Crustdata API review

What each Crustdata endpoint costs in credits

These are Crustdata's standard list prices in credits, read from its pricing docs. Batch versions cost the same as single calls, and a contract account can carry its own prices, which GET /account/endpoints returns for free.

Crustdata names three common patterns: 2 credits for sales outreach (profile and work email), 4 for full outbound with a phone, and 5 for recruiting with personal contact data. The most one person record can cost is 9 credits, because two add-ons sit outside the table: developer platform data at +1 and research profiles at +2, the second enabled on request.

Crustdata API pricing, plan by plan

Crustdata API pricing is a prepaid credit balance, with every endpoint priced in credits and the dollar rate of a credit shown only inside the dashboard.

Purchased credits are valid for 12 months from the purchase that added them, and usage draws on the earliest-expiring credits first. Crustdata says contract plans cost less per credit than self-serve, and that the more you use the less each credit costs, but it does not say by how much.

Per endpoint, per minute

Crustdata API rate limits are set endpoint by endpoint, in requests per minute, and Crustdata says the defaults apply to most accounts. Every response carries X-RateLimit-Limit, X-RateLimit-Remaining and X-RateLimit-Reset, and the reset header counts down the seconds to the next window.

The limits are per endpoint, which is generous on search and tight on enrich. Design around the batch calls from the start: a pipeline that enriches one profile per request will meet the 15-a-minute ceiling long before it meets the credit bill.

How to create a Crustdata API key

A Crustdata API key comes from the dashboard, and every request sends it as a Bearer token in the authorization header. Every request also sends x-api-version, currently 2025-11-01, and Crustdata's docs tell you to pin it rather than take the latest.

The key is simple; the version header is the part to get right. Crustdata's introduction says a request without it can default to the latest version, which may introduce breaking changes, and its credits page says such a request returns 400. Either way the answer is to send the header on every call.

What a Crustdata API call looks like

Enrich is a POST with a JSON body naming the profiles to look up. Leave out the add-ons and you pay the 1-credit base profile; ask for fields and you pay for each one that comes back.

# 1. enrich a person, base profile only
POST https://api.crustdata.com/person/enrich
authorization: Bearer $CRUSTDATA_KEY
x-api-version: 2025-11-01
{ "professional_network_profile_urls": ["..."] }

# 2. the balance, free
GET https://api.crustdata.com/account/credits

Where the Crustdata API documentation lives

The Crustdata API docs are at docs.crustdata.com, organized by dataset: company, person, job, web and social post, each with search, enrich and autocomplete pages, plus watchers, batch jobs and account endpoints. The docs publish an llms.txt index, and every page is served as Markdown, which suits an agent reading them directly.

Crustdata also ships a Claude Code plugin and a Codex plugin that register the same MCP connector and add ready-made skills. Its integrations page lists Zapier among the automation tools. The pricing docs carry a warning that prices can change by plan, entitlement and endpoint version, which is a reason to read your own account's prices rather than the list.

The MCP page lists Crustdata's MCP access alongside the others in this directory.

Crustdata's own video of its MCP server

Crustdata publishes this on its own channel, so it is Crustdata's account of Crustdata, not ours. It is here because a rate card cannot show you the thing moving, and a few minutes of the product is faster than any paragraph on this page at telling you whether the shape of it fits yours.

Four minutes from April 2026 on using the Crustdata MCP server from Claude. The channel is the one whose MCP video Crustdata embeds on its own MCP docs page. The video's description names the server at mcp.crustdata.com/mcp, while the current docs give install.crustdata.com/mcp, so take the address from the docs. Nothing on this page about credits or limits rests on the video.

Published 21 April 2026 on Crustdata, the channel Crustdata's own pages link to, and read on 23 October 2026. Nothing in it is a source for a price or a limit on this page: every figure in the tables above comes from a Crustdata page.

Strengths and limits

Crustdata is built for software that makes thousands of calls and wants to pay for exactly what it keeps.

The two columns are one design seen from both ends. The credit model is the most granular in this directory and lets a pipeline pay for exactly the fields it uses, but the unit it is granular in has no published price, so the cheapness cannot be checked until you are inside the dashboard.

Who should actually buy this

Buy Crustdata when you are building software on top of B2B data: an AI SDR, a recruiting tool, a signal feed. Its search-then-enrich pricing, free autocomplete and per-field add-ons fit a product that searches far more than it enriches.

For a sales team that wants a work email per contact, the comparison to make is credits per record against a vendor that prints its dollar rate. Spend the $20 of free credits, read the dashboard rate, and only then put Crustdata next to Apollo or People Data Labs on price.

Plan the rate limits before the bill. At 15 enrich requests a minute by default, a pipeline that does not batch will be slow long before it is expensive.

Crustdata is also a pick on the BuiltWith alternatives page, where technographics come as an add-on to a full company record: 2 credits a company, 4 with technographics.

Before you build against it

Four things to settle first, each one read off Crustdata's own pages. The ticks are remembered in this browser, so you can come back to a half-finished integration.

If Crustdata is not the answer

Four providers in the Enrichment APIs listing that solve the same problem differently. Each one is a trade, and the trade is named.

The full set, organized by the reason people leave, is on the Crustdata alternatives page.