The short version
All figures below were read from phantombuster.com/pricing on 2026-09-21 in a proxied Chromium session, in both billing states (annual default and monthly after clicking the toggle); every amount was matched in the rendered text layer. This is a terms check — no account was created and no Phantom was run.
PhantomBuster sells browser automation (“Phantoms”) that operate through your own logged-in social accounts, mainly for lead sourcing and outbound on LinkedIn. Three things about the pricing page are worth knowing before you quote any number:
- The page defaults to annual, and the big numbers on most comparison posts are the annual ones. $56 / $128 / $352 are per-month-equivalent prices that require paying $672 / $1,536 / $4,224 up front. Click “Monthly” and the same cards read $69 / $159 / $439.
- Billing is not per seat and not per lead. Every plan is priced on execution time, automation slots, and three separate credit pools (Email, AI, URL finder) — with unlimited users on every tier, including the trial. Teams of five and teams of fifty pay the same card price; that is the structural difference from per-seat outreach tools.
- Hitting a limit stops you; it does not bill you. FAQ, verbatim: “Your automations will pause until your execution time resets or you upgrade your plan. No overage charges are applied automatically.” Contrast Zapier, where hitting the task limit silently switches on pay-as-you-go unless you turn it off. Same “unlimited automation” marketing, opposite billing behavior — PhantomBuster’s is the friendlier one.
Two billing states, one page (USD, captured 2026-09-21)
| Plan | Monthly | Annual (per month) | Annual billed upfront | Included per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Start | $69 | $56 | $672 | 5 slots · 20h execution · 500 Email credits · 10k AI credits · 1k URL-finder credits · unlimited exports |
| Grow | $159 | $128 | $1,536 | 15 slots · 80h execution · 2,500 Email credits · 30k AI credits · 10k URL-finder credits |
| Scale | $439 | $352 | $4,224 | 50 slots · 300h execution · 10,000 Email credits · 90k AI credits · 20k URL-finder credits |
Every tier — trial included — carries “Unlimited users” and the MCP server (“Claude, ChatGPT, +”) line on the card. Exports are unlimited on paid plans; on the trial card the page prints “Exports limited to 10 rows”.
What “Save 20%” actually saves
Straight division of the two captured states:
| Plan | Monthly ÷ annual-monthly | Real saving |
|---|---|---|
| Start | $56 / $69 | 18.8% |
| Grow | $128 / $159 | 19.5% |
| Scale | $352 / $439 | 19.8% |
The banner says “Save 20%!” — on every tier the page’s own numbers come in under 20%. Small, but it belongs in the same honesty ledger as ClickUp’s “up to 30%” that measured 36.8% and Jotform’s “up to 20%” that measured 12.8–23.3% (both documented in our ClickUp pricing check); PhantomBuster rounds up rather than over.
The free entry is a 14-day trial, not a standing free plan
The first card on the page is labeled “Trial — Source your first leads for free”, with the “14-day free trial” and “No credit card required” language printed on the page: 5 automation slots, 2 hours of execution time, 50 Email credits, 1k AI credits, 100 URL-finder credits per month, exports capped at 10 rows.
This is the point where roundups get careless. PhantomBuster’s help-center documentation (surfaced in our research pass, not re-verified in today’s capture) describes what happens after the trial: the account falls back to a restricted Free plan (30 minutes of execution per month, 1 slot) rather than going dark. Treat that downgrade behavior as reported, not as something we confirmed on the pricing page — the card itself only states the trial limits above.
The LinkedIn question the price page cannot answer
PhantomBuster’s own FAQ framing, captured verbatim in evidence image 3:
“PhantomBuster does not use bots, fake accounts, or methods designed to bypass platform safeguards. It runs automations through your own accounts, within platform constraints, using best-practice usage patterns designed to reduce account risk.”
Read it against what the tool does: it operates LinkedIn (and X, Instagram, and others) through your session while you are away. LinkedIn’s terms prohibit automated access of that kind, which is why account restrictions are the single most common complaint in reviews of every cookie-driven LinkedIn tool — and why no setting inside PhantomBuster can make the risk zero. The page never mentions LinkedIn’s terms anywhere; “within platform constraints” is the closest it comes. Budget for that risk before judging whether $56/mo is cheap.
What we did not verify
- No account, no Phantom executed: real per-run consumption of execution time and the credit pools is quoted from card text only.
- The post-trial “Free plan (30 min/1 slot)” behavior comes from help-center documentation in our research pass, not from the page captured today — flagged above where used.
- Whether credits roll over: the cards print “/month” allowances and the page’s pause FAQ implies reset, but we did not find a rollover statement on the pricing page itself.
- Annual prices were captured as “billed annually” totals ($672/$1,536/$4,224); we did not test checkout, VAT handling, or refund terms.
Verdict (terms-level, no score)
No star rating — we ran nothing. What the terms support: PhantomBuster is the rare scraping-side tool where overage is a wall, not a bill, seats are unlimited at every price, and the discount label at least rounds in the wrong direction only by 0.2–1.2 points. What the terms cannot answer: whether any amount of “best-practice usage patterns” removes the LinkedIn ToS exposure that is the reason the category exists.
Methodology & sources
- phantombuster.com/pricing — captured 2026-09-21 (UTC) in a real Chromium session via proxied
exit, both billing states; DOM textContent dumps archived in
eval-ops/runs/2026-09-21-group8/(pb-pricing-annual.txt,pb-pricing-monthly.txt). Anchor checks: $56/$128/$352 + $672/ $1,536/$4,224 in annual state; $69/$159/$439 after the Monthly click; “within platform constraints” and the pause FAQ matched in text. - Help-center post-trial Free-plan details: research pass 2026-09-21, marked as unverified above; intercom article fetch was blocked from this network during the run.
- Cross-references to our own dated captures: Zapier review (pay-as-you-go default on overage), n8n pricing check (PhantomBuster’s own FAQ recommends connecting via n8n/Zapier/Make), ClickUp pricing (discount-label accuracy series), and the head-to-head PhantomBuster vs Zapier (same $69, two different bills).
- Checked 2026-09-21. Pricing pages change; re-verify before citing.
