PhantomBuster pricing has three paid plans: Start at $69 a month, Grow at $159 and Scale at $439, or $56, $128 and $352 a month billed annually. Each plan is a monthly bundle of execution hours, automation slots and credits, shared by everyone in the workspace.
That bundle is the tricky part. You don't pay for results; you pay for time and capacity, and how many results an hour buys depends on the automation. This guide lists every plan, explains how hours, slots and credits are used up, works out what a result really costs on each plan, and shows how pay-per-result scraping on Scrape.ly compares, with a real run from 22 October 2026.
Prices checked on 22 October 2026. PhantomBuster's pricing page only loads with JavaScript, so the figures below come from its help center article What Each PhantomBuster Plan Includes, which carries the same plan table. PhantomBuster bills in US dollars or euros depending on where you are, excluding VAT.
PhantomBuster pricing: plans and what they include
| Free | Start | Grow | Scale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly billing | $0 | $69 | $159 | $439 |
| Annual billing, per month | — | $56 | $128 | $352 |
| Execution time | 30 min a month | 20 hours | 80 hours | 300 hours |
| Phantom slots | 1 | 5 | 15 | 50 |
| AI credits | — | 10,000 | 30,000 | 90,000 |
| Email discovery credits | — | 500 | 2,500 | 10,000 |
| URL Finder credits | — | 1,000 | 10,000 | 20,000 |
| CAPTCHA-solving credits | — | 1,000 | 5,000 | 30,000 |
| Storage | 50 MB | 1 GB | 10 GB | 50 GB |
| CSV/JSON exports and API output | 10 rows | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Priority support | No | No | Yes | Yes |
Every plan allows up to 100 workspace members, so PhantomBuster doesn't charge per seat. Annual billing takes 20% off. Over a year, that looks like this:
| Plan | 12 months, billed monthly | 12 months, billed annually |
|---|---|---|
| Start | 12 × $69 = $828 | 12 × $56 = $672 |
| Grow | 12 × $159 = $1,908 | 12 × $128 = $1,536 |
| Scale | 12 × $439 = $5,268 | 12 × $352 = $4,224 |
PhantomBuster's own plan guide pitches Start at solo users running a few light automations, Grow at consultants, SDRs and small businesses with regular lead extraction, and Scale at agencies and high-volume setups that manage several accounts.
New workspaces also get a 14-day free trial: 2 hours of execution time in total, 5 slots, 1,000 AI credits and 50 email credits, with the same 10-row cap on exports. When the trial ends, the workspace drops to the Free plan unless you upgrade.
How PhantomBuster bills: hours, slots and credits
PhantomBuster meters three different things, and you can hit any one of them first.
Execution time is the total time your Phantoms (single automations) and Workflows (chains of Phantoms) may run in a month. PhantomBuster's plan guide is clear that the plan doesn't change speed: "Your subscription plan does not make your automations run faster or slower." A bigger plan buys more hours at the same pace.
Slots are how many Phantoms and Workflows you can keep on your dashboard. A Phantom takes 1 slot and a Workflow takes up to 3. When they're full, you delete an automation or upgrade.
Credits pay for specific steps, in separate pools:
- Email credits: "1 credit = 1 lookup, even if no match is found."
- AI credits: used by AI Phantoms that write messages or enrich profiles. Usage varies with the prompt and model.
- URL Finder credits: one per lookup of a profile or company URL.
- CAPTCHA-solving credits: used when an automation meets a CAPTCHA.
All of it resets each billing cycle. Unused hours and credits don't roll over, and you can't drop the credits you don't need to lower the price.
What PhantomBuster costs per result: three worked examples
PhantomBuster publishes typical speeds in its plan guide. They let you turn hours into results.
