What is Instantly?
If you’ve been researching cold email tools, you’ve probably stumbled across Instantly. Launched in 2020, it’s become the go-to platform for anyone serious about scaling cold email outreach. But here’s what makes it different from the dozens of other tools out there: Instantly was built specifically for people who need to send a lot of emails without tanking their deliverability.
Think about it this way. If you’re sending 50 cold emails per day from a single Gmail account, you probably don’t need Instantly. You could use almost any basic email tool and be fine. But if you’re an agency managing campaigns for multiple clients, or you’re running an SDR team that needs to hit 1,000+ prospects per day, that’s where Instantly shines.
The platform is best known for four things: letting you connect unlimited email accounts without paying per account, automatically rotating your sends across those accounts to protect deliverability, having a built-in warmup system that actually works, and doing all of this at a price point that won’t destroy your budget.
Who Should Actually Use Instantly?
Let’s be honest about who this tool is for and who it isn’t. I’ve seen too many solo founders waste money on tools they don’t need, and I’ve also seen growing teams struggle with tools that can’t keep up with them.
Instantly works really well for agencies that are managing cold email campaigns for multiple clients. The unlimited email accounts feature alone saves you thousands of dollars compared to tools that charge per inbox. It’s also perfect for SDR teams that need to distribute volume across many mailboxes without manually managing which account sends what. If you’re sending 500 or more emails per day, Instantly’s inbox rotation feature becomes essential, not just nice to have.
Here’s a real scenario: imagine you’re running campaigns across 10 different domains to protect your main company domain. With Instantly, you can connect 5 email accounts per domain (50 total accounts), rotate sends automatically across all of them, and stay well under the safe sending limit of 50-100 emails per account per day. You’re sending 2,500+ emails daily without raising any red flags with inbox providers.
On the flip side, Instantly might be overkill if you’re only sending 100 emails per day or less. In that case, you could probably get away with something simpler and cheaper. It’s also not ideal if you need robust CRM features to manage your sales pipeline. Instantly has a unified inbox for replies, but it’s pretty basic compared to what you’d get with a full-featured CRM. If you’re planning to run multichannel campaigns that include LinkedIn outreach alongside email, Instantly won’t help you there since it’s email-only. And if heavy personalization is your thing (like personalized images or videos in your emails), there are other tools like Lemlist that do this much better.
Breaking Down Instantly’s Features
Let me walk you through what Instantly actually does, beyond the marketing speak on their website.
Email Sending at Scale
The unlimited email accounts feature is the crown jewel here. Every plan, even the cheapest one at $37 per month, lets you connect as many email accounts as you want. You can mix Gmail accounts, Outlook accounts, and custom SMTP accounts all in the same workspace. There’s no per-account fee tacked on later. For agencies, this is huge because you can separate each client into their own set of accounts without worrying about costs spiraling.
But unlimited accounts are useless if you can’t manage them efficiently. That’s where inbox rotation comes in. Instead of manually deciding which account sends which email, Instantly automatically distributes your campaign sends across all connected accounts. It’s smart enough to check the warmup status of each account and send more volume through accounts that are fully warmed up while taking it easy on newer accounts. This feature alone has saved countless people from the nightmare of having one account send too much and get flagged as spam.
Campaign management in Instantly works how you’d expect. You build sequences with multiple follow-up emails, add conditional logic (like “if they don’t reply, send follow-up B, but if they do reply, stop the sequence”), and test different variations with A/B testing. You can also optimize for different timezones so your emails land in prospects’ inboxes at reasonable hours.
Deliverability Tools That Actually Matter
Here’s the thing about cold email: it doesn’t matter how good your copy is if your emails never make it to the inbox. Instantly takes deliverability seriously, and it shows.
The built-in email warmup system connects your accounts to a network of over 20,000 real inboxes. These aren’t fake bot accounts; they’re actual email addresses that will exchange messages with your accounts, open them, reply to them, and move them out of spam folders. This creates positive engagement signals that tell Gmail, Outlook, and other providers that your account sends legitimate email. The warmup gradually increases your sending volume over time instead of going from zero to 100 overnight, which would definitely trigger spam filters.
You also get a deliverability dashboard that shows the health of each connected account. It tracks your warmup progress, monitors bounce rates (bounces are a death sentence for deliverability), and even checks your spam score. If one of your accounts starts having issues, you’ll know about it before it becomes a bigger problem.
