Crunchbase alternatives, sorted by why you are leaving
No published price and no free tier. For most teams the search for Crunchbase alternatives starts at the paywall, not at the data. 4 replacements below, each one matched to a specific reason rather than ranked on a score nobody can audit.
Prices and limits for every option below are read off the vendor's own page. These are the Crunchbase competitors that answer a named problem, not a field of logos.
The 4 reasons people actually leave
If none of these is your situation, the honest answer is that you should probably stay, and the Crunchbase API review covers what you already have. The 26 providers these replacements are drawn from are in the Signal APIs listing.
1 · There is no rate card to evaluate
Crunchbase publishes no public price for API access, so the first step is a sales conversation and the second is a number you cannot compare against anything on this page. Every other provider in this directory publishes something; this is the only one priced entirely by quote.
2 · The free tier is gone
The Basic API was withdrawn and new Basic keys are not issued, so there is no way to test coverage on your own accounts before committing. For a dataset whose value is entirely about whether it covers your segment, that is a real obstacle.
3 · Funding is a lagging signal
A round is announced weeks after it closes and months after the hiring that followed it. If the reason you want funding data is to catch companies that are about to spend, there are signals that move earlier.
4 · 200 calls a minute across the whole API
Workable for enrichment, tight for a backfill, and shared across every integration on the key. HTTP requests are refused outright with a 426 rather than redirected.
4 replacements, and what each one fixes
Ordered by how often they turn out to be the right answer, not by price.
| Provider | Entry price | Unit cost | Free tier | Fixes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Crunchbase | Quote only | Not by the unit | None. The Basic API was withdrawn and new Basic keys are not issued. | Baseline |
| TheirStack | $49/mo | $0.109 per company credit | A free trial with company and API credits, no card required | Best hiring and tech signal |
| Exa | $4/1k searches | $0.007 per auto search | $10 of credits every month | Best for agent research |
| 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 |
| Firecrawl | $16/mo | $0.0032 per credit | Free plan, 1,000 credits a month, no card. Keyless scrape and search too. | Best for turning sites into model input |
Read from each vendor's own pricing page between 8 and 19 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.
TheirStack
Job postings as the growth signal, with published pricing. A company hiring five sales reps is spending now, which is usually what a funding filter was a proxy for.
The reason most teams filter on funding is to find companies that have money and are about to spend it. Hiring is a better version of that signal because it is current: a round is announced weeks after it closes, and a job posting is published while the budget is being spent.
TheirStack sells that as rows rather than as a dashboard, and unlike Crunchbase it publishes a complete rate card. The API subscription runs from $49 a month for 1,500 credits up through eleven published steps to $5,500 for 5,000,000, with the per-credit rate falling from about $0.033 to $0.0011.
Credits roll over for 12 months, there is a free allowance on signup with no card, and the dataset covers job postings, technographics and buying intents under one key.
What you give up
The funding data itself, and the company graph. TheirStack does not track rounds, investors or acquisitions, so if your filter genuinely needs to be a Series B rather than a company that is growing, this does not replace it.
When it is the wrong answer
Investor research, competitive landscape mapping, or anything where the funding event itself is the subject rather than a proxy for spending.
Entry $49/mo. A free trial with company and API credits, no card required. Job postings are the cheapest honest intent signal in B2B, because a company hiring three SDRs has already decided to spend. Visit TheirStack
Exa
Search the funding announcement itself rather than buying the database, at $4 to $7 per 1,000 searches with $10 of credits free every month.
If what you needed was to know that a company raised, the announcement is public and searchable. Exa is search built to be read by a model, so you can ask for the narrative rather than for a structured field, at $0.007 a search.
The free allowance is $10 of credits every month plus a $10 onboarding bonus, which is roughly 1,400 searches a month at the standard rate, and every endpoint is available on it. That is a working evaluation without a sales conversation, which is the thing Crunchbase makes impossible.
There is a hosted MCP server, a Claude connector and a ChatGPT plugin, all on the free tier, so an agent can run this directly.
What you give up
Structure. A database gives you a field you can filter and sort; a search gives you text you have to parse, and the answer varies with the query. For a repeatable pipeline that is a real cost in engineering rather than in dollars.
When it is the wrong answer
Anything that needs a consistent, comparable field across thousands of companies. Search is the wrong shape for a filter, and you will end up rebuilding a database badly.
Entry $4/1k searches. $10 of credits every month. Exa is what you reach for when the signal you need is not in anybody's database yet. Read the review
People Data Labs
Firmographics at a published $0.28 a record, with a license that covers putting them inside a product you sell.
If the half of Crunchbase you were paying for was company firmographics rather than funding events, People Data Labs sells that with a published price and, a stated redistribution position.
