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Contact enrichment APIs, compared on cost per usable row

13 providers that attach a work email, a mobile number or a company record to a name you already have. The rate cards look close. The cost per contact you can actually mail is not, because match rate, miss policy and mobile multiples move it more than the headline price does.

See the 13 providers Build a waterfall
unit-economics.txt per 1,000 contacts
apollo · 1 credit$19.60
findymail · 1 credit$19.80
leadmagic · 1 credit$19.80
fullenrich · 1 credit$55.00
people data labs$280.00
Same job, 14x spread PDL's $280 is the license, not the lookup
13enrichment providers
10return mobile numbers
9charge nothing on a miss
2run a waterfall for you
The category

What enrichment actually sells you

An enrichment API takes an identifier you have, usually a name and a company domain or a LinkedIn URL, and returns the contact details you do not. That is the whole product. Everything else in this category is packaging around that trade.

The packaging is where the money goes. Apollo bundles enrichment into a seat license alongside search and sending. Clay bundles it into an orchestration layer that fans the same request out to 150 providers.

People Data Labs sells you the underlying dataset with a license to redistribute it. Findymail, Prospeo, Hunter and LeadMagic sell the lookup on its own, at per-credit rates within half a cent of Apollo's and with no seat attached.

Those are four genuinely different products, and comparing their per-email prices tells you almost nothing until you know which one you are buying. The rest of this page is about the four numbers that do tell you something.

The number that decides it

Cost per usable row, not cost per call. A $0.02 lookup with a 45% match rate costs $0.044 for every contact you can actually mail. A $0.04 lookup at 80% costs $0.05. That is a 14% gap, not the 100% gap the rate cards imply, and it reverses depending on whether your list is North American or European.

The directory

Every enrichment provider, filtered

Billing model is the filter worth starting with here, because it decides whether an uneven month costs you anything.

Showing 13 of 13

Apollo API

Best all-in-one GTM API
Featured
MotionSourceEnrichEngageSync
ModelMCP serverFree tierPer seat

One of the few providers here that covers sourcing, enrichment and sending behind a single key, which is why it is usually the first API a GTM team wires up and the last one they rip out. The catch is that credits and seats are coupled, so the API inherits a per-seat price even when no human logs in.

  • People and organization search across Apollo's own database
  • Enrichment returns 1 credit for email, 9 if a mobile comes back
  • Sequence, contact and task endpoints cost 0 credits
  • Credits are granted per seat per YEAR, not per month

From$49/seat/mo

Visit Read the review

Clay

Best orchestration layer
MotionSourceEnrichSignal
ModelMCP serverFree tier

Clay is not really an enrichment API, it is the router in front of everybody else's. You pay in actions for the work and data credits for the data rather than per record, and the waterfall logic that would take a week to build yourself is a column setting.

  • Waterfall across 150+ data providers without separate contracts
  • Two meters, actions and data credits, and neither is charged on a lookup that finds nothing
  • Free plan runs 500 actions a month with no phone enrichment

From$167/mo

Visit Read the review

People Data Labs

Best for building on top of
MotionSourceEnrich
ModelFree tier

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. That is the reason to pick it over a cheaper per-email tool.

  • Person, company, job title and school datasets under one key
  • Free plan obfuscates emails and phones until you upgrade
  • Bulk and search endpoints designed for warehouse loads

From$98/mo

Visit Read the review

LeadMagic

Best priced per operation
MotionSourceEnrichVerifySignal
ModelMCP server

The clearest rate card in this directory. Every operation has a stated credit cost, credits come off only when a lookup succeeds, and search itself spends nothing on plans that include it. The MCP server ships on every tier, including the cheapest.

  • Email finder 1 credit, mobile 5, validation 0.25, job change 3
  • Credits deducted on valid results only, never on a miss
  • People, company and jobs search spends no credits from Essential up

From$99/mo

Visit Read the review

Findymail

Best bounce guarantee
MotionEnrichVerify

Findymail verifies at the moment it finds, so you are not paying twice for the same address. It is the only provider here that puts a number on deliverability and refunds against it: above a 5% bounce rate, the credits come back.

  • Under 5% bounce rate or the credits are refunded
  • Duplicates found in the last 30 days cost nothing
  • Mobile numbers are non-EU only, at 10 credits each
  • API access on every plan, with credits shared across a team rather than per seat

From$99/mo

Visit Docs

Prospeo

Cheapest entry for email
MotionSourceEnrich
ModelMCP server

Prospeo gets you to 2,000 verified emails a month for $49, which is the cheapest real entry point in this directory, and unused credits roll into the next cycle rather than expiring. The trade is the shape of the product: email and phone, priced per user, and a mobile number costs ten times what an email does.

