Hunter vs Prospeo
Identical on the rate card and different in what they do. Hunter gives you Domain Search, which returns every known address at a company and has no equivalent here. Prospeo sells mobile numbers, which Hunter does not, and is stronger on European data. Decide by which of those two capabilities you actually need, because the price will not decide it for you.
Where they actually differ
Every value comes from the same record that drives the Enrichment APIs listing, so this table cannot disagree with the cards. Accented tags are data one provider returns and the other does not.
| Compare | Hunter | Prospeo |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Domain search, email finder and verifier | The lowest paid floor for verified work email |
| Entry price | $49/mo | $49/mo |
| Unit cost | $0.025 per credit | $0.025 per credit |
| Billing model | Subscription Credit packs Free tier | Subscription Credit packs |
| Free tier | Free plan, 50 credits per month | Free plan, 100 credits a month, and no API access on it |
| GTM motion covered | Enrich Verify | Source Enrich |
| Data returned | Work emailFirmographics | Work emailMobile phoneLinkedIn profile |
| MCP server | Yes https://mcp.hunter.io/mcp | Yes https://prospeo.io/api-docs/mcp |
| Interfaces | REST API MCP server Bulk or async Native in Clay n8n node | REST API MCP server Bulk or async Native in Clay n8n node |
| Auth | API key in X-API-KEY, as a Bearer token, or as a query parameter | API key in the X-KEY header |
| Rate limits | Per endpoint: 15/s and 500/min on most, 10/s on Verifier, 5/s on Discover | Per plan: Enrich 5/300/2,000 on Starter up to 30/1,800/500,000 on Pro. No API on Free. |
| Coverage | Global | Strongest in EMEA |
| Compliance | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II | GDPR DPA |
| Best for | Best documented starter | Cheapest entry for email |
The same workload, priced both ways
Computed from each provider's published entry-plan rate. The monthly floor is shown separately, because at low volume the floor is the bill.
| Workload | Hunter | Prospeo | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 verified work emails | $245.00 $0.025 per email |
$245.00 $0.025 per email |
Hunter by 0% |
| Monthly floor at entry | $49/mo | $49/mo | Identical |
| Charged on a miss | No | No | Neither |
Rates read from each vendor's own pricing page on 8 October 2026. Bulk figures assume the entry-plan rate holds at that volume, which in practice means moving up a plan tier.
Pick each one when
Hunter
- You work from company domains rather than named people.
- You want the most mature documentation in the category.
- A confidence score on each address is useful to you.
Neither vendor publishes a match rate you could hold them to, so the rate card only tells you half the story. Take 500 rows from the segment you actually sell into, run them through one free tier and one trial, verify both result sets, and divide spend by survivors. Half a day and about $20, and on a close pair it changes the answer often enough to be worth it.
What each one costs, tier by tier
Both publish a full rate card, so this comparison runs on numbers rather than on adjectives. Hunter lists 4 tiers and Prospeo lists 4. Every figure is read off the vendor's own pricing page, and the pages they came from are listed at the foot of this one.
| The short version | Hunter | Prospeo |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan | Starter, $49 | Starter, $49 |
| Tiers published | 4 | 4 |
| Free tier | Free plan, 50 credits per month | Free plan, 100 credits a month, and no API access on it |
| Unit cost at entry | $0.0245 per credit | $0.0245 per credit |
The cheapest paid plan is rarely the plan you end up on, because what moves you up a tier is usually volume rather than a feature. The two rate cards below are what you are choosing between.
Hunter
Hunter publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $49 to $299.
Free
- Full API access, not a trial
- Domain Search, Email Finder and Email Verifier
- Enough to measure your own match rate
- Renews every month, indefinitely
Starter
- $34 a month paid yearly, 24,000 credits upfront
- $0.0245 per credit at the monthly rate
- Credits shared across find, verify and search
Growth
- $104 a month paid yearly, 120,000 credits upfront
- $0.0149 per credit at the monthly rate
Scale
- $209 a month paid yearly, 300,000 credits upfront
- $0.0120 per credit at the monthly rate
Prospeo
Prospeo publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $49 to $249.
Free
- No API access, Enrich or Search
- 28 search filters, 3 intent topics
- Max 25 rows per selection
- App only, which is the thing to notice
Starter
- $441 a year, which is $37 a month
- 24,000 credits delivered upfront on annual
- 32 filters, 6 intent topics, 20,000 row selection
- $0.0245 a credit
Growth
- $888 a year, which is $74 a month
- 60,000 credits upfront on annual
- 38 filters, 9 intent topics
- $0.0198 a credit
Pro
- $2,241 a year, which is $187 a month
- 180,000 credits upfront on annual
- All 41 filters, 12 intent topics
- $0.0166 a credit, and the highest rate limits
What Hunter and Prospeo cost at your volume
Put your own volume in. The model picks the cheapest published plan that covers it on each side, which is the question a rate card cannot answer and the one that decides the bill.
Hunter
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 before any discount you negotiate and before annual billing, which most of these vendors discount.
