What The Cognitive’s Credits Buy Your Recruiting Team

The Cognitive’s AI Sourcing costs $49 per month for 500 credits on Starter. Each candidate returned by search costs 1 credit, a successful email reveal costs 5 credits, and a successful phone reveal costs 10 credits. Finding a candidate and revealing both contact details therefore costs 16 credits, not one. AI interviews are purchased separately, starting at $99 per month. These are the vendor’s published prices checked on October 6, 2026.

The practical distinction is between profiles found and people you can contact. A 500-credit allowance does not buy 500 candidates with revealed contact details. Your budget depends on how many search results you consume, which contact channels you reveal, and how much of the monthly allowance you actually use.

Enter your monthly search results and successful reveals; see the credit total and the lowest-priced published plan that covers it.

Sourcing Plans Cost Less Per Credit Only When Used

Sourcing plan	Monthly price	Monthly credits	Cost per credit*
Starter	$49	500	9.8¢
Growth	$99	1,500	6.6¢
Scale	$199	3,500	About 5.69¢
Pro	$299	5,500	About 5.44¢

*Calculated at full use of the allowance. Plan prices and credit allowances come from The Cognitive’s pricing page. Dollar amounts are reproduced as published; confirm invoice currency and taxes before purchasing.

The per-credit calculation is the monthly subscription price divided by the included sourcing credits. It helps compare plans, but it is not a published pay-as-you-go rate. You cannot infer that additional credits are available at that price once your allowance runs out.

Unused sourcing credits expire each billing cycle rather than rolling over. That makes the headline rate useful only when the team consumes the allowance within the cycle. A larger subscription can have a lower advertised unit cost while costing more for your actual workload.

For example, paying $99 for Growth but using only 500 credits produces an effective cost of 19.8¢ per used credit, rather than 6.6¢. If those 500 credits were your entire sourcing requirement, Starter would cover the same credit consumption for $49. A decision to buy Growth would need another reason, such as expected additional usage, rather than its lower full-utilization rate alone.

For purchasing, separate the allowance decision from the workflow decision. First calculate the credits required for the month. Then check whether the plan includes the outreach features your recruiters need. The cheapest allowance that covers your searches and reveals is not necessarily the cheapest subscription that supplies your required workflow.

The calculator above compares published credit allowances and subscription prices. It does not price taxes, sourcing top-ups, or a custom arrangement. Those figures are not supplied in the draft’s pricing evidence.

Search And Contact Reveals Are Separate Charges

For candidates found through search, the combined charges are:

Action Per Candidate	Search	Reveals	Total
Search result only	1	0	1 credit
Search plus email	1	5	6 credits
Search plus phone	1	10	11 credits
Search plus both	1	15	16 credits

Email and phone reveals are charged only when successful. The search charge is based on candidates returned, not on the number you eventually shortlist. Profiles you reject after reviewing them still belong in the search portion of the budget.

Credits needed = candidates returned + (5 × successful email reveals) + (10 × successful phone reveals).

Keep the three quantities separate. A recruiter might review a broad result set but reveal contact details for only the people who meet the role requirements. Another workflow might reveal an email for each result and add phone numbers only for a smaller group. Both use the same charging rules, but they produce different totals.

A candidate whose email and phone are both successfully revealed belongs in both reveal counts. That is not double-counting the candidate’s search charge: the profile is counted once in search, while the two contact actions are charged separately.

The formula is a credit-consumption calculation, not a quality measure. A successful reveal establishes that the vendor charged for the reveal; it does not establish that the candidate will reply, satisfy the role requirements, or accept an interview. Keep those outcomes outside the credit count so the purchasing estimate does not become an unsupported cost-per-hire claim.

Starter Covers Fewer Contactable Candidates Than Profiles

The pricing page describes Starter as covering roughly 100 verified emails or 50 phone numbers. Those figures reflect reveal charges alone: email reveals consume five credits each and phone reveals consume ten. They do not leave room for finding those candidates through charged search results.

Applying the search-plus-reveal rules to the same 500-credit allowance gives these calculated limits:

Starter Workflow	Candidates Covered	Credits Used
Find each candidate and reveal email	83	498
Find each candidate and reveal phone	45	495
Find each candidate and reveal both	31	496

These are hypothetical maximums for the stated workflows, not vendor guarantees of candidate delivery. They assume every returned candidate is worth contacting and every requested reveal succeeds. The candidate totals are rounded down to whole people because the remaining balance cannot fund another complete search-and-reveal sequence of the same kind.

A real shortlist may be smaller because unsuitable results consume search credits before you reject them. Conversely, an unsuccessful reveal does not incur the successful-reveal charge. Neither effect changes the published unit charges; it changes how much useful recruiting work you get from the balance.

This distinction matters when comparing a sales-page allowance with a recruiter’s target. “Find candidates,” “reveal emails,” and “produce recruiter-approved, contactable candidates” are different deliverables. A budget built around the last one needs an estimate of search results reviewed as well as the intended contact reveals.