  • 1 credit per verified email, 10 per direct mobile
  • Unused credits roll over and stack on the next cycle's pack
  • Annual billing delivers the full year of credits upfront

From$49/mo

Visit Read the review

Hunter

Best documented starter
MotionEnrichVerify
ModelMCP serverFree tier

Hunter has been the default first API in this category for a decade, and the documentation shows it. Coverage is thinner than the newer waterfall tools, but nothing else here is as fast to get a working call out of.

  • Domain Search returns every known address on a domain
  • Free tier of 50 credits a month, enough to prototype against
  • Annual billing drops Starter from $49 to $34 a month

From$49/mo

Visit Read the review

FullEnrich

Best waterfall without Clay
MotionEnrichVerify
ModelMCP server

FullEnrich runs the same waterfall logic Clay does, but as a single API call with a single bill. If all you need is the waterfall and not the spreadsheet around it, this is that half of the trade on its own.

  • Work email 1 credit, personal email 3, mobile 10
  • Verification is free when bundled with enrichment, 0.25 alone
  • Landline results cost nothing, so you only pay for mobiles

From$55/mo

Visit Read the review

ZeroBounce

Best pure verification
MotionVerifyEnrich
ModelMCP serverFree tierNo monthly floor

One of the few providers here you can use properly without a subscription. $39 buys 2,000 validations that never expire, which makes it the natural gate in front of a sending tool that charges you for every send whether it lands or not.

  • Pay as you go from $39 for 2,000 validations, the minimum buy
  • Unknown results consume no credits
  • Email Finder costs 20 credits per successful query

From$39 one-time

Visit Docs

Exa

Best for agent research
MotionSignalSourceEnrich
ModelMCP serverFree tierNo monthly floor

Exa is what you reach for when the signal you need is not in anybody's database yet. It returns clean page content rather than links, which is the difference between an agent that can answer a research question and one that hands you ten tabs.

  • Search from $4 per 1,000 requests on Lite and $7 on the default auto mode, up to 10 results each
  • Contact enrichment at $0.02 per email, $0.07 per phone
  • Research endpoint tiers from $0.012 to $1.00 per request

From$4/1k searches

Visit Read the review

Cognism

Best for notified, DNC-screened contact data
MotionSourceEnrichSignal
ModelMCP serverPer seat

Cognism sells a compliance posture as much as a dataset: it notifies the business contacts it holds within GDPR timeframes and scrubs its phone data against 15 Do Not Call and TPS registries. The API meters usage three separate ways, and the one that stops you first is usually not the one you budgeted for.

  • Search tokens meter rows returned, credits meter contacts revealed
  • 500 requests a minute per operation, each with its own window
  • No published price. Two plans, both with 5 seats included

FromQuote only

Visit Read the review

Lusha

Best published credit costs for contact data
MotionSourceEnrichSignal
ModelMCP serverFree tierPer seat

Lusha publishes what every operation costs to the credit: an email is 1, a phone number is 5, a recorded call is 8. What it does not publish is how fast you may ask for them. Rate limits are per plan across three windows and the numbers are an account manager conversation.

  • An email costs 1 credit, a phone number costs 5
  • Per-credit cost is flat across tiers, so volume buys seats not discounts
  • Rate limits run per minute, hour and day, and are unpublished

From$37.45/mo annual

Visit Read the review

Instantly

Best for unlimited mailboxes and warmup
MotionSourceEnrichEngage
ModelMCP server

Instantly splits the product in two and sells each half on its own: an Outreach plan with unlimited email accounts and unlimited warmup from $47 a month, and a Credits plan for the 450M contact database and waterfall enrichment. The bundles are the two added together.

  • Unlimited email accounts and warmup on every Outreach plan
  • Metered on uploaded contacts and emails, not mailboxes
  • 100 requests a second and 6,000 a minute, per workspace

From$47/mo

Visit Read the review
Head to head

The five specialists, on the numbers that move your bill

Apollo and Clay are left out of this table on purpose. They are priced as platforms, and putting a seat license next to a per-lookup rate makes both look wrong.

