Crustdata alternatives, sorted by why you are leaving
Crustdata publishes the credit price of every endpoint and the dollar price of none of them. That gap is why most teams start looking at Crustdata competitors. 4 replacements below, each one matched to a specific reason.
If you need a dataset you can build a product on, People Data Labs is the closest of these Crustdata alternatives: it prints its price, and its standard terms cover showing its data inside your product. If you want unlimited profile fetches at a flat monthly price, Reverse Contact sells exactly that from $249. If the signal you bought Crustdata for is hiring, TheirStack sells job postings as rows from $49 a month. If you want one key for search, enrichment and sending at a published rate, Apollo is $0.0196 a credit.
Prices and limits for every option below are read off the vendor's own page. These are the Crustdata competitors that each answer a named problem.
The 3 reasons people actually leave
If none of these is your situation, the honest answer is that you should probably stay, and the Crustdata API review covers what you already have. The 23 providers in the Enrichment APIs listing are where these replacements come from.
1 · Nobody can tell you what a credit costs
Every Crustdata endpoint is priced in credits: 0.03 a search result, 1 for a base profile, up to 9 with every contact add-on. The public pages give two dollar figures only, $20 of free credits and enterprise plans from four figures a month. Self-serve packs are priced inside the dashboard, so a budget built from the public pages has a unit and no price.
2 · Enrich is the slow path
The default limit on person and company enrich is 15 requests a minute, 30 on search and 10 on the live endpoints. One profile per call is 900 an hour, which is why the 25-profile enrich call and the batch endpoints exist. A pipeline built around single lookups meets the ceiling long before it meets the bill.
3 · The live and contact endpoints are enterprise only
Fresh live profiles at 7 credits, live search at 2, contact enrich and developer profiles all sit on enterprise plans. Self-serve buys the indexed data, refreshed every 1 to 30 days. If the reason you chose Crustdata was real-time data, the self-serve account may not include it.
4 Crustdata alternatives, and what each one fixes
Ordered by how closely each one answers the reasons above, not by price.
| Provider | Entry price | Unit cost | Free tier | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Crustdata | Quote only | Sold in credits; no public dollar price for a credit | $20 in free credits on every new account, on the self-serve In-DB endpoints | Baseline |
| People Data Labs | $98/mo | $0.28 per record | Free plan, up to 100 credits per month with contact data obfuscated | Best for building on top of |
| Reverse Contact | $100 one-time | $0.02 per credit | 500 credits free to try, no credit card required | Unlimited profile lookups for a team that starts from LinkedIn URLs |
| TheirStack | $49/mo | $0.0327 per API credit, entry plan | A free trial with company and API credits, no card required | Best for hiring and technology signal with filter depth |
| Apollo API | $49/seat/mo | $0.0196 per credit | Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month | Best all-in-one GTM API |
Read from each vendor's own pricing page on 24 October 2026.
The case for each one
Each one below is matched to a reason rather than scored, and each one names what you give up by taking it. A replacement with no downside is a replacement nobody has actually run.
People Data Labs
A dataset vendor that prints its price, $0.28 a record, and whose standard terms cover showing its data inside your product.
People Data Labs is the like-for-like move for a team building software on B2B data, which is who Crustdata sells to. Person, company, job title and school datasets sit under one key, and the bulk and search endpoints are built for warehouse loads rather than row-by-row calls.
The price is on the page. Self-Serve starts at $98 a month for 350 credits and the record carries a rate of $0.28 a record, which is high, but it is a number you can put in a budget before you sign. The free plan gives 100 credits a month with emails and phones obfuscated, enough to check the shape of the data.
The license is the reason to pay it. Its standard subscription agreement licenses you to show its data to your own customers inside your product, which few other self-serve plans here grant by default.
It is not a resale license: you may not resell the data, give your users programmatic access to a substantial part of it, or build anything that competes with PDL, and those terms must flow down to your customers. That is the question legal asks the moment those rows reach your customers. Rate limits are per key and per endpoint and reported in the response headers.
What you give up
Search priced by the result and enrichment priced by the field. Crustdata's 0.03-credit search and 1-credit base profile let a pipeline search wide and pay little; at $0.28 a record PDL charges for the whole record. There is also no MCP server on the PDL record, where Crustdata hosts one.
