keep paying for it, and call it from Cargo for the rows where it misses.

Frequently asked questions #

Sources #

• Apollo: pricing, plan credits and credit costs, fetched Oct 16 2026.
• Cargo: credit prices from each action’s definition in Cargo’s code; plan prices from pricing; job-level results from Cargo platform data, 90 days to Oct 16 2026.