Best Free Cold Email Software: What Is Free, What Is a Trial

Search for free cold email software and most of what comes back is not free. It is a fourteen day window, or a seven day one, or a plan that renews fifty credits a month while the vendor's own documentation explains that it was never meant to grow a business.

That is not a complaint about the industry. Sending email costs the vendor money in infrastructure and reputation, so the free tiers that survive are the ones built around a limit rather than a date. The useful question is which limit, and whether you can work inside it.

Below are the tools with a plan you can keep, the exact caps as their own pricing pages state them, and a second list of the ones that use the word free for a countdown.

What "free" Means in Cold Email Software

The word covers three different things, and telling them apart takes about thirty seconds on the vendor's pricing page.

A free plan. A column priced at zero, with no expiry date and no card at signup. It always carries a hard limit: emails a day, emails a month, credits, or the number of people you can put in a sequence.

A renewable trial dressed as a plan. It looks permanent because the credits reset every month, but the allowance is set at a size where nothing can actually run. Snov.io is unusually honest about this: its documentation says the Trial plan "has been created to offer a peek into what Snov.io can do and is not meant to help grow sales."

A trial with a countdown. Seven or fourteen days of the full product, then a card. This is the most common shape, and it is the one that fills search results for free cold email tools.

The distinction matters more here than in most software categories, because cold outreach is a habit rather than a project. A tool you lose in two weeks teaches you nothing about whether the campaign works, since most replies arrive after the first message, on a follow-up you never got to send.

How We Checked

Every tool below had to clear the same bar, and the check was done on the vendor's own pricing or documentation page rather than on a comparison site.

1. A plan priced at zero with no end date. A trial is a trial even when the page says free.
2. No card to reach it.
3. It has to send. Tracking and templates are useful, but a tool that cannot put a message in front of a stranger is not cold email software.
4. A stated limit. If the cap is not published, the plan cannot be planned around.
5. Your own mailbox. Cold email from a shared marketing platform is a deliverability problem before it is a compliance one.

Tools are described by what the free tier does, not by their full feature list, because on a free plan the full feature list is not what you get.

The Cold Email Tools With a Genuinely Free Plan

1. Outsales

Outsales is the tool we build, and the free plan exists for a structural reason rather than a marketing one: sequences that leave from your own mailbox cost us almost nothing to run, because there is no model call, no data provider and no inbox pool behind them. What costs money is the AI writing and reading on your behalf, so that is the part that is paid.

The practical effect is that the free tier is the whole sending workflow rather than a sample of it. Multi-step sequences, open, click and reply tracking, a daily cap per mailbox with a send window in the recipient's time zone, and bounce and unsubscribe suppression applied across every campaign rather than the one that triggered it.

What the free plan gives you: one seat, 2,000 contacts and 300 emails a month, multi-step sequences from Gmail, Outlook, SendGrid, Resend or SMTP, tracking per step and per job title, sending controls, suppression, and two-way sync with HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce and ActiveCampaign. The contact record and the campaign are the same product, so a reply lands on a timeline instead of in a void, which is the free CRM half of the same plan.

What it cannot do: there is no inbox warm-up and no mailbox rotation across domains, so a brand new sending domain needs warming elsewhere first. Three hundred emails a month is a prospecting habit, not a volume operation. Finding people by domain or by search spends credits; everything else does not.

Best for: founders and one person sales teams who send their own email and want the history and the sequence in one place. The full limits are on the free cold email plan page.

2. Apollo.io

Apollo is the most common answer to this question, and the reason is the database rather than the sender: the free plan includes contact search across a very large B2B index, which is the part most people are missing when they start.

The free tier includes credits on an annual allowance, two sequences, and email campaigns from a connected Gmail account. Non-paying plans can only connect Gmail, which matters if your company runs on Microsoft.

What the free plan gives you: roughly nine hundred credits a year, two active sequences, contact search with basic filters, and CRM enrichment on a limited number of records a month.

What it cannot do: the credit allowance is the real constraint, and it is annual rather than monthly, so a single enthusiastic afternoon of exporting can consume a quarter of it. Free accounts are limited to one seat after a period of active use, and the mailbox restriction rules out Outlook.

Best for: anyone whose bottleneck is finding people rather than writing to them. If that is you, the prospecting is the product and the sending is a bonus.

3. Hunter Campaigns

Hunter is known for finding and verifying addresses, and Campaigns is the sending tool attached to it. The free plan is unusually clear: fifty credits a month, one connected email account, and up to five hundred recipients per sequence.

Five hundred recipients on a free plan sounds generous until you notice the credits, which is where finding the addresses comes from. In practice the free tier suits a list you already have, where you only need verification on the doubtful ones.

What the free plan gives you: fifty monthly credits, one mailbox, sequences with follow-up steps, and five hundred recipients per sequence, plus basic database filters.

What it cannot do: the credit budget runs out quickly if you are sourcing addresses as well as sending to them, and one connected mailbox caps throughput regardless of the recipient allowance.

Best for: a one-off campaign to a list you can already export, where verification matters more than volume.

4. Mixmax

Mixmax lives inside Gmail and leans towards the meeting rather than the campaign. Its free plan appears automatically at the end of the trial, which is a pattern worth knowing: you are not asked to downgrade, you simply land there.

What the free plan gives you: open and click tracking on twenty emails a month, email sequences to fifty contacts a month, templates, scheduling links, reminders and tasks.

What it cannot do: twenty tracked emails a month is a demonstration rather than a workflow, multichannel sequences are paid, and the meeting intelligence features are on the upper tiers.

Best for: someone who books meetings from their inbox and wants the scheduling link and the light sequencing in the same place, with the volume kept small.