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. Every column moves with volume, because all of these meter usage rather than seats.
| A year at | Hunter | Prospeo |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $588 Starter | $588 Starter |
| 10,000 a month | $1,788 Growth | $2,988 Pro |
| 50,000 a month | Quoted | Quoted |
2 of the 2 providers here publish enough to be put in this table. These are list prices on the published plan that covers each volume, so they are the number before you negotiate and before annual billing, which most of these vendors discount by between a fifth and a half.
How this plays out once it is running
Identical on the rate card, $49 for 2,000 credits each, and genuinely different in what those credits buy. Hunter has Domain Search, which takes a company domain and returns the addresses it knows there. Prospeo has mobile numbers, which Hunter does not sell at all.
Work backwards from your input. If you start with a company and need to find people at it, Hunter does that in one call and Prospeo does not. If you start with named people and need to reach them by phone, Prospeo does that and Hunter cannot. Only if you start with named people and need email alone are these two actually substitutes.
What each one is genuinely good at
Not a feature list. These are the things that make somebody keep paying after the novelty has worn off, which is a different question from what the marketing page leads with.
Hunter
Domain Search, and a workflow that starts from a company
Every known address at a domain, returned in one call. Prospeo enriches named people. If your list is a set of target accounts rather than a set of contacts, that is the step Hunter does and Prospeo does not.
The most mature documentation in the category
Ten years of it, with per-endpoint rate limits published: 15 a second and 500 a minute on most, 10 a second on the Verifier, 5 on Discover. Nothing else here is as fast to get a working call out of.
A free tier that never expires, and a real volume discount
Fifty credits a month indefinitely, and a per-credit rate that halves from $0.0245 at $49 Starter to $0.0120 at $299 Scale. Prospeo's rate stays nearer flat across its ladder.
Prospeo
Direct mobile numbers
Hunter does not sell them at all. For any motion that dials, the $49 is buying two different products and only one of them includes a phone number.
Stronger European data
Prospeo is in this directory for EMEA coverage, which is where Hunter's single narrow dataset is weakest. Same price, different answer on a European list.
Annual billing delivers the year upfront
At roughly a 25% discount, with 24,000 credits available on day one at the Starter tier. For lumpy volume that is a better shape than a monthly allowance that resets.
Where each one falls down
Every provider on this site has a case it handles badly, and the people who find out are the ones who bought it for that case. These are the ones worth knowing before you sign rather than after.
Hunter
No mobile numbers and a narrow index
Hunter is an email and domain product with the thinnest coverage here. On a hard segment there is no second provider behind it, and the quality of the documentation does not change the match rate.
A 403 that means slow down
Hunter answers a hit rate limit with 403 Forbidden and spends 429 on an exhausted quota, so a standard client retries the wrong one. Both now publish an MCP server, so that is no longer a difference.
Prospeo
Credits expire at renewal on monthly billing
They do not carry forward, which is the complaint Prospeo's own alternatives page opens with. The annual plan is the published fix and it is a year's commitment.
The free tier excludes the API
A hundred credits a month, app only, with Enrich and Search unavailable. Hunter's 50 free credits include API access, so for a developer evaluating, the smaller allowance is the more useful one.
Priced per user
The $49 is per seat, so a second person doubles it. Hunter's plans are account-level with no per-seat component at all.
Using Hunter and Prospeo together
A two-way comparison assumes the answer is one of them. On this pairing it often is not, and the arrangement below is what teams actually end up running.
Same price, same credit allowance, different jobs, so this is one of the few pairings in this directory where buying both is straightforwardly reasonable.
Hunter builds the list from domains and Prospeo enriches the people on it, including phone numbers Hunter does not sell. The two free tiers between them, 50 credits a month with the API and 100 a month in the app, are enough to prove that arrangement before either invoice starts.
If the budget only covers one, let the input decide. A list of companies is a Hunter problem; a list of people, especially European ones, is a Prospeo problem.
Hunter or Prospeo, for you
Three questions, answered from the same records as the rest of this page. Nothing is sent anywhere and there is no result to email yourself.
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 segment, and the one test that does is the bake-off further down: real rows, cheapest entry on each side, spend divided by survivors.
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 not how good the data is, it is who is allowed to hold it. These are the fields each one returns, the coverage it claims and the compliance it publishes.
| Provider | Fields returned | Coverage | Compliance | Redistribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hunter | Work email, Firmographics | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II | Not stated |
| Prospeo | Work email, Mobile phone, LinkedIn profile | Strongest in EMEA | GDPR DPA | 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, not 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 between Hunter and Prospeo
Most readers of this page are already on one of these two. A swap is four hours of code and a month of watching, and the order below is the one that catches the expensive mistakes while they are still free.
Measure the thing you are about to lose
Run 500 rows you already have through Hunter 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 the fields, not the field count
Prospeo does not return Firmographics, which Hunter does. If anything downstream reads firmographics, that is a change to your pipeline and not just to your vendor.