Do not interpret the email-only example as a requirement to buy phone data. If email is the intended outreach channel, count email reveals. If both channels are needed for selected candidates, count both only for that group. The budget should reflect the planned recruiting workflow rather than automatically revealing every available field.

A Worked Monthly Budget Fits Growth Exactly

Suppose your team returns 500 candidates, successfully reveals 100 emails, and successfully reveals 50 phone numbers during one billing cycle. The email and phone groups may overlap; overlap does not change the total because each successful reveal has its own charge.

Monthly Activity	Quantity	Credits Used
Candidates returned	500	500
Successful email reveals	100	500
Successful phone reveals	50	500
Total	—	1,500

That workload uses the entire $99 Growth allowance. It is the calculator’s starting example, so you can change the three counts to match your own expected activity.

The example does not mean the team has contacted every candidate returned. It includes contact reveals for selected groups within the search workload. It also does not give the number of distinct people with contact details, because the email and phone groups may overlap. Without knowing that overlap, adding the reveal counts would overstate the number of separate candidates if some received both reveals.

Growth covers the stated credit total, but the example leaves no unused allowance for further charged searches or successful reveals in that cycle. If the team expects additional activity, enter it before treating the plan as sufficient. Do not assume an unpublished sourcing top-up will cover the difference at the plan’s average cost per credit.

If the same team also purchases the Starter interview plan, the combined published monthly subscription price is $198. That combines $99 for Growth sourcing with $99 for Starter interviews. It is a subscription budget, not a cost-per-hire estimate, and it excludes any interview overages or other charges not included in those subscriptions.

Interview Credits Cannot Extend A Sourcing Balance

The Cognitive’s pricing policy says sourcing and interview balances cannot pay for each other. Buying an interview subscription does not expand your sourcing allowance, even though both products describe usage in credits.

The interview Starter plan includes 15 live AI interviews. Its 1,500 interview credits represent those interviews at 100 credits each; they are not another 1,500 credits available for candidate searches or contact reveals. Additional interviews on that tier cost $8 each.

Keep the two products on separate lines in the recruiting budget. The sourcing line accounts for candidates returned and successful contact reveals. The interview line accounts for the interview subscription and any applicable extra interviews. Combining the dollar amounts is useful for monthly spend, but combining the credit balances would produce an incorrect usage estimate.

This separation also matters during a trial. New accounts receive 100 sourcing credits and two AI interviews. Apply the same search-plus-reveal calculation to the sourcing allowance; the trial interviews do not increase it. A trial can test both parts of the workflow, but it does not turn interview capacity into more candidate contact data.

Outreach Features And Exhaustion Need Separate Checks

Automated email and SMS outreach is tier-dependent. The pricing page lists it with Sourcing Pro and says it is included with any Pro or Enterprise plan. Do not assume the $49 sourcing subscription includes automated outreach simply because it can reveal contact details.

Contact data and an outreach workflow are separate purchasing questions. If your requirement is to find candidates and obtain an email address, the credit calculation addresses that consumption. If your requirement also includes automated email or SMS outreach, verify the qualifying subscription before choosing a plan solely by allowance.

The published pricing evidence does not provide a sourcing overage or top-up rate. It does publish interview overage pricing, but that cannot be carried across to sourcing. There is no supported figure here for the price of an extra sourcing credit, a top-up package, or continued sourcing after the balance is exhausted.

Ask the vendor what happens when the sourcing allowance runs out: whether activity stops, whether an upgrade is required, and whether additional credits can be purchased. Get the applicable charge and billing treatment before committing to a workload above the published allowances. The calculator reports when the entered usage exceeds the largest listed sourcing allowance rather than inventing a price for that gap.

Credit expiry makes the timing of usage another purchasing constraint. Budget within the billing cycle, not as though unused credits can be saved for a later hiring push. An annual total of expected sourcing activity is not enough to establish which monthly allowance will fit uneven hiring demand.

Judge A Pilot By Approved, Contactable Candidates

For a pilot, record the three charged quantities alongside the recruiter’s assessment of the resulting candidates. Search results show consumption; recruiter-approved, contactable candidates show whether that consumption produced a usable shortlist. Replies and interview acceptance belong in separate outcome measures.

Calculate effective credit cost using credits actually consumed, rather than the entire allowance if part of it expires. Then examine how many of those consumed credits supported candidates the recruiter approved for contact. This keeps unused subscription capacity and unsuitable search results visible instead of hiding both behind the plan’s lowest possible per-credit rate.

Use the pilot to replace assumptions in the calculator with observed search and successful-reveal counts. The published prices can establish the subscription budget, but they cannot establish your shortlist quality, response rate, or eventual hiring cost. Our AI sourcing tools buyer’s guide explains how to assess data quality and workflow fit alongside price.