> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://help.pipelime.ai/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # How many credits does a lead cost? > One credit for every lead your source finds an email for, plus five more only when it also finds a phone number. export const Screenshot = ({id, alt, caption, frame = 'browser', url, marks = [], lang = 'en', workspace = 'northwind-outbound'}) => { const src = `/images/screenshots/${lang}/${id}.png`; const chrome = url ? `app.pipelime.ai/${workspace}${url}` : 'app.pipelime.ai'; return

; }; A [lead source](/en/ai-agents/lead-sources) charges one credit for every lead it attaches an email to, and five credits more only when you asked it for a phone number and one actually comes back. A lead it never finds an email for costs nothing.

Where

Outreach→AI Agents

Your role needs

Read access to AI Agents read-campaigns. Admin, Member and Viewer have it by default.

To create or change

create-campaigns to add one, update-campaigns to change one, on top of the permission above.

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## How it behaves ### One credit, the moment a lead gets an email A lead source finds companies, and each company it finishes researching starts its own hunt for people inside it. Within one company those hunts run as a queue: one contact, then the next. Every one of them that ends with an email attached to a lead costs one credit. That is the base charge, and the only charge for a lead you didn't also ask for a phone number on. Researching the company itself is not charged. Only contacts are. How many contacts one company can produce is its own control, **Contacts per company**: it caps how many people in that company can end up with an email, and the search stops working through that company's list once the cap is reached. You'll find it on the **Pace** step of the create-agent wizard, and on **Add a source** it sits inside the **Pace & limits** section, which starts closed. With phone lookup off, the field's own helper text says as much: "each contact uses 1 credit". Set it to three and a company that yields three leads with emails can add up to three separate one-credit charges. The charge is per lead, not per company. ### What skips the charge A search that never attaches an email is never charged: nothing came back, or the address turned out to be on your workspace's blocked-domain list. Nor is a search we skip outright, which we do once a company has racked up enough failed email checks in a row that trying the next person there is unlikely to help. One address that checks out clean resets that streak. The bar to actually skip a charge is narrower than "verified," though. Only a check that comes back failed discards the email. Everything short of that (a clean verified result, or one that comes back inconclusive with no firm answer either way) still leaves the email in place, and that lead still costs the credit. [What consumes credits](/en/billing/what-consumes-credits) covers what those verdicts mean in full, including for leads that never went through a lead source at all. ### Turning on phone lookup Phone lookup is off for every lead source until you turn it on yourself, with the **Also find phone numbers** switch. You'll meet it wherever you set a source up: the **Pace** step when you first create an agent, and **Add a source** on an existing one. In that dialog it deliberately sits out in the open rather than inside **Pace & limits**: it's the one control there that changes what a lead costs, and the product keeps that in view instead of disclosing it behind a closed section. Turning it on doesn't touch the email side of the price. Every lead your source finds still gets the same email search, at the same one credit, whether the switch is on or off. The panel says as much in its own words: "The email is always included and is never replaced by the phone number." What the switch adds is a second, separate search, run right after the email one succeeds: an attempt to find a direct phone number for that same lead. ### The phone credit only lands when a number comes back That second search is billed only on success. A lookup that comes back empty costs nothing on top of the email credit. You don't pay for finding out a lead has no number on file, only for one you are actually handed. There's also a ceiling on how much one lookup can add. The enrichment behind it can return more than one number for a lead (a mobile, a work line, a direct line), but a lead source only ever bills you for one of them. So the most one lead can cost a lead source is the one-credit email plus the five-credit phone number, no matter how many numbers the lookup turns up. That cap belongs to lead sources: the manual **Get Phone** button on a lead's own page works differently and bills every number it finds. See [Get a phone number for a lead](/en/leads/get-a-phone-number). If the workspace doesn't have five credits to spare when the lookup is due, the lookup is skipped instead of half-charged. The lead keeps its email and its one credit. ### Where to see what you've spent