Rewrite the auth and the limits, in that order
Hunter authenticates with API key in X-API-KEY, as a Bearer token, or as a query parameter. Prospeo uses API key in the X-KEY header.
The limits are the part that bites later. Hunter rate: Per endpoint: 15/s and 500/min on most, 10/s on Verifier, 5/s on Discover.
Prospeo rate: Per plan: Enrich 5/300/2,000 on Starter up to 30/1,800/500,000 on Pro. No API on Free. 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, not before
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 Hunter
The one part of this page that is not a vendor claim. Quotes are transcribed as written, linked to the thread, and nothing here is the only source for a figure in the tables above.
A bulk verification competes with the thing you bought the plan for
I've used hunter for quite some time. I needed to do a bulk verification and now my plans ruined. Looking for a new option. Spent hundreds with hunter - way more expensive than it once was
r/agency · October 2024 · 1 point
Hunter's subscription plans run one credit pool across Email Finder, Email Verifier and Domain Search, so a one-off list clean draws on the same allowance as finding does. On Starter that allowance is 2,000 credits a month, which makes a 10,000-address verification five months of the plan spent on a job that found nothing new. Credits reset monthly and do not roll over, so there is no banking your way out of it either.
What Hunter publishes for exactly this case is the Data Platform, where search credits and verification credits are bought separately and priced apart from the subscription. That is worth knowing before concluding the plan is the wrong shape, because the complaint is really about using the wrong product rather than about the price.
Only one comment from this harvest is quoted, and that is the finding. Of 83 candidates the highest-scoring were people promoting their own tools, two of them linking a Hunter URL with an affiliate parameter on it, and five more threads turned out to be about LinkHunter, a link-building product with no connection to Hunter.io.
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.
Where each one sits in a working pipeline
Neither of these is bought in isolation. These are the worked stacks on this site that use one or both, with the cost run end to end.
The wider field for both
A two-way comparison assumes the answer is one of these two. Often it is not, and the reason you are comparing them at all points somewhere else entirely: Hunter alternatives and Prospeo alternatives both start from the reason people leave.
Hunter alternatives
4The best documentation in the category, attached to the narrowest dataset.
See the alternatives →Prospeo alternatives
4The cheapest paid floor in the directory, and credits that vanish at renewal.
See the alternatives →Everything in Enrich
13The full category these two sit in, filtered by data returned, billing model and entry price.
Browse the category →Related comparisons
The 26 providers behind every pairing here are in the main listing.
Pairings that share a side with this one: Findymail vs Hunter, LeadMagic vs Prospeo and Apollo vs Hunter.
And: Findymail vs Prospeo and Apollo vs Prospeo. Every comparison in the directory is on the compare hub.
Apollo API vs Prospeo
Two $49 plans that look identical and meter completely differently.
Compare them →LeadMagic vs Prospeo
Credits that bank for two months against credits that reset on renewal.
Compare them →Findymail vs Prospeo
Two EMEA-strong indexes, fifty dollars apart on the entry plan.
Compare them →Comparison pages end at the rate card. Your list does not.
We run the bake-off on your actual data, pick the provider order, and build the pipeline behind it: waterfall routing, credit ceilings and the write-back that puts a verified contact in front of a rep the same day.
Worked with 300+ companies. A senior operator runs your account.
Hunter and Prospeo, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is Hunter or Prospeo cheaper?
They start at the same price, $49/mo each. Per unit it is $0.025 per credit against $0.025 per credit, which is the figure that decides it at volume.
Can I try Hunter and Prospeo for free?
Hunter: Free plan, 50 credits per month. Prospeo: Free plan, 100 credits a month, and no API access on it.
What are the rate limits on Hunter and Prospeo?
Hunter: Per endpoint: 15/s and 500/min on most, 10/s on Verifier, 5/s on Discover. Prospeo: Per plan: Enrich 5/300/2,000 on Starter up to 30/1,800/500,000 on Pro. No API on Free.
Do Hunter and Prospeo both have MCP servers?
Both do. Hunter: https://mcp.hunter.io/mcp. Prospeo: https://prospeo.io/api-docs/mcp.
Which is better, Hunter or Prospeo?
Identical on the rate card and different in what they do. Hunter gives you Domain Search, which returns every known address at a company and has no equivalent here. Prospeo sells mobile numbers, which Hunter does not, and is stronger on European data.
What are the downsides of Hunter and Prospeo?
Measured against each other rather than in general. Hunter: none of the structural gaps in this answer; the limits section carries its operational ones. Prospeo: there is no free tier, so you cannot measure your own match rate before paying.
Can you use Hunter and Prospeo together?
Same price, same credit allowance, different jobs, so this is one of the few pairings in this directory where buying both is straightforwardly reasonable.
Can I migrate from Hunter to Prospeo without losing data?
Not without losing a field. Prospeo does not return firmographics, which Hunter does, so anything downstream that reads it has to change. Either way, measure your match rate on 500 rows before you switch, because that number is the one you cannot recover afterwards.