5. Mailmeteor

Mailmeteor is a mail merge for Gmail and Google Sheets with a genuinely permanent free tier. It is the cleanest of the merge tools and the free plan is honest about what it is.

What the free plan gives you: fifty emails a day, templates, an email tracker for opens and clicks, scheduling and attachments, and the Gmail, Sheets and Excel extensions.

What it cannot do: no follow-ups, no reply detection, no email verification and no branding removal. That combination matters: without reply detection, the follow-up you send manually can land on somebody who already answered, which is the single most expensive mistake in cold outreach.

Best for: one personalised send to a list, where you will handle the replies and the follow-ups yourself.

6. Yet Another Mail Merge

YAMM is the other long-running Gmail merge tool, and its free quota is fifty recipients a day. The quota used to be a hundred and was reduced, which is a reminder that free tiers move.

What the free plan gives you: fifty recipients a day, mail merge from Google Sheets, and personalisation from your spreadsheet columns.

What it cannot do: footers, click tracking and email scheduling belong to the paid plans, so the free tier sends but tells you very little about what happened afterwards.

Best for: internal or warm sends where you already know the list and do not need the analytics.

7. Streak

Streak is on this list with a caveat, because it is the clearest example of a free tier that changed shape. It is still free, but what is free is the email tooling rather than the CRM: tracking, snippets, thread splitting and a mail merge capped at fifty a day. Pipelines, the reason most people installed it, now sit on the paid plans.

What the free plan gives you: email and link tracking, reusable snippets, mail merge at fifty a day, and the thread splitter.

What it cannot do: no pipelines and no contact management on free, so there is nowhere for a reply to land except your inbox.

Best for: a Gmail user who wants tracking and a small merge and already keeps records somewhere else. If the record is the point, compare it against a free CRM plan instead.

8. Gmail, on its own

The option most lists skip. A personal Gmail account sends up to five hundred messages a day and a Workspace account up to two thousand, and you can already personalise a send with a mail merge, as our guide to mass email in Gmail explains step by step.

What it gives you: sending, at a volume most free tools cannot match, from an address with real history.

What it cannot do: everything after the send. No sequence, no reply detection, no suppression list, no record of who opened anything, and no protection against the same person receiving your follow-up after they have replied.

Best for: a single announcement to a list you own. For anything that needs a second touch, the missing pieces are the whole job.

Tools That Say Free and Mean Trial

These appear constantly in free cold email lists. They are good products, and none of them has a free plan.

• GMass. Seven day trial at fifty emails a day. The company's own blog explains that free accounts were discontinued after abuse, which is the most common reason free tiers disappear in this category.
• Saleshandy. Seven day trial, no card required.
• Woodpecker. Fourteen days or one hundred cold emails, whichever comes first, no card required.
• Lemlist. Fourteen day trial.
• Reply.io. Fourteen day trial, no permanent free tier.
• Instantly. A trial rather than a free plan, despite how often it is listed as one.
• Smartlead. Trial, no card required.
• Snov.io. A renewable Trial plan: fifty credits and one hundred recipients a month, with integrations, bulk search, bulk verification, teamwork, A/B testing, API and export all excluded.
• Mailshake. No free plan and no trial at all.

The pattern is worth naming rather than resenting. A freemium model works for a vendor when the free tier converts, and in cold email the free tier also carries a cost the vendor cannot control: somebody else's sending reputation, attached to their infrastructure. That is why the free plans that survive tend to be the ones where you bring your own mailbox.

What No Free Plan Will Do for You

Being clear about this saves an evening.

Warm up a new domain. Warm-up pools are an ongoing cost, so they sit behind the paywall everywhere. If you registered a sending domain this month, warm it before you send anything cold from it.

Run many mailboxes across many domains. The agency setup, where volume is spread across dozens of inboxes to stay under the caps, is the definition of a paid product. If that is your model, the outreach tools built for volume are the right comparison.

Fix a bad list. Verification costs money per address, so free tiers ration it. Sending to an unverified list is how a good domain becomes a bad one, and deliverability tools exist because that damage is slow to undo.

Make a weak message work. Nothing on this page changes reply rates by itself. The variables that do are relevance, length and the follow-up, and the statistics on cold email are consistent about which one moves first.

How to Choose, by Situation

You have a list and need to send a real sequence. You need follow-ups, reply detection and suppression on the free tier, which narrows it quickly. That is the case ours was built for, and Hunter covers it too if the list is small and your mailbox is Gmail.

You do not have a list. Apollo, because the database is the part you are missing and the sending is included.

You want one clean personalised send. Mailmeteor or YAMM. Both are honest, both are capped around fifty a day, and neither pretends to be a campaign tool.

You live in Gmail and book meetings from it. Mixmax, if twenty tracked emails a month covers you.

You are testing whether outbound works at all before spending anything. Start on a free plan with sequences, send to a hundred people over a month, and read the reply rate by job title. The same logic applies to the paid shortlist once it works, which is what the tools for startups comparison is for. That single number tells you more than any comparison page, including this one, and it is the reason cold email still works for some teams and not others.

You are an agency running campaigns for clients. None of this fits. Client work needs separate domains, separate mailboxes and volume, which is a paid setup from day one: the tools built for agencies are the honest starting point.

The Short Version

There are fewer free cold email tools than the search results suggest, and the difference is easy to check: look for a column priced at zero on the vendor's own pricing page, then read its cap.

Of the ones that pass, the caps fall into three shapes. A daily merge limit around fifty, which sends but does not follow up. A credit allowance, which finds people but rations the sending. And a monthly send limit with the full sequence attached, which is the only shape that lets you run outbound as a habit rather than as an experiment.

Pick the shape that matches the job, then spend the effort you saved on the list and the message, which are the two things no plan, free or paid, will do for you.