That second part is the reason to pick it over anything cheaper. If enriched company records appear inside something your customers log into, this is the provider here whose terms are written for it, and the rate card is downstream of that question.
The free plan gives 100 credits a month with contact data obfuscated, which is enough to check the shape of the company data. Self-Serve starts at $98 a month from 350 credits.
What you give up
Funding events and price. People Data Labs is person and company data rather than a funding graph, and at $0.28 a record it is the most expensive per-row option in this directory.
When it is the wrong answer
Internal go-to-market filtering on a budget. You would be paying a licensing premium for a permission you never exercise, and TheirStack or Exa does the signal job for a fraction.
Entry $98/mo. Free plan, up to 100 credits per month with contact data obfuscated. PDL sells the dataset rather than the workflow, and it is one of the few here whose license is written for you to redistribute enriched records inside a product you sell. Read the review
Firecrawl
Read the company's own newsroom or investor page as clean Markdown, from $16 a month with 1,000 free credits. Cheap, and the primary source rather than an aggregator of it.
Crunchbase is an aggregator of announcements that companies published themselves. If you know which companies you care about, reading their newsroom directly is both cheaper and fresher than waiting for a database to pick it up.
Firecrawl turns any URL into clean Markdown built for model input, at $0.0032 a credit, which is the cheapest per-unit rate in this directory. The Hobby plan is $16 a month for 5,000 credits and Standard is $83 for 100,000.
The free tier is 1,000 credits a month, enough to prove the approach on a real watchlist before paying anything.
What you give up
Discovery. Firecrawl reads pages you point it at; it does not tell you which companies to look at. That is the entire function of a database, and replacing it with a crawler means you now own the list-building problem.
When it is the wrong answer
Finding companies you have not heard of. If the job is discovery rather than monitoring, this is the wrong tool and the concurrency limit will bite before the credit cost does.
Entry $16/mo. Free plan, 1,000 credits a month, no card. Keyless scrape and search too.. Firecrawl takes a URL and gives you back the page as Markdown, with the navigation, the cookie banner and the JavaScript already dealt with. Read the review
What you would actually pay, on each one
4 of the 5 providers here publish a rate card. Crunchbase does not, and the entry price below is all it will tell you without a call. The plan you want is the one whose included volume covers a normal month for you, not the cheapest one on the page.
Crunchbase
Crunchbase publishes no price at all, so there is no rate card to put here. Everything is quoted, which means the number you get depends on what you ask for and on where in their quarter you ask it.
Get these in writing before you sign: the per-unit rate at your volume, the annual minimum, how many seats that price assumes, whether API access is included or an add-on. Without the first two you cannot compare this against anything else on this page.
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 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.
Exa
Exa publishes 3 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from Pay as you go to Custom.
Starter
- $10 of credits every month, plus a $10 onboarding bonus
- Access to every endpoint
- 10 search queries per second, 50 agent concurrency
- MCP server, Claude connector and ChatGPT plugin
Developer
- The per-1,000 rates in the table above
- Up to 25 search queries per second
- 50 agent concurrency
- SOC 2 Type II, card or bank payment
Enterprise
- Custom search QPS and agent concurrency
- For large-scale requirements
People Data Labs
People Data Labs publishes 3 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from From $98 to Custom.
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
Firecrawl
Firecrawl publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $16 to $333.
Free
- No cost, no card
- 1,000 pages or 500 searches
- 2 concurrent browsers
- Plus the keyless endpoints, which need no account
Hobby
- 2,500 searches or 5,000 pages scraped
- 5 concurrent requests
- $0.0032 a credit
- 1,000 extra credits per $5
Standard
- 50,000 searches or 100,000 pages scraped
- 25 concurrent requests
- $0.00083 a credit, four times better than Hobby
- 2,000 extra credits per $5
Growth
- 50 concurrent requests
- Scale is $599 a month for 1,000,000 credits
- Enterprise above that
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
Crunchbase 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.
Crunchbase
Publishes no price, so there is nothing here to model and the lines below say what to ask for.
TheirStack
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
Exa
Publishes an entry price and no ladder above it, so the figure below is a floor rather than a forecast.
People Data Labs
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
Firecrawl
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. Crunchbase publishes no price, so nothing is modeled there and the panel says what to ask for instead. Exa publishes an entry price with no ladder above it, so the figure shown is the floor rather than your bill.
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 | Crunchbase | TheirStack | Exa | People Data Labs | Firecrawl |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | Quoted | $588 1,500 API credits | $48 | Quoted | $0 Free |
| 10,000 a month | Quoted | $2,028 10,000 | $48 | Quoted | $996 Standard |
| 50,000 a month | Quoted | $4,800 50,000 | $48 | Quoted | $996 Standard |
3 of the 5 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.