The smart sending features help you avoid common mistakes that tank deliverability. You can set rate limits per account (like “never send more than 50 emails per day from this account”), throttle sends at the domain level, make sure emails go out during business hours in the recipient’s timezone, and automatically pause campaigns on weekends or holidays when response rates are terrible anyway.
Analytics and Inbox Management
Instantly gives you the analytics you’d expect: open rates, reply rates, click rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe tracking. You can see performance at the campaign level and also drill down to individual account performance, which helps you identify if a specific account is having deliverability issues.
The unified inbox brings all replies from all your connected accounts into one place. You can filter by campaign, reply directly from the interface, and do basic lead management. But here’s where I need to be real with you: it’s not a CRM replacement. There’s no visual pipeline, no deal stages, and limited tracking of where prospects are in your sales process. If you’re serious about sales, you’ll probably want to integrate Instantly with a proper CRM like HubSpot or Pipedrive.
Instantly Pricing Breakdown
Pricing is where Instantly really stands out from competitors. As of 2025, there are three main plans.
The Growth plan costs $37 per month and gives you 5,000 emails per month with unlimited email accounts, inbox rotation, warmup, and basic analytics. This is solid for small teams or agencies just getting started.
The Hypergrowth plan is $97 per month for 100,000 emails monthly, plus everything from Growth with advanced analytics and API access added in. This is the sweet spot for most serious users. Do the math: 100,000 emails for $97 means you’re paying $0.001 per email. That’s ridiculously cheap.
The Light Speed plan runs $358 per month for 500,000 emails, everything from Hypergrowth, priority support, and more leads. This is for enterprise teams moving serious volume.
Every plan includes the same core features: unlimited email accounts, inbox rotation, email warmup, campaign automation, and A/B testing. You’re not locked out of critical features on the cheaper plans, which I appreciate.
Let’s compare this to competitors for a second. Lemlist charges $59 per month for a single email account and 500 emails. Woodpecker is $49 per month for 1,500 emails. If you’re sending high volume across multiple accounts, Instantly wins on price-to-volume ratio by a mile. The unlimited accounts alone would cost you hundreds or thousands per month with other tools.
One thing worth mentioning: the warmup being included is a hidden cost savings. If you bought a separate warmup tool like Mailreach or Warmbox, you’d pay $50-100 per month per account. With 10 accounts, that’s $500-1,000 per month just for warmup. Instantly includes this for free.
The Good and The Bad
Let’s talk honestly about what Instantly does well and where it falls short.
On the positive side, unlimited accounts at any price point is almost unheard of in this industry. Most tools charge per inbox, which makes scaling prohibitively expensive. The inbox rotation feature is genuinely best-in-class. I haven’t found another tool that does this as smoothly and intelligently. The built-in warmup works well if you give it time (don’t rush it; let accounts warm for 2-3 weeks before sending real campaigns). The pricing is competitive, especially at higher volumes. And the user interface is clean and modern, which makes it easy to navigate once you get the hang of it.
On the negative side, the CRM features are basic at best. If you need to track deals through a pipeline, you’ll need to connect an external CRM. There’s a bit of a learning curve with some of the advanced features, and the documentation could be better in explaining things. Personalization is limited to basic variables like first name and company; you can’t do personalized images or videos like you can with Lemlist. It’s email-only, so if you want to mix in LinkedIn outreach or other channels, you’re out of luck. And support can be slow at times, especially on the lower-priced plans where you’re relying mostly on chat.
Getting Started With Instantly
If you decide to try Instantly, here’s how to set it up properly so you don’t waste weeks troubleshooting deliverability issues.
Start by connecting your email accounts. Add your sending domains, connect Gmail or Outlook or custom SMTP accounts, and verify your DNS settings. This means making sure your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records are configured correctly. If you skip this step, your deliverability will be terrible no matter what tool you use.
Next, set up warmup for each account and let it run for at least 2-3 weeks before you start sending real campaigns. I know it’s tempting to jump right in, but trust me, patience here pays off in inbox placement later. Keep warmup running even after you start campaigns; it’s not a one-and-done thing.
When you’re ready to create your first campaign, upload your leads (you can import a CSV or add them manually), create your email sequence with follow-ups, set conservative sending limits to start (think 30-50 emails per account per day), enable inbox rotation so sends are distributed across your accounts, and schedule your launch.
Here are some best practices that will save you headaches: use 3-5 email accounts per domain to distribute volume, keep warmup running on all accounts always, rotate which accounts you use for different campaigns, and monitor the health scores in your dashboard regularly. If an account’s health starts dropping, pause campaigns from that account and let it warm up more.