When it is the wrong answer
A product that searches far more than it enriches, such as an AI SDR scanning thousands of candidates to keep a few dozen. That is the workload Crustdata's per-result pricing was designed for.
Reverse Contact
Unlimited profile fetches from a social URL at a flat $249 a month, and credit packs from $100 for 5,000 if you would rather pay per call.
Reverse Contact sells person and company data two ways, and the second is the one Crustdata does not offer. Credit packs start at $100 for 5,000, valid three months. The unlimited monthly plans unlock an endpoint family each: Go at $249 makes profile fetches from a social URL unlimited, Plus at $449 adds search and Max at $699 adds enrichment from an email, a name or a domain.
Emails, phones and live refreshes stay on credits on every plan, and nothing is charged when nothing is found. For a product whose cost is dominated by profile lookups, a flat monthly price removes the per-call arithmetic altogether.
The rate limit is 100 or more requests a minute per workspace on every self-serve option and 1,000 or more on Platform, against Crustdata's default 15 on enrich. There is a hosted MCP server with 16 tools, OAuth or an API key, and 500 free credits with no card.
What you give up
The breadth of Crustdata's index and its watchers. Crustdata searches jobs, social posts and the web as well as people and companies, and its watchers report new matches on a schedule. Reverse Contact is built around the person and the company.
When it is the wrong answer
A team whose lookups are mostly contact fields. Emails and phones stay on credits on every Reverse Contact plan, so the unlimited plans help least where the contact data is the bulk of the bill.
TheirStack
If what you used Crustdata for was hiring signals, TheirStack sells job postings as rows, from $49 a month for 1,500 API credits.
Crustdata sells job search at 0.03 credits a result and job watchers at 0.5 a new posting, and plenty of teams buy it for exactly that. TheirStack does only this: job postings and the technographics inferred from them, sold as data rather than a dashboard.
The subscription starts at $49 a month for 1,500 API credits and climbs a published ladder to $5,500 for 5,000,000. One-time company-credit packs start at $109 for 1,000, and unused paid credits of either kind roll over for 12 months, which suits a quarterly research cycle better than a monthly balance does.
Paid accounts get 4 requests a second, and there is an MCP server at api.theirstack.com/mcp. Free credits come on signup with no card, so the coverage of your own target accounts can be tested before anything is bought.
What you give up
People. TheirStack has no person profiles, no contact fields and no person search, so the enrichment half of a Crustdata pipeline needs a second provider.
When it is the wrong answer
Anyone who used Crustdata mainly for people search or person enrichment. TheirStack replaces the hiring feed and nothing else.
Apollo API
Search, enrichment and sending behind one key at a published $0.0196 a credit, with an enrichment limit of 1,000 a minute.
Apollo is the move for a sales team that bought Crustdata to find and enrich prospects rather than to build a product. People and organization search run across Apollo's own database, and an enrichment costs 1 credit for an email and 9 if a mobile comes back. Sequence, contact and task endpoints cost nothing.
The rate is published. Basic is $49 a seat a month billed annually, with 30,000 credits a seat a year, which is $0.0196 a credit. The free plan carries API access and 900 credits a seat a year.
The limits are the opposite of Crustdata's shape. Enrichment gets 1,000 requests a minute with no hourly or daily cap, while the general limit on Basic is 200 a minute, 400 an hour and 2,000 a day. Apollo also hosts an MCP server at mcp.apollo.io/mcp.
What you give up
The per-field billing, the jobs and social post datasets, and the developer and research profiles. Apollo sells a contact record for a sales team, and credits are tied to seats, so a headless pipeline still pays for a seat nobody logs into.
When it is the wrong answer
A product that resells or embeds the data, and a recruiting tool that wants developer profiles. Apollo is priced and licensed for a sales team working its own pipeline.
What you would actually pay, on each one
Every provider on this page publishes a rate card, so the real numbers can sit next to each other rather than behind a summary. The plan you want is the one whose included volume covers a normal month for you, not the cheapest one on the page.
Crustdata
Crustdata publishes 3 tiers, one of them free.