Compare LeadMagic Findymail Prospeo Hunter FullEnrich
Entry plan$99/mo$99/mo$49/mo$49/mo$55/mo
Credits included5,0005,000 + 5,000 verifier2,0002,0001,000
Work email1 credit · $0.01981 credit · $0.01981 credit · $0.02451 credit · $0.02451 credit · $0.055
Mobile phone5 credits · $0.09910 credits · $0.19810 credits · $0.245Not offered10 credits · $0.55
Personal emailNoNoNoNo3 credits · $0.165
Verification0.25 creditsIncluded in the findIncluded in the find1 creditFree when bundled
Charged on a missNoNoNoNoNo
Credits roll overUp to 2 monthsUp to 2x planStacks on next cycleNoNo
Deliverability promiseValid results onlyUnder 5% bounce or refundVerified at find timeConfidence score returnedVerification bundled
Waterfall built inNo, single sourceNo, single sourceNo, single sourceNo, single source25+ sources
Free tierNone10-credit trial, no card100 credits/mo, no API50 credits/moNone
MCP serverEvery planNot documentedPaid plansEvery planYes, OAuth
Geographic noteGlobalMobiles non-EU onlyStrongest in EMEAGlobalGlobal
Best forPredictable unit costBounce-sensitive sendsCheapest paid floorFastest first callWaterfall without Clay

Cash figures are the entry plan price divided by included credits, multiplied by each vendor's published credit cost per operation. Read from vendor pricing pages between 8 October 2026 and 19 October 2026.

Buyer's guide

Four things that decide an enrichment provider

In the order they cost you money.

01

Whether you pay for a miss

None of the 10 providers here charges when a lookup returns nothing, which has quietly become the category standard. That includes Clay: its pricing page says an enrichment that returns no result costs neither data credits nor actions.

The difference is in what a hit costs. A dedicated provider bills one credit for a found email. Clay bills an action for its own work plus data credits for the data, at $0.0452 a credit on annual Launch, unless you connect your own provider keys, in which case only the action is billed. Model a Clay bill on both meters, not on the action count alone.

02

The mobile multiple

Every provider that sells phone numbers charges a multiple of the email price, and the multiples are not close. LeadMagic charges 5 credits against 1, which is $0.099 a number and the cheapest mobile here. Findymail, Prospeo and FullEnrich all charge 10, which lands between $0.198 and $0.55. Apollo charges 8 extra credits on top of the email credit, which works out at $0.1764 for the call.

A 2,000-contact phone-first campaign therefore costs $353 on Apollo (9 credits a contact), $238 on LeadMagic (6) and $1,210 on FullEnrich (11). Decide whether you need dials before you pick, because this one choice moves your bill by more than everything else on this page combined.

03

Where your list lives

Coverage is not uniform and it is not where you would guess from the marketing. Findymail and Prospeo are both strongest on European data, which is the opposite of the usual pattern in this category. Findymail also restricts mobile numbers to non-EU contacts entirely, which is a compliance decision rather than a gap in the data.

If your target market is EU-heavy and you need phone numbers, that restriction removes a provider from your shortlist before price enters the conversation. Check it against your actual list, not against the coverage map.

04

Whether credits survive a quiet month

LeadMagic banks up to two months of unused credits from its Essential plan up. Findymail rolls over to twice your monthly allowance. Prospeo adds anything unused on top of the next cycle's pack. Hunter is the one that does not roll over at all, unless you pay a year upfront and take the whole allowance on day one.

For a steady pipeline this is noise. For agency work, where one month is a list build and the next is nothing, it is the difference between paying for what you used and paying for what you booked. Hunter shares the cheapest floor here and is also the one that punishes an uneven month hardest.

Before you sign

How to run a bake-off that means something

Nobody in this category publishes a match rate you can hold them to, so the only figure worth trusting is the one you generate on your own list. This takes about half a day and routinely changes the decision.

1

Take 500 real rows, not a clean sample

Pull them from the segment you actually sell into, including the messy titles and the companies with two domains. A curated test list flatters every provider equally and tells you nothing.

500rows
↓
2

Run the same rows through two free tiers

Prospeo gives you 100 credits a month, Hunter 50, Findymail 10 on signup. Between them that is a usable first pass at zero cost. Apollo's 900 free credits cover the whole test on their own.

$0free tiers
↓
3

Count matches, then verify the matches

A returned address is not a valid one. Push both result sets through ZeroBounce at $0.0195 each and count what survives. This is where providers separate, and it is the step most bake-offs skip.

$19.50ZeroBounce, 1,000 rows
↓
4

Divide spend by survivors, not by calls

That number is your real cost per contact. It is usually 1.5 to 2.5 times the rate card, and the ranking it produces is frequently not the ranking the rate cards produce.

≈$20total test cost

Twenty dollars and half a day is a cheap way to avoid an annual contract with the wrong provider. It is also the only part of this evaluation nobody else can do for you, because the answer depends entirely on the shape of your list.

Keep going

Related reading

Build a waterfall stack

Guide

Four providers chained in order, with the cost per verified contact at each step and the point where adding a fifth stops paying for itself.

