Run cold email up to 82% cheaper than 
Instantly.
Ballast is cold email software with every feature on every plan. Connect unlimited mailboxes, send sequences at a pace your domains survive, and handle replies in one inbox, priced by the emails you send.
- From $19 a month
- Every feature on every plan
- Unlimited mailboxes and seats
The problem
The cheap plan is never the plan you end up on.
Entry plans cap your contacts. Then the Unibox, client workspaces and placement tests sit on higher tiers or cost extra. Here is an agency sending 150,000 emails a month for 5 clients.
Instantlyper month- Light Speed plan$358
Smartleadper month- Unlimited Smart plan$174
- 5 client workspaces × $29$145
- Pro plan, 150,000 emails$79
- Unibox, warmup, placement testsincl.
Now put in your own numbers.
Your volume and your list, priced on each tool's cheapest public plan that covers both.
Emails a month
20,000
Contacts in your account
5,000
On Ballast
Warmup is free and never uses your quota. All 20,000 emails go directly to your prospects.
Instantly
Hypergrowth plan
$107
Ballast is 82% cheaper
Smartlead
Pro plan
$94
Ballast is 80% cheaper
Lemlist
Email plan
$69
Ballast is 72% cheaper
Woodpecker
Email 50K plan
$79
Ballast is 76% cheaper
Their cheapest public plan for both numbers, monthly billing, checked November 2026. Ballast is priced as if every contact were active; it only counts contacts still waiting for an email. The 82% in the headline: 20,000 emails/month: Ballast Starter $19 vs Instantly Hypergrowth $107, monthly prices checked November 2026. Every comparison
How it works
Cheap is the hook. Steady is the product.
LaunchOnIt Everything included
Everything you need to run cold email.
Every card below is on every plan. The plan only sets how many emails you send.
Mailboxes
Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 or any SMTP host, as many as you own.
Warmup
New mailboxes trade a few emails a day with the pool, so they have a real history before your first campaign.
Sequences
Steps, A to E variants, spintax and variables, previewed against real leads.
Unibox
Replies from every mailbox in one inbox, sorted into Interested, Out of office and the rest.
Guardrails
Breakers pause a mailbox, a campaign or the workspace when bounces climb, and say why.
Deliverability Network
SMTP mailboxes connect from one fixed IP used only for mail, so your provider sees the same sender every time.
Import
Pull lists from Apollo, Instantly, Smartlead and Lemlist with your own key, take rows from Clay, or drop in any CSV.
API and MCP
Everything in the app is a REST endpoint and a tool your AI can call, with signed webhooks.
Deliverability
Built so people can say no, and you hear it.
Cold email works when it reaches one person with a reason to read it, and is easy to refuse. Every plan sends at a person's pace, honors every no, and stops on its own when bounces or complaints say the list is wrong.
No means no, everywhere
Every email carries one-click unsubscribe, the button Gmail and Yahoo show next to your name. An unsubscribe, a "stop" reply or a spam complaint suppresses the address in every campaign, for good.
A reply ends the sequence
By default, when someone writes back, Ballast stops emailing them in every campaign, not only the one they answered. A real conversation never gets an automated follow-up.
Paced like a person
30 emails a day per mailbox by default, 4 to 10 minutes apart, only in each lead's working hours, with a slow ramp for new mailboxes.
It stops you before your list does damage
When bounces climb, Ballast pauses the mailbox, the campaign or the whole workspace and says why. A mailbox stops above a 5% bounce rate, and on repeated spam complaints.
Tested before your leads see it
Send a campaign email to test inboxes at the main providers and see inbox, spam or missing for each, before you launch. Ten tests a day on every plan.
Acceptable use
What Ballast is not for.
Ballast is for one-to-one business email to people whose work makes your message relevant. Accounts that use it for anything below have their sending held or suspended.
- Bought, rented or scraped lists of people with no business reason to hear from you
- Newsletters, marketing blasts or emailing thousands of strangers
- Hiding who you are, fake replies or a brand that isn't yours
- Emailing anyone who unsubscribed, said stop or bounced
The full rules are in the Acceptable Use Policy.