1. Scraping LinkedIn profiles
The guide puts the LinkedIn Profile Scraper at "~1 minute per profile". At that pace:
| Plan | Hours | Profiles per month | Cost per 1,000 profiles |
|---|---|---|---|
| Start | 20 | 20 × 60 = 1,200 | $69 ÷ 1.2 = $57.50 |
| Grow | 80 | 4,800 | $159 ÷ 4.8 = $33.13 |
| Scale | 300 | 18,000 | $439 ÷ 18 = $24.39 |
On annual billing, Start comes to $56 ÷ 1.2 = $46.67 per 1,000. And those figures assume you spend every minute on one Phantom; any other automation shares the same hours.
2. Finding email addresses
Start includes 500 email credits. PhantomBuster's guide gives a typical match rate of 30–50%, and a credit is spent per attempt. So 500 credits return about 150 to 250 emails a month. Grow's 2,500 credits return about 750 to 1,250.
3. Fitting a workflow into slots
Start's 5 slots hold one 3-slot Workflow and two single Phantoms. A second Workflow means Grow, even if your 20 hours are mostly unused. In PhantomBuster's own words, "More execution time will not solve a slot problem, and more slots will not solve depleted email credits."
Extra costs to plan for
- Add-on credit packs. When a credit pool runs out mid-cycle, steps that need it fail. PhantomBuster's pricing post says you can buy add-on credit packs or upgrade; execution time and slots have no mid-cycle top-ups.
- The upgrade step. Because hours, slots and credits come as one bundle, outgrowing one of them means paying for all three at the next tier.
- VAT and currency. Prices exclude VAT, and your billing currency (USD or EUR) is fixed at your first payment.
- Your own accounts. LinkedIn and Sales Navigator Phantoms run on your own LinkedIn account through its session cookie. PhantomBuster's account safety guide says the cookie "lets PhantomBuster act on your behalf while you're logged in", that "LinkedIn doesn't publish official automation limits", and that "no automation tool can eliminate risk entirely".
PhantomBuster vs Scrape.ly pricing
Scrape.ly is a web data platform with a Store of 568 ready-made scrapers (Actors). Most of the data jobs PhantomBuster users run have an Actor in the Store, and each one charges per result, from a prepaid balance:
| Data you need | Scrape.ly Actor | Price |
|---|---|---|
| LinkedIn job listings | LinkedIn Jobs Scraper | $1.50 per 1,000 jobs |
| LinkedIn company profiles | LinkedIn Company Details Scraper | $2.00 per 1,000 companies |
| LinkedIn companies by keyword | LinkedIn Company Search | $2.00 per 1,000 companies |
| Public LinkedIn posts | LinkedIn Post Scraper | $1.00 per 1,000 posts |
| Google Maps places | Google Maps Scraper | $3.60 per 1,000 places |
| Instagram profile details | Instagram Profile Scraper | $1.00 per 1,000 profiles |
Runs also pay a little platform usage (compute, storage and proxy traffic). In our 10-job run below, usage added about $0.003 to $0.015 of job fees. Here's how the two models compare:
| Scrape.ly | PhantomBuster | |
|---|---|---|
| What you pay for | Each result, at the Actor's listed price | A monthly bundle of hours, slots and credits |
| Cheapest way to a full export | Free plan, $5 of credit a month, no card | Start, $69 a month (Free and trial cap files at 10 rows) |
| What $69 buys | 46,000 LinkedIn jobs or 19,166 Google Maps places in result fees | 20 execution hours, 5 slots and the Start credits |
| Slow pages | A little more compute on that run | Minutes off your monthly hour budget |
| LinkedIn login | Job, company search and post Actors read public pages; no LinkedIn account or cookies | LinkedIn Phantoms run through your session cookie |
| Spending cap | Maximum charge per run; the run stops at it | The plan price, plus any add-on credit packs |
| Outgrowing the plan | Pay for more results; the price per result stays the same | Next tier's full bundle of hours, slots and credits |
The $69 row is simple division: $69 ÷ $0.0015 per job = 46,000 jobs, and $69 ÷ $0.0036 per place = 19,166 places. The free credit alone covers 3,333 LinkedIn jobs in result fees. For the full product comparison, see Scrape.ly vs PhantomBuster.
