Swordfish AI Pricing 2026: Plans and Cost per Usable Contact

Swordfish AI pricing looks simple on the current plan cards: paid subscriptions advertise unlimited prospecting with no credits. The contract and product pages make the buying decision more complicated. Fair-use thresholds are undisclosed, API access can require separate approval, CRM viewers may need licences, and several tools still describe credit charges. We would buy only after Swordfish puts the allowed users, successful-record charges, API access, cancellation date, and post-termination data rights in one order form.

Swordfish AI pricing at a glance

The current pricing page displays Professional and Team subscriptions, plus a separate data-licensing offer.

The annual option roughly halves the cash run rate compared with 12 monthly payments, but the embedded plan data lists prepaid annual totals. Confirm the amount due at checkout, tax, renewal date, and refund position before using the lower monthly equivalent in a budget.

Professional fits an individual researcher who can work through the browser extension, Prospector, and reverse lookup. Team is the relevant tier when file uploads, integrations, shared work, or API access matter. Data Licensing is a different procurement motion and should not be compared with a self-serve seat on the same per-record assumptions.

"Unlimited" still has operating limits

Swordfish's live pricing headline says "Unlimited prospecting. No credits." Its terms, updated July 15, 2025, define a narrower entitlement.

Use must reflect individual, human-led outreach. Automated scraping, scripts, bots, shared credentials, and systematic access are prohibited without written authorization. Professional has no published fixed cap, but it is not unrestricted. Team can receive expanded thresholds, yet the thresholds are not public and can change or be withdrawn. Swordfish may throttle, suspend, terminate, or charge additional licence fees.

This means "unlimited" is best read as the absence of a visible contact allowance on the subscription card, subject to fair use. It is not evidence that a buyer can run an unattended enrichment pipeline at any volume.

Ask for a written threshold tied to the intended route: individual extension use, Prospector export, bulk file enrichment, CRM sync, or API. Include the expected users and monthly records. If the vendor will not define a threshold, budget for the point at which throttling would break the workflow.

Credits have not disappeared from every route

Swordfish's FAQ says a successful extension reveal uses one credit. The terms define a credit as one Business Profile or one Prospector result. Reverse Lookup refers to Premium credits, and the email and phone validation pages each offer five free credits plus a control to buy more.

The file upload page describes result-based charging: a buyer chooses must-have fields and pays only when those fields are returned. The API page similarly says phone-only or email-only keys can avoid charges when the required field is not found. No public page inspected supplied the current price per successful API record or a public credit-pack schedule.

These pages may reflect separate tools, trial balances, or contract versions. The public evidence does not reconcile them with the no-credit plan cards. Do not estimate cost by choosing the most favorable sentence. Ask Swordfish to define every billable event for the selected subscription and route.

The seven-day trial includes ten credits and requires a valid card. Pricing and FAQ pages describe a temporary $5 authorization hold, while the terms call it a refundable deposit and allow retention for suspected abuse. The trial converts to the selected paid plan unless cancelled before it ends.

Ten records cannot establish match quality. Use the trial to inspect workflow and raw result shape, then request enough test capacity for a defensible matched sample.

Seat rules can dominate Team cost

The Team cards divide pricing by member bands, but the surrounding first-party copy conflicts. A pricing FAQ says a Team and Scale offer includes unlimited users. The terms say team members need licences and extend that requirement to people who can view or interact with Swordfish data in a shared CRM or applicant tracking system.

That broader definition can turn a small research team into a much larger licensed population. List every person who will search, export, view, edit, or act on the returned data. Ask which roles count, whether read-only users count, and how automated service accounts are treated.

The terms also require exported CRM or applicant-tracking data to be purged after termination unless the buyer keeps an active licence or obtains a written perpetual licence. This is a material ownership constraint. A company may pay for enrichment and still lose the right to retain the data after cancellation.

Our outbound services use client-owned infrastructure and explicit data provenance. Any Swordfish trial should therefore test export rights and deletion obligations alongside match rate.

API access needs separate approval

The pricing card lists API access on Team. The terms say API use requires an approved Team plan and separate case-by-case approval. Purchasing Team alone does not guarantee access.

Swordfish describes phone-only, email-only, and customized response requirements, plus rate limiting. It does not publish the rate limit, successful-record price, retry policy, service level, or exact approval criteria.

Before signing an annual Team term, obtain an API approval tied to the expected volume and use case. The order should define rate and concurrency limits, charge behavior for no-match and partial-match responses, retries, duplicate requests, verification calls, test capacity, support, and suspension rules.

Do not build the cost model from an assumed API entitlement. If API approval is pending, model the workflow as manual or file-based and include the staff time that creates.