Write the sequence
Write it once. Read it as each lead will.
Variables with fallbacks, spintax and up to five variants a step. The preview fills in a real lead, warns you when a value is missing, and checks length, spam words and links while you type.
Rendered by the real template engine
To Maya Okafor <maya@brightline.io>
Quick question about Brightline
Hey Maya,
Saw that Brightline is hiring two SDRs. Teams that size lose the first month to setup: lists in one tool, mailboxes in another, replies nobody reads.
We get new reps sending from their own mailboxes in a day, with the replies sorted for them.
Worth a short call next week to see if it fits?
Alex
Handle the replies
Every reply from every mailbox, in one inbox.
Replies land in the Unibox seconds after they arrive, with the campaign emails folded above them. Out of office pauses the sequence until the return date, unsubscribes stop it, and AI labels the rest if you turn it on. Answer from the same mailbox, in the same thread.
Automations
When a lead replies, clicks or fills in a form, the next step runs itself.
Build flows on a canvas: post interested replies to Slack, open the deal in HubSpot or Pipedrive, sort replies with AI, or turn a Typeform signup into a lead in the right campaign. Test a flow before it goes live. On every plan, no Zapier in the middle.
History
- Waiting for an event
Ready to stop paying per mailbox?
Import your setup in an afternoon. Every feature on every plan, from $19 a month.
Why Ballast
Spend the budget on the list, not on the tool.
Every feature on every plan
No Unibox tier, no seat fee, no warmup add-on. Built-in deliverability network on every plan. The plan only decides how many emails you send.
Your data stays yours
Your list, your copy and your replies live in your workspace. We don't sell them, share them or train models on them.
Your AI can run it
Every screen is also an MCP tool for Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor. Nothing sends until you say yes.
Steady beats fast
Each mailbox sends at its own daily limit, ramps up slowly and pauses when bounces climb. Unlimited mailboxes is not unlimited sending.
Replies over opens
Open tracking is off by default. Privacy proxies open emails on delivery, so the number mostly counts machines.
Switch in an afternoon
Connect Instantly, Smartlead or Lemlist with your API key and your lists come straight in, or drop in their exports. Duplicates, suppressed and invalid rows counted for you.
Your AI can run it
Everything you can do in Ballast, your AI can do too.
Every action is a tool on the Ballast MCP server. claude.ai and ChatGPT sign in with your account, Claude Code and Cursor use an API key. Anything that sends, imports or deletes asks first.
Find leads
Local businesses from the map, and the addresses on their websites.
Pick from 67 business categories and a city on OpenStreetMap, or connect your own Google Places key. BallastBot reads each business's website for the email addresses it publishes, marks them Company or Personal, and sends them through the import pipeline. No per-lead credits.
Bring your list
Switch on a Tuesday afternoon.
Connect Apollo, Instantly, Smartlead or Lemlist with your own API key and pull a list without exporting anything, or let your Clay table send its rows. Exports work too: Ballast knows each tool's columns, keeps your custom fields, and tells you exactly what it left out and why.
Free tool
Check your domain before the next send.
SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MX and 9 blacklists in about two seconds, with the fix for every problem. The same check Ballast runs on your domains every night.
Pay for emails sent. The rest is included.
Five plans, one product. Mailboxes, seats, warmup, the Unibox and the API come with each of them.
Emails a month
Up to 10,000 active contacts
Leads that finished, replied, bounced or unsubscribed don't count, so you never delete leads to make room.
Starter
$0.95 per 1,000 emailsBilled monthly
300 AI drafts a month, no limit with your own AI key
Included on all five plans
- Unlimited mailboxes
- Unlimited seats
- Warmup outside your quota
- Mail-only sending IPs
- Unibox with AI labels
- Sequences and A/B variants
- Domain monitoring
- Import presets
- API, webhooks and MCP
- One-click unsubscribe
Need an Enterprise plan or more than 2,000,000 emails a month? Talk to us. Full details on the pricing page.
From the blog
Cold email, with the numbers we checked.
