How ThoughtLeaders pricing works.
One price covers every ThoughtLeaders offering — the tl CLI, the Chrome extension, and the web analytics & booking platform all draw from the same credits. ThoughtLeaders offerings are primarily B2B-oriented — but you can use them as an individual or as a team.
Subscribe at your usage level.
- Good for trying out
- Doesn't allow premium data queries
- Premium data
- 40× more usage than the Free tier
- Premium data
- 200× more usage than the Free tier
- Perfect for small teams sharing one workspace
- 1.5× more weekly usage than Pro, per seat
- Built for teams running agents around the clock
- 15× more weekly usage than Pro, per seat
- Custom allowances, quotas and terms
- Compliance features available
- Priced per contract
Premium data is the contact-ready intelligence that turns a channel list into a shortlist: outreach emails, full video transcripts, brand-mention history, and audience demographics.
The 5-hour spend cap applies on every tier: a session opens on your first metered call, and when its budget is spent you wait for the reset — then the full allowance is back at once, nothing trickles. Buying extra credits — available on paid tiers only — extends the weekly quota.
Buying extra usage credits.
One credit costs $0.001 (a tenth of a cent). Paid tiers can buy extra credits on the billing page (/billing/cli/); usage is deducted per API call. Whole credits only are granted on purchase.
Credits are abstract until you spend them. 10,000 credits — $10 of extra credits — goes a long way. Any of these, or any mix:
Unit costs reflect typical runs of each operation; the median sponsorship deal sold in the last 12 months was ≈ $1,500.
What real workloads add up to — find the one that looks like you.
- 10 sponsorship searches 5,300
- 25 quick data questions 90
- 10 channel vettings 2,000
- 1 full report run 300
- 450 sponsorship searches 283,500
- 9 data questions per workday 800
- 70 channel vettings 18,200
- 10 keyword researches 1,000
- 30 full report runs 10,500
- 5 brand-matching analyses 14,500
- 4 analysts' monthly work 1,314,000
- 30 monitoring reports per day 648,000
What drives cost — and how to control it.
Four things drive a query's price — and each has a lever you control.
Rows returned
Cost is linear — twice the rows, twice the credits.
✓ Add LIMIT and fetch only what you'll read: half the rows, half the bill.
Tables joined
Every table in a join adds its rate to every returned row.
✓ Drop joins you don't need — each one removed makes every row cheaper.
Premium data fields
Emails, demographics and transcripts add a flat charge per row — they dominate the bill.
✓ Select them only when you'll use them: one skipped column on 500 rows saves 25,000 credits.
Aggregations
count and GROUP BY pay for the rows they scan, not the few they return.
✓ Narrow the scan with a WHERE clause before you aggregate.
Never guess — preview instead: add --pricing to any query for a guaranteed upper-bound estimate at a flat 1 credit, and run tl describe for every operation's exact rate — the full reference ships with the CLI as CLI_PRICING.md.