Cost of finding and sending candidate emails

Search for a candidate by role and location, and the same chat that returns the address will draft and send the approach. That is the work your budget covers: the lookup, the verification pass on every address it returns, and the send, kept together so a shortlist does not have to move between tools before anyone is contacted.

Paid tiers put finds and sends on an equal footing, so a month spent hunting hard does not leave you short of sends when the shortlist is ready. That balance suits specialist recruiting, where a narrow search can produce a small number of people you genuinely want to write to, and where the writing matters as much as the finding.

The AI side is included across email types, which matters when you approach a candidate, chase a reference or send a speculative note in the same week. The plans page lists the tiers and the lifetime options sit on softwareprogrammer.app, so both sources are worth reading before you commit to a monthly plan.

Nothing in the tiers buys a guarantee about where a message lands. You are paying for the finding, the checking and the drafting, and the sending itself runs on infrastructure whose placement behaviour sits outside the plan you choose. Budget for the workflow, not for a promise about the primary inbox.

Free sits at the bottom as a way to test the chat before any money moves. Starter and Growth raise the monthly allowance, which is the figure that matters most to a recruiter working a steady desk. Pro, Agency and Scale continue upward for people running more searches and more approaches each month, and Enterprise and Unlimited sit above them for the heaviest use.

Three lifetime tiers appear on softwareprogrammer.app: Starter lifetime, Growth lifetime and a bring-your-own-SMTP lifetime. The last of these is the one to read closely if you already have sending infrastructure you trust, because it changes which part of the job the plan covers. Compare each lifetime option against the monthly equivalent on the same volume before deciding.

Higher tiers do not change the mechanics. Verification still runs on each address, finds and sends still move together, and the AI still writes the drafts. What climbs is capacity. A recruiter with a quiet month and a recruiter with a frantic one are buying the same workflow at different volumes, which is why the allowance is the number to match to your desk.

Stale data is the reasonable worry. A specialist database can look full and still hold people who moved on last quarter, and a recruiter pays for that in wasted approaches. Verification on every address helps at the point of lookup, but it describes that moment and not the following month, so treat older rows as candidates for a fresh check before you reuse them.

The same caution applies to the AI writing. Drafts arrive for every email type, and a recruiter still reads each one before it leaves, because the approved text is what the candidate receives. That read is part of the job rather than a failure of the tool, and it is the step that keeps a speculative approach sounding like a person wrote it.

Allowances reset each period and unused finds and sends do not carry forward, so a quiet month is not banked for a busy one. Size the tier to a realistic month rather than an optimistic one. None of this makes the product weak; it tells you what to check before paying, which is the useful part of any buying decision.

Take the two tiers nearest your monthly volume and write down how many candidate approaches you actually send in a normal month, not a record one. Then check whether the lower tier covers that number with room for a re-check of older contacts. If it does, the higher tier is buying capacity you will not use, and the reset rule means that capacity disappears at period end anyway.

If your desk is growing, or you run several specialisms at once, the higher tier earns its place through volume rather than through features, since the mechanics stay the same. For a recruiter who already owns sending infrastructure, the bring-your-own-SMTP lifetime option deserves a direct comparison with the monthly plans on the same expected volume.

Read both price sources before you decide: the plans page for the monthly tiers and softwareprogrammer.app for the lifetime ones. Then pick the smallest plan that covers a realistic month and plan to revisit it when your desk changes. The API, MCP, webhooks and CSV export sit alongside the chat for anyone who wants the data elsewhere.