Product scope affects the denominator

Swordfish is a contact-data and enrichment layer, not a complete sending platform. Its first-party pages describe several routes:

• Prospector searches by title, seniority, company, industry, location, headcount, and contact availability.
• The Chrome extension reveals individual or bulk records on supported profile and list pages.
• File Upload enriches CSV records with contact and company fields.
• Reverse Lookup searches from a phone, email, or supported social profile.
• API keys can require phone, email, or a custom field set.
• Email and phone tools validate returned fields.

A returned contact is not yet a usable contact. Identity can be wrong, employment can be stale, the record can duplicate the CRM, the person can be suppressed, or the required field can fail verification. Use accepted CRM records as the cost denominator.

Swordfish publishes large inventory and accuracy claims on its data page. Those are vendor statements, not independent measurements of the buyer's market. A matched sample is more useful than a global profile count.

Integration costs extend beyond the subscription

The integration directory names Zapier, Salesforce, HubSpot, Crelate, LOXO, Top Echelon, Pipedrive, Salesloft, Lever, and Outreach. Public pages do not establish sync direction, field precedence, duplicate handling, writeback history, or whether every connection is native.

Pricing places CRM and applicant-tracking integrations on Team. The receiving platform, Zapier, and any verifier can add their own charges. Include those subscriptions and the licensed-viewer interpretation in total cost.

Test one controlled record for creation, update, owner assignment, source date, field precedence, suppression, and rollback. Then test a duplicate and a stale employee. A fast sync that overwrites trusted CRM data is a failed integration.

Cancellation and privacy terms need reconciliation

Swordfish's terms describe purchases as final and non-refundable, then allow discretionary refunds while excluding custom, annual, team, and enterprise plans. The FAQ says to contact support before renewal and suggests processing within 24 business hours. The terms call for 30 days' written notice and also mention account settings.

Use the strictest interpretation until the order form says otherwise. For an annual purchase, set the internal cancellation deadline at least 30 days before renewal and obtain acknowledgment.

The privacy policy, updated August 18, 2025, identifies Swordfish as a Delaware corporation and registered data broker in California and Vermont. It says business profiles can come from licensed providers and public sources, and identifiable personal information is generally retained for seven years from the processing date.

Public product pages advertise GDPR and CCPA compliance, while Swordfish's GDPR page says the company is not required to comply with GDPR and voluntarily follows some principles. The FAQ separately says EU-based contact data is not provided. Treat this as an unresolved legal and product-scope question.

The inspected pages did not provide public SOC 2 or ISO evidence, a public DPA, subprocessor register, encryption detail, penetration-test scope, breach-notification term, uptime service level, or residency choice. Request those documents if the buyer's review requires them.

Calculate cost per accepted record

Build a blind 100-row fixture with current employees, recent job changers, restrictive domains, invalid domains, no-match rows, duplicates, different company and email domains, phone-only requests, email-only requests, and CRM suppressions.

For each immutable input ID, record the route, raw result, verification state, fields returned, balance before and after, duplicate behavior, current-employer decision, identity decision, and final accepted, held, or rejected state.

Use four measures:

1. Match rate: returned matches divided by submitted rows.
2. Acceptance rate: accepted CRM records divided by submitted rows.
3. Precision: accepted records divided by returned matches.
4. Cost per accepted record: subscription allocation, seats, API, verification, integration, and operator cost divided by accepted records.

An illustrative month with 70 accepted records would allocate the $99 Professional monthly fee at $1.41 per accepted record. The $299 Team tier would allocate $4.27 before integration, verification, and staff cost. These examples assume the workflow fits the plan and do not predict match quality.

Set acceptance rules before viewing results. Reject identity mismatches and suppressed contacts. Hold stale or uncertain employment. Count a record only when the required field is returned, verified to the buyer's standard, mapped correctly, and permitted for the intended use.

Who should buy which Swordfish plan?

Choose Professional for one human researcher using the supported interface who does not need file enrichment, CRM integration, or API access. Confirm the fair-use boundary and the exact role of credits first.

Choose Team only when shared controls, file enrichment, or integrations justify the higher fixed cost and Swordfish confirms every licensed user. Do not sign an annual Team order for an API workflow until API approval and successful-record pricing are written into it.

Choose Data Licensing only after a representative file proves coverage and the contract defines refreshes, permitted use, retention, and a total accepted-record denominator. Pass on every tier when the buyer cannot accept the post-termination purge rule or unresolved privacy and entitlement conflicts.

Want to test Swordfish against your actual market?

We can build the blind fixture, define accepted-record rules, and connect only approved data to a client-owned outbound system without letting raw reveals overwrite trusted CRM fields.

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