Free
- Every new account
- The self-serve In-DB endpoints
- Enough to test your own use case
Self-serve
- Search, enrich, jobs and web endpoints
- Packs valid 12 months, or auto top-up
- Dollar rate not printed on the public pages
Enterprise
- Live people and company endpoints
- Contact enrich and recurring credit grants
- A lower rate per credit as volume grows
People Data Labs
People Data Labs publishes 3 tiers, one of them free.
Free
- Full access to the Person APIs for testing
- Contact data is obfuscated, so emails and phones are masked
- No commitment, sign up and go
Self-Serve
- Contact data included and unmasked
- Access to premium fields
- Monthly or annual subscription
- CSV enrichment and email support
Enterprise
- Custom volumes and annual contracts
- Access to all APIs, plus Data License Feeds
- Formal data testing before you commit
- Additional field bundles
Reverse Contact
Reverse Contact publishes 4 tiers, none of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $249 to $699.
Credit packs
- Fourteen sizes, up to $5,000 for 1,000,000
- $0.02 a credit falling to $0.005
- Valid for 3 months, no subscription
Go
- Unlimited fetches from a social URL
- Search at 1 credit, enrichment at 2
- MCP and CLI included
Plus
- Everything in Go
- Unlimited people, company, agentic and lookalike search
- Enrichment still 2 credits
Max
- Everything in Plus
- Unlimited enrichment from an email, a name or a domain
- Emails, phones and live refreshes on credits
TheirStack
TheirStack publishes 11 tiers, none of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $49 to $5,500.
1,500 API credits
- 1,500 jobs, or 500 companies, or any mix
- $32.67 per 1,000 credits
- Unused paid credits roll over for 12 months
5,000
- $20.00 per 1,000 credits
10,000
- $16.90 per 1,000 credits
20,000
- $12.00 per 1,000 credits
50,000
- $8.00 per 1,000 credits
5,000,000
- $1.10 per 1,000 credits, the floor of the ladder
5 steps between the fifth and the last are not drawn here. The cost model below reads all 11.
Apollo API
Apollo publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $49 to $119.
Free
- Full API access, not a trial of it
- Granted monthly, so 75 credits a month in practice
- 2 sequences and basic filters
Basic
- $588 a seat a year, credits granted upfront and pooled across the team
- 2,500 credits a month, at $0.0196 each
- Annual billing saves 24% against paying monthly
Professional
- 4,000 credits a month, at $0.0198 each
- AI lead scoring and multi-touch outreach
Organization
- 72,000 credits a seat a year, so 6,000 a month
- $0.0198 a credit, so the rate is flat across every paid tier
- The three-seat minimum makes $357 a month the real floor
Read the included volume before the headline price. A plan that costs twice as much and carries five times the credits is the cheaper plan, and on this page that is the usual case rather than the exception.
What each one costs at your volume
Crustdata first, then every replacement. The model picks the cheapest published plan that covers your volume on each one, which is the comparison a row of entry prices cannot make.
Crustdata
Publishes no price, so there is nothing here to model and the lines below say what to ask for.
People Data Labs
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
Reverse Contact
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
TheirStack
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
Plans are read from each vendor's own pricing page and the model picks the cheapest one that covers you, so these are list prices on the billing term each vendor publishes, annual where that is how it prices, before any discount you negotiate. Crustdata publishes no price, so nothing is modeled there and the panel says what to ask for instead.
What a year costs at three volumes
The same plan-fit arithmetic as the model above, run out to a year, because an annual number is what a budget actually asks for.
The priced columns move with volume, through a bigger plan or more seats.
| A year at | Crustdata | People Data Labs | Reverse Contact | TheirStack | Apollo API |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | Quoted | $3,360 Self-Serve | $1,200 Credit packs | $1,200 5,000 | $588 Basic |
| 10,000 a month | Quoted | $33,600 Self-Serve | $2,400 Credit packs | $4,800 50,000 | $2,352 Basic |
| 50,000 a month | Quoted | $168,000 Self-Serve | $12,000 Credit packs | $10,800 200,000 | $11,760 Basic |
Crustdata does not publish enough to price a year, so that column is marked rather than filled. These are list prices on the published plan that covers each volume, on the billing term each vendor publishes, so they are the number before you negotiate.