Read the guide →

Apollo API review

Featured

Rate limits, credit costs per endpoint, what the MCP server adds, and the case for and against putting your whole motion behind one key.

Read the review →

Apollo vs Clay vs PDL

3-way

The three platform-priced options, compared on what they are really selling: a seat, an orchestration layer, or a license to redistribute.

Compare them →
What practitioners say

Read off Reddit, not off a vendor page

The one part of this page that is not a vendor claim. Quotes are transcribed as written and linked to the thread.

Starting from an email is the expensive way in

An email alone is a weak key, so most tools either return nothing or try to "guess" based on name similarity, which is how you end up with the wrong LinkedIn profile. [...] First confirm the identity using name + company or company domain, then enrich from there. Once you've got a confident match, pulling socials, personal sites, blogs, or GitHub is much more reliable.

r/gtmengineering · January 2026 · 7 points

This is the same finding the rate cards show from the other side. The identifier you already hold decides the bill: a lookup from a domain or a name is the cheap path on every provider here, and a reverse lookup from an email is the dear one. If your pipeline starts from an email, price that step before you design around it.

The waterfall is a price-discovery tool, not only a hit-rate tool

Just try an enrichment waterfall on your email instead. Then if you find a data provider that has a good match rate, go directly to them for bulk/API pricing. Clay's benefit is that it's a one-stop shop and convenient, because any one data vendor may not match a specific record.

r/gtmengineering · January 2026 · 3 points

Use the orchestrator to find out which provider actually answers for your segment, then buy that provider directly. It is the honest version of the test on every comparison page here, and it is why the Clay and FullEnrich comparison turns on who changes the logic rather than on the per-result rate.

Nobody who does this at volume relies on one provider

Apollo is solid for sourcing and Hunter works well for verification, but only as part of a waterfall. Don't rely on one tool. Use multiple verifiers, enrich with Clay, and send via Instantly or Smartlead with warmed inboxes and multiple domains.

r/agency · December 2025 · 3 points

The shape described here is the waterfall stack on this site, and the reason the order matters: the cheapest provider first absorbs the easy majority, and the dear one only sees what is left. Nobody publishes a match rate you could use to plan that, which is why the stack page shows its assumptions rather than asserting them.

The tool is not the variable that decides deliverability

Findymail and Clay are solid, but they're not magic either. They still rely on the same data sources and need good enrichment and verification. Tool choice matters less than setup, warmup, and list hygiene at that scale.

r/agency · December 2025 · 2 points

Worth reading against every page in this category. The providers here differ on price, license and limits, which are real and comparable; they differ much less on the underlying data, because several of them buy from the same places. If a switch is meant to fix a bounce rate, the verification step and the sending setup are the first things to look at.

Teams verify outside the tool that found the address

My workflow is Apollo for scraping -> Reoon or MillionVerifier for cleaning -> Smartlead/Instantly for sending. Don't rely on Apollo's internal verification if you want to keep your deliverability high

r/agency · January 2026 · 2 points

A separate verification step is the default assumption for most of this category, and it is a real cost line. The exceptions are the providers that verify at find time and bill only for a verified result, which is why Findymail and Prospeo sit in the verification category here as well as this one: routing per source rather than verifying everything at the end is what removes the double charge.

13 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by the problem rather than by vendor name, because a thread about a named tool is mostly people recommending their own. 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.

Want the pipeline, not just the provider?

Frontal builds the layer that turns these endpoints into a motion: the waterfall order, the match-rate testing, the credit budget, and the write-back that puts a verified contact in front of a rep the same day it was found.

Back to the directory

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FAQ

Enrichment APIs, answered

How many Enrichment APIs are in this directory?

13, each with its own review carrying the price, the rate limit and the auth method read from the vendor's own pages.

Which Enrichment APIs have a free tier?

Apollo, Clay, People Data Labs, Findymail, Prospeo, Hunter, ZeroBounce, Exa and Lusha. What each free tier includes differs a lot, so the review says what you actually get.

Which Enrichment API is cheapest?

Per unit, Apollo at $0.0196 per credit, and only by about one percent over Findymail and LeadMagic at $0.0198. The cheapest unit is not the cheapest bill: a monthly floor and a charge on a failed lookup both change the answer, and each review states both.

How are Enrichment APIs billed?

11 of the 13 charge per unit (Apollo, Clay, People Data Labs, LeadMagic, Findymail, Prospeo, Hunter, FullEnrich, ZeroBounce, Exa and Lusha); the rest sell a plan, where what you are buying is throughput rather than volume.

Which ones ship an MCP server?

11 of the 13 enrichment providers ship one, and every one of them is on the MCP page with its transport, auth and what calling it costs. The directory's MCP filter lists them.