For sending limits, start conservative. Send 30-50 emails per account per day at first, then gradually increase over several weeks. Never exceed 100 emails per account per day; if you need more volume, add more accounts instead of pushing individual accounts harder. This is the whole point of having unlimited accounts.
For campaign optimization, A/B test your subject lines to see what gets opened, test different sequence structures (more follow-ups versus fewer, different timing between emails), monitor reply rates by individual account to spot deliverability issues early, and pause underperforming accounts before they hurt your sender reputation.
How Instantly Compares to Alternatives
You’re probably looking at Instantly alongside a few other tools, so let me break down the key comparisons.
Instantly vs Lemlist
Instantly gives you unlimited email accounts while Lemlist charges per account. Instantly has excellent inbox rotation; Lemlist’s version is more limited. But Lemlist wins on personalization with features like personalized images and videos that Instantly doesn’t have. Lemlist also integrates with LinkedIn for multichannel campaigns and has better CRM features. Instantly starts at $37 per month; Lemlist starts at $59 per month.
Choose Instantly if you’re focused on high volume across multiple accounts and you’re budget-conscious. Choose Lemlist if personalization and multichannel outreach matter more to you than raw volume.
Instantly vs Smartlead
These two are very similar, honestly. Both offer unlimited email accounts, both have excellent inbox rotation, both include built-in warmup, and both have API access. Instantly has a slightly better user interface, while Smartlead has slightly better pricing ($39-79 per month versus Instantly’s $37-97 per month).
The truth is, you should probably test both with free trials and see which one you prefer. They’re close enough in features and price that personal preference matters more than any objective difference.
Instantly vs Woodpecker
Instantly offers unlimited accounts; Woodpecker charges per account. Instantly is built for scale; Woodpecker focuses more on quality and smaller volumes. Woodpecker has better team collaboration features and more integrations with other tools. The pricing models are fundamentally different: Instantly is volume-based, Woodpecker is account-based.
Choose Instantly if you’re scaling with many accounts. Choose Woodpecker if you need better team features and integrations.
Common Questions About Instantly
How many emails can you actually send per day? It depends on your plan and how many accounts you have. With the Hypergrowth plan at $97 per month, you get 100,000 emails per month, which averages out to about 3,300 per day. If you spread that across 50+ accounts, you’re sending 50-100 per account, which is the safe range that won’t hurt deliverability.
Does the warmup actually work? Yes, but you need to be patient. Instantly’s network of 20,000+ real inboxes generates genuine engagement signals that help your accounts build a positive sender reputation. The key is running warmup for 2-3 weeks before sending campaigns and keeping it running alongside your campaigns, not turning it off.
Can agencies use Instantly effectively? Absolutely. It’s one of the most popular tools for agencies because of unlimited accounts (you can separate clients easily), workspace separation, white-label options on higher plans, and competitive pricing that makes it profitable to offer cold email as a service.
Is Instantly safe for deliverability? It’s one of the safer options if you use it correctly. The warmup protects your accounts, inbox rotation distributes volume so no single account sends too much, and rate limiting prevents sudden spikes that trigger spam filters. But you still need to do your part: proper DNS setup, quality email copy that doesn’t sound spammy, and good list hygiene so you’re not sending to bad addresses.
Key Takeaways
After testing Instantly extensively and using it for client campaigns, here’s what you need to know.
Instantly is a strong choice for high-volume cold email outreach. The unlimited email accounts on all plans make it incredibly cost-effective for scaling. The inbox rotation and warmup features are genuinely best-in-class and will protect your deliverability better than most alternatives. At $37 per month to start, it’s competitively priced for the features you get.
The main weaknesses are limited CRM and pipeline features compared to alternatives (you’ll probably need to integrate with an external CRM) and it’s really best suited for agencies and teams sending 500+ emails per day. If you’re sending less than that, you might be paying for features you don’t fully need.
If you need scale and deliverability at a good price, Instantly is worth trying. They offer a free trial, so you can test it with your own campaigns before committing.
Need Help With Cold Email Setup?
Setting up a cold email system that actually works takes more than just picking the right tool. You need proper domain setup, email account configuration, warmup strategy, list building, copywriting, and ongoing optimization. We’ve set up cold email systems using Instantly and other tools for hundreds of clients across different industries.
If you want expert guidance to avoid the common mistakes that tank deliverability and waste months of time, book a call with our team. We’ll review your specific situation and show you exactly how to set up a cold email system that consistently books meetings.