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 Crunchbase 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 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. A migration is the moment to check it, because you are signing a new contract anyway.
| Provider | Fields returned | Coverage | Compliance | Redistribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Crunchbase | Firmographics, Intent and news, Job postings | Global | GDPR DPA | Stated, forbidden |
| TheirStack | Job postings, Technographics, Firmographics, Intent and news | Global | GDPR DPA | Not stated |
| Exa | Firmographics, Intent and news, Work email, Mobile phone | Global | SOC 2 Type II | Not stated |
| People Data Labs | Work email, Personal email, Mobile phone, Firmographics, LinkedIn profile | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II CCPA | Not stated |
| Firecrawl | Firmographics, Technographics, Intent and news | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II | 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 off Crunchbase
Written against TheirStack, 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 Crunchbase 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
TheirStack returns every field Crunchbase does, so nothing downstream has to change shape. Confirm the values rather than the keys: two providers can both return a mobile number and disagree about which one it is.
Rewrite the auth and the limits, in that order
Crunchbase authenticates with user_key in the URL, or the X-cb-user-key header. TheirStack uses bearer token.
The limits are the part that bites later. Crunchbase rate: 200 calls a minute across the API. HTTPS required, HTTP returns 426.
TheirStack rate: Published per plan, with a documented bulk search endpoint. 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 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 Exa
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.
Developers who evaluate it call it infrastructure, not a search box
I've evaluated both for safety-related AI work, and Exa was much more obviously built to be infrastructure: programmatic retrieval, extraction, structured results, semantic search, throughput controls, enterprise privacy, all that boring backend stuff. Kagi was much more consumer-facing, and its API offering is newer.
r/firefox · August 2026 · 14 points
Somebody who evaluated Exa against a consumer search product for real work, and the list they reach for is the list this page is built on: retrieval you call programmatically, extraction, structured results and throughput you can control. It is the clearest outside statement of what Exa is for, which is a retrieval layer underneath something else rather than a search engine a person looks at.
The thread is about why Mozilla picked Exa and the commenter calls their own answer speculation, so the part worth keeping is the evaluation rather than the conclusion about who won it.
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 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, and note that 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 Firecrawl
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.
A credit is a page until you turn on the features you came for
The credit inflation thing is crazy. From "1 credit = 1 page" to burning 5-9 per page the second you enable anything actually useful is not an accident, that's a deliberate design choice if you ask me. [...] Product is good, no question. Just know what you're getting into before you start building on it
r/ProxyEngineering · May 2026 · 3 points
The mechanism is confirmed by Firecrawl's own documentation, which states that operations cost different amounts of credits and names JSON extraction and Interact as the dear ones, so heavier usage reaches the credit cap sooner. That is the thing to model before sizing a plan: the rate card above quotes 1 credit a page, and the page you actually want is usually not a basic scrape.
The 5 to 9 multiplier is this commenter's own and nothing here verifies it, and the rest of their comment is about GitHub stars and the self-hosting license rather than about the API. Take the shape of the warning, read the operations table against your own pipeline, and treat the baseline rate as the cheap case rather than the typical one.
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.
Should you actually switch?
Be clear about whether you need the database or the signal. Nothing on this page is a curated funding dataset, and if your workflow genuinely requires structured round, investor and acquisition fields with history, Crunchbase is the category and the quote is the price of entry. If funding was standing in for "this company is about to spend", TheirStack measures that more directly and tells you what it costs, and a hiring surge shows up before a press release does. The combination most teams end up with is a hiring or technographic signal to find the account and a search API to read the story.
These providers do not index the same web, so a feature table will not tell you which one suits your questions. Take a hundred of the queries you actually run, send them through one free tier and one trial, and compare the answers you could use without editing them. That is the only coverage number that means anything to you.
Head to head, and in a stack
Switching costs more than the rate card says. Usually.
Three times out of four the fix is a second provider behind the first and a credit ceiling in front of it, not a migration. We will tell you which case you are in before you sign anything.
Worked with 300+ companies. A senior operator runs your account.
Switching from Crunchbase, answered
What is the best Crunchbase alternative?
It depends on why you are leaving, which is how this page is organized rather than ranked. The replacement most teams land on is TheirStack, which this directory lists as the best hiring and tech signal, at $49/mo. The case for it, and what you give up, is in the section above.
Is there a free alternative to Crunchbase?
Exa ($10 of credits every month), People Data Labs (Free plan, up to 100 credits per month with contact data obfuscated) and Firecrawl (Free plan, 1,000 credits a month, no card. Keyless scrape and search too.).
What is the cheapest Crunchbase alternative?
On the entry plan, Exa: $4/1k searches, against Crunchbase at quote only. Entry price is not the same as cost per result, so check the unit figure on each review before deciding.
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.