If you are typing "instantly alternative" into Google, something about your current setup is probably bothering you. Maybe it is paying twice, once for sending and once for the lead database. Maybe it is the idea that your prospect list, your copy and your sending reputation all live on someone else's infrastructure. This page is for that search.
Eveil is an open-source outbound platform you can self-host for free, or run on a pay-as-you-go cloud with no subscription. It finds companies by reading the live web at the moment you ask, not from a purchased database, and it sends from your own mailbox over plain SMTP. Instantly is a mature, hosted platform with a large contact database and a proven warm-up pool. Both are real tools. They solve the problem differently, and the right one depends on what you actually need.
What Instantly actually costs
Checked on instantly.ai/pricing, 14 October 2026. Instantly separates sending from lead data, and you generally need both.
Outreach-only plans:
- Growth: $47/month, unlimited email accounts, unlimited email warmup, 1,000 uploaded contacts, 5,000 emails per month.
- Hypergrowth: $97/month, 25,000 uploaded contacts, 125,000 emails per month.
- Lightspeed: $358/month, 100,000 uploaded contacts, 500,000 emails per month.
Lead data is billed separately as credits against a database advertised as "450M+ B2B Leads":
- Growth Credits: $47/month, or $37.60/month billed annually, 1,500 to 2,000 credits a month.
- Supersonic Credits: $97/month, 5,000 to 7,500 credits a month.
- Hyper Credits: $197/month, volume not published per credit in the same way, priced as a step up from Supersonic.
Instantly also sells Starter, Scale and Agency bundles that combine a sending plan with a credit plan, which is how most buyers actually subscribe once they need both outreach and leads.
The arithmetic that matters: if you want outreach volume and fresh lead data, you are usually stacking two monthly subscriptions, not one. A team on Hypergrowth plus Supersonic Credits is looking at $194/month before any annual discount, and that commitment does not shrink the month you send fewer emails.
What Eveil costs
Eveil has no subscription. Cloud pricing is pay-as-you-go: 5,000 free credits at signup, no card required. After that, roughly EUR 0.10 per qualified lead, all-in. Credits never expire. Verification, sending and reading replies over IMAP cost nothing, you only pay when a lead is actually qualified.
The self-hosted edition is free forever under AGPL-3.0. You run it in Docker, bring your own AI provider key, and nothing is feature-gated. Unlimited mailboxes, unlimited seats.
There is no separate "lead database" line item, because there is no stored database. Eveil qualifies companies by reading the live web, search engine results, maps, Reddit, and official registries, at the moment you ask, and attaches a fit score and reasoning to each one.
The real difference: where the leads come from
This is the part that does not show up on a pricing page. Instantly's 450M-row database is a static asset, scraped and resold, refreshed on Instantly's schedule, shared across every customer who buys credits. It gives you instant volume. It also means your competitor, three doors down, might be working the exact same list you are.
Eveil does not have a database to sell you. It searches live at qualification time. For a niche vertical, a specific region, or a company that only exists because it incorporated last quarter, a static database has nothing. Live search can still find it, because it is reading the actual web, not a six-month-old snapshot.
The trade-off is honest: live discovery is slower per lead and will not match a 450-million-row database on raw breadth. If you need 100,000 contacts in bulk-import spreadsheet form right now, that is not what Eveil does.
The real difference: where your mailbox sends from
Instantly's unlimited warmup is a genuine, mature feature. It runs your mailbox through a shared network of accounts that open and reply to each other, building sender reputation before you send real campaigns. It works, and a lot of deliverability guides recommend exactly this kind of warm-up.
Eveil does not have a warm-up pool. It sends plain SMTP from your own mailbox, no relay, no shared sending domain, no bot network pretending to be real recipients. Your reputation is built the way it was before any of these tools existed: by sending real mail that real people reply to, at a pace you control with daily caps and ramp-up. Some teams will miss the warm-up automation. Others will prefer that nothing is artificially inflating their sender signals.
Eveil also does not insert tracking pixels or rewrite your links. That means no open-rate number in the dashboard, because open tracking is exactly the kind of thing that degrades deliverability and increasingly gets stripped or flagged by mail providers anyway. If open rate is a metric you report to a boss, this is a real gap. If you have stopped trusting open rate as a number, this is a feature.
Feature comparison
| Instantly (checked 14 Oct 2026) | Eveil | |
|---|---|---|
| Lead sourcing | Purchased database, 450M+ rows, sold as credits | Live web discovery at qualification time, no stored database |
| Sending | Relay-assisted, shared infrastructure features | Plain SMTP, own mailbox, no relay |
| Warm-up | Unlimited automated warm-up pool | None, ramp-up and pacing controls instead |
| Open tracking | Pixel-based open rate | None, no pixels, no rewritten links |
| Pricing | Subscription tiers, sending and leads billed separately | Pay-as-you-go credits, roughly EUR 0.10 per qualified lead |
| Self-hosting | Not available | Free forever, AGPL-3.0, Docker, own AI key |
| Monthly email volume (top tier) | 500,000 emails/month (Lightspeed) | Not built for six-figure monthly volume |
| Reply handling | Unibox, battle-tested at agency scale | Unified inbox over IMAP, threads on Message-ID, pauses or reschedules on reply |
| Beyond email | Not a focus | LinkedIn, X and Bluesky post drafts, SEO articles, Reddit reply drafts, all from one knowledge base |
Where Instantly is genuinely better
It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise, so here it is plainly. Instantly's warm-up pool and deliverability tooling are more mature than anything Eveil ships today. Its unibox and reply handling have been battle-tested across agencies running high volume for years. If you need to send 500,000 emails a month, that is a scale Eveil is not built for. And its 450-million-row database gives instant breadth that live web discovery simply cannot match in raw row count, no matter how current the live results are.Eveil is younger and smaller. If your team already runs high-volume, database-dependent outbound at agency scale and that works for you, switching has a real cost and you should weigh it against what you actually gain.
Who should actually switch
Eveil fits teams who sell into a specific niche, a region, or a segment where timing and specialization matter more than database row count, who want to keep sending from a mailbox they control, and who would rather not pay a second subscription just to access lead data. It also fits anyone put off by the idea of a shared warm-up network sitting between their mailbox and the inbox they are trying to reach.
If none of that bothers you about your current Instantly setup, there may be no reason to move. If it does, the self-hosted edition costs nothing to try: clone it, run it in Docker, bring your own AI key, and see what live discovery finds for your actual market before you decide anything.