Instantly vs QuickMail: pricing, features and which to choose

Instantly is a hosted sales platform centered on outbound email campaigns. Its Outbound plans support unlimited connected email accounts and unlimited warmup, with contact and monthly email limits that rise from 1,000 contacts and 5,000 emails on Growth to 25,000 contacts and 125,000 emails on Hypergrowth, then 100,000 contacts and 500,000 emails on Light Speed. Campaign automation, scheduling, analytics, reputation protection, bounce detection, blocklists, A/Z testing, integrations, webhooks, and reply management are part of the product family. Instantly also sells lead data, verification, enrichment, website visitor identification, inbox placement testing, CRM, managed email accounts, and AI-assisted sales products. Customers access the service through hosted web software and an API rather than installing it on their own infrastructure.

Instantly began in 2021 after the founders of a lead generation agency built internal outreach software to address account-based costs they faced with other services. The founders later closed the agency and launched the software publicly. In an October 2022 interview, CEO and co-founder Raul Kaevand described four co-founders, including one developer and three founders with marketing or sales backgrounds. The interview reported an AppSumo launch, early agency customers, and growth through the founders’ outreach, content, and community activity. External company profiles describe Instantly as unfunded and bootstrapped, with no outside capital reported. The company operates through Foo Monk, LLC doing business as Instantly.ai, according to its privacy policy.

Instantly bills several product families separately and shows monthly and annual billing views for selected plans. Outbound monthly pricing lists Growth at $47 for 1,000 uploaded contacts and 5,000 emails, Hypergrowth at $97 for 25,000 contacts and 125,000 emails, and Light Speed at $358 for 100,000 contacts and 500,000 emails. Annual billing displays $37.60, $77.60, and $286.30 monthly equivalents. Data Credits lists Nano at $9 for 150 credits, Growth at $47 for 1,500, Supersonic at $97 for 5,000, and Hyper from $197 for 10,000 to 200,000 credits monthly. CRM and Inbox Placement each list Growth at $47 and Hypergrowth at $97 monthly. Bundles range from Starter at $94 monthly to Agency at $555 monthly, with annual equivalents shown. Enterprise and VIP pricing is custom.

QuickMail, led by founder Jeremy Chatelaine, is a platform for outbound email and LinkedIn campaigns. It serves sales teams, founders, recruiters and especially lead generation agencies that send cold email at volume for many clients. The company says it invented inbox rotation, the practice of spreading a campaign across several sending accounts so no single inbox hits limits or harms its reputation, a feature most cold email tools now copy. QuickMail positions itself as a platform rather than a service: it does not write campaigns or find leads for you, but provides the sending, deliverability and reply tools that outbound teams and agencies run their programs on.

Campaigns combine email steps, wait steps and LinkedIn steps such as connection requests, messages, voice messages and InMail. You can connect unlimited email senders and LinkedIn accounts on every plan, and Inbox Rotation distributes volume across them automatically. Deliverability tools include spintext, blacklist monitoring, variable delays, daily sending caps, MX bounce protection, unsubscribe headers, text-only sending and A/Z testing. Replies collect in a shared inbox as opportunities. Integrations include Zapier on every plan, plus HubSpot, Pipedrive, Sales Navigator import and API access on Growth and above. The Agency plan adds webhooks, a campaign template library, client portals and multiple workspaces for client accounts.

QuickMail's strengths are deliverability features such as Inbox Rotation, Deliverability AI and Reword with AI, unlimited users and senders on every plan, LinkedIn steps, agency tools and an MCP server. Its weaknesses are no built-in lead database, a Starter plan with low contact limits and no API, and fewer AI writing and research tools than newer rivals. Instantly and Smartlead offer similar unlimited inbox models with lead databases. Lemlist adds personalized images and a lead database. Reply.io and Apollo combine outreach with contact data and AI agents. Choose QuickMail if deliverability at scale matters most, especially for an agency.