Which replacement is yours
Answer what matters most and the lean appears below. Every option is read from the records on this page, and staying on Crustdata is one of the possible answers.
Each answer leans one way. The recommendation appears here once you have picked at least two.
A tool like this can only weigh what is on the page. It does not know your workload, and the one test that does is the bake-off on this page: your own rows, queries or records, run on the cheapest entry each side offers.
Where an answer leans on a certification or an integration, it means that vendor publishes it on the pages this directory read, which is not the same as the other one lacking it. The sources are listed at the foot of the page.
Where the data comes from, and what you may do with it
The question that arrives late and expensively is who is allowed to hold the data. A migration is the moment to check it, because you are signing a new contract anyway.
| Provider | Fields returned | Coverage | Compliance | Redistribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Crustdata | Work email, Personal email, Mobile phone, Firmographics, Technographics, Job postings, Job changes, Intent and news, LinkedIn profile | Global | None published | Not stated |
| People Data Labs | Work email, Personal email, Mobile phone, Firmographics, LinkedIn profile | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA | Not stated |
| Reverse Contact | Work email, Personal email, Mobile phone, Firmographics, LinkedIn profile | Global | GDPR DPA CCPA | Not stated |
| TheirStack | Job postings, Technographics, Firmographics, Intent and news | Global | GDPR DPA | Not stated |
| Apollo API | Work email, Mobile phone, Firmographics, Technographics, Job postings, Intent and news, LinkedIn profile, CRM records | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA | Not stated |
None of these states a redistribution position on its pricing or docs pages. Internally that never matters. Put the rows in something your customers can see and it becomes the question your legal team asks first.
Two practical notes that apply to every provider on this page. A compliance badge describes the vendor rather than your use of it, so a GDPR DPA does not give you a lawful basis for the outreach you send. And every one of these vendors runs its own opt-out, which means a person who asks you to delete their record has to be removed from your copy as well as from theirs.
Moving off Crustdata
Written against People Data Labs, the first pick above, because the steps are the same whichever one you take and the specifics are what make them useful. Swap the name and the order still holds.
Measure the thing you are about to lose
Run 500 rows you already have through Crustdata and record the match rate, the fields that came back populated and the cost. Without that number a migration cannot be judged, because every provider looks cheaper per unit than the one you are paying for today.
Check which fields change
People Data Labs does not return technographics, job postings, job changes and intent and news, which Crustdata does. If anything downstream reads those fields, the switch changes your pipeline as well as your vendor.
Rewrite the auth and the limits, in that order
Crustdata authenticates with a bearer token in the authorization header, plus an x-api-version header pinned to 2025-11-01. People Data Labs uses an API key in the X-Api-Key header.
The limits are the part that bites later. Crustdata's limits: per endpoint, per minute: 15 on person and company enrich, 30 on search, 10 on the live endpoints, 300 on autocomplete. Batch jobs are also capped at 5 in flight per pool by default.
People Data Labs' limits: per key, fixed window, separate per endpoint. Reported in the response headers. A loop tuned to the first will either crawl or get throttled on the second.
Run both for one billing cycle
Keep the old key live and route a slice of real traffic to the new one. A month is the shortest honest test, because credit expiry, rollover and the overage rate only show up at renewal and those are where the surprises live.
Cancel on the renewal date
Credits on most of these plans do not survive a downgrade. Check what happens to the balance you have already paid for, and time the switch so you are not buying the same records twice.
The step people skip is the first one, and it is the only one that cannot be done after the fact. Once the old key is off you have nothing to compare the new match rate against, so a provider that is quietly worse on your segment looks like a provider that is fine.
What practitioners say about People Data Labs
Transcribed as written and linked to the thread. A Reddit claim is a signal rather than a fact, so nothing here is the only source for any figure on this page.