Developers and AI agents get more on Scrape.ly too. Every Actor runs from the dashboard form, the REST API, the Python and Node clients, or the hosted MCP server, so Claude, Cursor or ChatGPT can search the Store, start a run and read the results for you. Schedules and webhooks turn a one-off pull into a weekly feed, and scoped API keys with daily charge limits keep an agent's spending in bounds.
A word on LinkedIn data: LinkedIn's User Agreement (section 8.2) says members may not use software, scripts or crawlers "to scrape or copy the Services, including profiles and other data". Scrape.ly Actors collect only publicly available data that any visitor can see, and they don't log in as you. Personal data you collect still falls under privacy laws such as the GDPR and CCPA, so keep only what you need. This isn't legal advice.
A real run: 10 LinkedIn jobs for $0.0181
We ran the Data engineer jobs in Berlin this week preset on 22 October 2026. It saved 10 jobs, with each employer's company page, in 45.961 seconds, and the run was charged $0.018079:
| Charge | Amount |
|---|---|
| Job fees (10 × $0.0015) | $0.015000 |
| Compute | $0.001532 |
| Residential proxy traffic | $0.001497 |
| Dataset writes | $0.000050 |
| Total | $0.018079 |
No hour budget was touched, and no LinkedIn account was connected. The LinkedIn jobs tutorial shows the fields and a sample of the output.
The run took just over the 45-second limit of the synchronous endpoint, so from code you start it, wait, and read the items:
# 1. start the run; the response's data.id is the run ID
curl -X POST "https://api.scrape.ly/v2/actors/openrole~linkedin-jobs-scraper/runs" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $SCRAPELY_TOKEN" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"keywords": "data engineer", "location": "Berlin", "distance": 0, "datePosted": "pastWeek", "limitPerSource": 10}'
# 2. wait (up to 60 s per call; repeat until status is SUCCEEDED)
curl "https://api.scrape.ly/v2/actor-runs/RUN_ID?waitForFinish=60" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $SCRAPELY_TOKEN"
# 3. read the items (CSV here)
curl "https://api.scrape.ly/v2/actor-runs/RUN_ID/dataset/items?format=csv" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $SCRAPELY_TOKEN"Or hand it to an AI agent. Connect the hosted MCP server at https://api.scrape.ly/mcp (see the MCP docs) and ask: "Use scrapely to run openrole/linkedin-jobs-scraper for data engineer jobs in Berlin posted in the past week, 10 jobs, and give me a CSV of title, company and posting date."
FAQ
How much does PhantomBuster cost per month?
Start costs $69 a month, Grow $159 and Scale $439. Billed annually, they come to $56, $128 and $352 a month. Prices exclude VAT.
Does PhantomBuster have a free plan?
Yes. After the 14-day trial, the Free plan gives you 30 minutes of execution time a month, 1 slot and 50 MB of storage. Exports and API output are capped at 10 rows, so it's for testing, not for building lists.
What is an execution hour on PhantomBuster?
It's an hour of run time for your Phantoms and Workflows, counted across the whole workspace. How many results it buys depends on the automation: PhantomBuster puts its LinkedIn Profile Scraper at about a minute per profile, so an hour is about 60 profiles.
Do PhantomBuster credits roll over?
No. Execution time and all credit types reset at the start of each billing cycle, and unused amounts are lost.
Can PhantomBuster get my LinkedIn account restricted?
PhantomBuster's safety guide says LinkedIn "evaluates activity at the account level, not per Phantom", and that "no automation tool can eliminate risk entirely". Its LinkedIn Phantoms act through your session cookie, so any restriction lands on your account. Scrape.ly's LinkedIn job, company search and post Actors read public pages and don't use your account at all.
Is there a cheaper alternative to PhantomBuster for scraping?
For data extraction, yes. Scrape.ly charges per result instead of per hour: LinkedIn jobs cost $1.50 per 1,000 and Google Maps places $3.60 per 1,000, and you can start on $5 of free monthly credit. See our list of PhantomBuster alternatives for more options.