Deliverability
Email Reputation: How to Check and Repair It for Cold Email
Email reputation has no single score, and Google is retiring its reputation dashboards. What a cold sender can still check, and how to repair damage.
Deliverability
Why Are My Emails Going to Spam? How to Find the Cause in Cold Email
Emails going to spam have a handful of causes, and the pattern shows which: one provider, mailbox, domain or campaign. How to read it and fix it.
Cold email
7 Pitch Email Examples for B2B Sales and Cold Outreach
Real B2B pitch email templates that get replies, without the fluffy compliments, fake calendar demands, or generic sales talk.
Questions
The ones people ask before they switch. Anything else, write to contact@ballast.to.
How do you protect deliverability if your price is up to 82% lower?
The price is lower because we do not charge per seat, mark up mailboxes, or sell safeguards as add-ons. We do not cut corners on deliverability. Ballast paces sending per mailbox with random 4 to 10 minute gaps, matches ESPs (Google mailboxes write to Gmail leads, Microsoft to Outlook), routes traffic over static mail-only IPs, checks SPF, DKIM and DMARC nightly, and pauses campaigns automatically if bounces climb past 3%.
How the breakers workWhy do you charge per email, not per mailbox or seat?
Your emails leave from your own mailboxes, so one more mailbox or teammate costs us next to nothing. Charging for them would only punish you for spreading volume the safe way. The plan counts emails sent a month and active contacts. Leads that finished their sequence, replied, bounced or unsubscribed don't count.
Does warmup consume from my monthly email quota?
No. Warmup never touches your email allowance. If your plan includes 20,000 or 150,000 emails a month, all of them are for real prospect campaigns. Warmup runs separately across the pool (2 on day one, up to 10 a day per mailbox, with real opens and replies) at no extra cost.
How warmup worksWhich mailboxes can I connect?
Google Workspace and Gmail with an app password, Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com with Microsoft sign-in, and any other provider over SMTP and IMAP. Unlimited on every plan. To keep the shared network clean, a new workspace can add 5 mailboxes and send 1,000 emails a day for its first 7 days.
Connect a mailboxCan my AI run it?
Yes. Every action in the app is also a tool on the Ballast MCP server. claude.ai and ChatGPT sign in with your Ballast account; Claude Code and Cursor use an API key. Launching a campaign, replying, importing and deleting need a second, confirming call, so nothing sends until you say yes.
Connect your AICan I bring my leads from Instantly or Smartlead?
Yes. Connect Instantly, Smartlead or Lemlist with your own API key and import a list or campaign from the Import page, or export a CSV and drop it in. Custom fields come along, leads who unsubscribed there stay suppressed, and duplicates, suppressed and invalid addresses are counted, never imported twice. Apollo and Clay connect the same way.
Switching from InstantlyWhat happens if I go over my plan?
Sending pauses until your next monthly period or until you move up a plan. There is no overage bill. The sidebar shows what's left, and we email you when you reach the limit.
Is there a free trial?
No free plan and no trial: a card is required, because free cold email accounts attract people who burn the shared sending network for everyone. The domain checker is free and needs no signup. If Ballast isn't for you, ask for a full refund within 3 days of a charge.
Check your domain freeCan I keep my clients apart?
Yes. Make a workspace per client: each has its own mailboxes, leads, campaigns and Unibox, unlimited seats, and its own plan, so each client's sending is billed on its own. Or run several clients from one workspace on one plan.
Where is my data, and who sees it?
Ballast is hosted in the EU. Your list, your copy and your replies stay in your workspace. We don't sell them, share them or train models on them. Every company we use that touches your data is on our sub-processor list.
Sub-processorsThe honest part
Skip Ballast if this is you
You have no list or offer yet
A sending tool won't find you customers. Work out who you're writing to and why they'd reply, then come back.
You want to blast a bought consumer list
Our acceptable use policy forbids it and the breakers would pause you anyway.
You send newsletters or receipts
Use an email service built for that. Ballast is for one-to-one outbound from your own mailboxes.
You want guaranteed inbox placement
Nobody can sell that honestly. We keep you inside the published rules and stop before a bad day burns a domain.