The accuracy spread between vendors is smaller than the one inside your own list
it's nearly all the same at the end of the day... there's a marginal 5-10% difference between the vendors but overall 55-65% data accuracy / validity overall. [...] have a team of 20+ (or however many) outsourced data integrity workers through fiver or whatnot... it's what the rich tech companies like AirBnB and Uber do to have the most up to date data...
r/SalesOperations · November 2024 · 3 points
The range here lands on the assumption the waterfall stack on this site is modeled with, which is a 55% first pass. That figure is labeled as modeled on every page that uses it, because no provider in this category publishes a match rate you can hold it to, so an independent practitioner arriving at 55 to 65% is the closest thing to corroboration available. It also makes the case for the waterfall itself: if the best single source clears about 60%, the second provider is not a luxury.
The 5 to 10% spread between vendors is this commenter's estimate and nothing here verifies it, and the thread it comes from is a request for benchmarks that were never published. Read it as a reason to run your own test on your own rows rather than as a reason to skip one. It argues against paying a premium for coverage claims, which is a different question from paying a premium for a redistribution license.
14 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page.
What practitioners say about TheirStack
Transcribed as written and linked to the thread. A Reddit claim is a signal rather than a fact, so nothing here is the only source for any figure on this page.
There is no official job-postings API, which is why this category exists
Job sites don't provide public APIs, they want that ad revenue. There use to be scripts to scrape their HTML but most no longer work. You can search github to find some now mostly abandon projects.
r/cscareerquestions · May 2023 · 12 points
This is the structural reason a provider can charge for job postings at all. The boards publish no publicly usable API because the listings are their advertising inventory, so the data reaches you either through a scraper you maintain yourself or through somebody who maintains one for you. TheirStack is the second option with a rate card attached, and the rate card is what you are really comparing against your own engineering time.
It is a 2023 comment and the abandoned-project problem has not improved since, which is the part to weigh. The question for your own build is not whether you can scrape a board this week but whether you want to own that maintenance the next time the markup changes.
14 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page.
What practitioners say about Apollo
The one part of this page that is not a vendor claim. The comment below makes its point in crude words, so we summarize it in our own words and link the thread. A Reddit claim is a signal rather than a fact, so nothing here is the only source for a figure on this page.
The rate limit, not the credit price, is what people actually hit
In our words: A practitioner building on the API says the rate limits are what their team hit, that they got past them by routing requests across three Apollo accounts, and that Apollo charges per request even when a lookup returns nothing.
r/gtmengineering · May 2026 · summarized rather than quoted
Two halves worth separating. The limit is real and it is on this page: 200 requests a minute, 400 an hour and 2,000 a day on Basic, with enrichment on a separate 1,000 a minute and no hourly or daily cap. That split is why a bulk job and a per-row loop feel like different products.
The charge-on-no-output half needs care, because Apollo publishes 0 credits when nothing is found and that matches what we read. What a miss does spend is a request against the rate limit, and when the limit is the binding constraint that is the cost you feel. Pooling accounts to get round a published limit is a terms question before it is an engineering one.
11 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page.
Should you actually switch?
The short answer is at the top of this page. Before you act on it, run the test below, because it is the cheapest way to find out whether that answer holds for you.
No provider in this category publishes a match rate you can hold them to, so run the same 500 rows through a free tier or trial on each, verify every result set, and divide spend by survivors. Your own list is the only evidence worth acting on, it takes half a day, and it changes the decision often enough to be worth it.
Head to head, and in a stack
Before you switch, try the waterfall in Clay.
Clay runs a waterfall across 150+ data providers from one table, without a separate contract with each. A lookup that finds nothing costs no data credit, and the free plan includes 500 actions a month.
Frontal is a Clay Elite Studio Partner.
Switching from Crustdata, answered
What is the best Crustdata alternative?
It depends on why you are leaving, which is how this page is organized rather than ranked. The first pick here is People Data Labs, which this directory lists as the best for building on top of, at $98/mo. The case for it, and what you give up, is in the section above.
Is there a free alternative to Crustdata?
Yes, 3 of the replacements here do. People Data Labs: Free plan, up to 100 credits per month with contact data obfuscated. Reverse Contact: 500 credits free to try, no credit card required. Apollo: Free plan with API access, 900 credits per seat per year granted monthly, so 75 a month.
How were these alternatives chosen?
By the reason teams leave, not by a score. The page opens with the reasons teams leave and matches a replacement to each one.